SOURCE: LeBlanc, Ronald D. “Gluttony and Power in Iurii Olesha's Envy.” Russian Review 60, no. 2 (April 2001): 220-37.

In the following essay, LeBlanc uses a semiotic approach to discuss the ways in which Olesha's novel uses gastronomic and alimentary motifs in a playful way and also suggests that these motifs relate to the story's central power struggle between individual imagination and the new Soviet ideas of science, progress, and collectivism.

Given the highly carnivalized view of the world that informs the narrative structure of Envy (Zavist', 1927), one should not be terribly surprised to find that Iurii Olesha's controversial novella contains gastronomic and alimentary motifs that function in a highly Rabelaisian way, with food imagery being called upon to celebrate what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “material bodily principle” (“images of the human body itself, food, drink, defecation, and sexual life”) and thus to express a joyful sense of satiety, abundance, and...