SOURCE: LeBlanc, Ronald D. “The Soccer Match in Envy.”¹ Slavic and East European Journal 32, no. 1 (spring 1988): 55-71.

In the following essay, LeBlanc, using the works of other Russian writers for comparison, argues that the soccer match in Envy is an apt metaphor for the romantic competition in the novel.

Georg Lukács begins his essay “Narrate or Describe?” by making a comparison between the “depiction” of a horse race in Zola's Nana (1880) and the “narration” of the steeplechase in Tolstoj's Anna Karenina (1877). What is so striking about these two scenes, Lukács argues, is the vastly different way the authors fit them into the narrative structure of their respective novels. With Zola, the horse race serves as a mere descriptive tableau for the reader, where “the events are loosely related to the plot and could easily be eliminated” (110). With Tolstoj, on the other hand, the race is “no...