SOURCE: Ehre, Milton. “Olesha's Zavist': Utopia and Dystopia.”Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (fall 1991): 601-11.

In the following essay, Ehre explores the ways in which Olesha's modernist novel Zavist' presents a comic view of the Soviets' utopian dream.

Utopia and dystopia designate the human dream of happiness and the human nightmare of despair when these are assigned a place (topos) in space or time. Since narrative literature “is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery,”¹ utopian and dystopian inventions are mere extremes of literature's ongoing story. In realistic fictions, although social circumstances may range from the incidental to the decisive, the story of the movement to happiness or unhappiness is usually told in terms of individual achievement and failure. In the utopian and anti-utopian scheme deliverance or damnation depend on the place where one has found oneself, whether it is “the good...