“He sings in the morning in the closet. You can imagine what a cheerful, healthy person he is.” One cannot do without this textbook, which has become a flying phrase, with which Olesha's novel begins. And it is about a former revolutionary, a member of the Society of Political Prisoners, now a major Soviet business executive, director of the food industry trust Andrei Babichev. He sees him like this - a mighty giant, the master of life - the main character, a man lost in life, Nikolai Kavalerov. Andrei Babichev picked up the drunken Kavalerov, who was lying near the pub, from which he was thrown out after a quarrel. He took pity on him and gave him shelter in his apartment for a while, while his pupil and friend, a representative of the “new generation”, an eighteen-year-old student and football player Volodya Makarov, is absent. For two weeks he lives with Babichev Cavaliers, but instead of gratitude, he feels tormenting envy towards his benefactor. He despises him, considers him below himself and calls him a sausage man. After all, he, Kavalerov, has a figurative vision, almost a poetic gift, which he uses to compose pop monologues and verses about the financial inspector, sovladyshne, NEPmen and alimony. He envies Babichev's prosperity, his health and energy, celebrity and scope. Kavalerov wants to catch him on something, to find a weak side, to find a gap in this monolith. Painfully conceited, he feels humiliated by his covetousness and Babichev's pity. He is jealous of Volodya Makarov, who is unfamiliar to him, whose photograph is on Babichev's desk. Kavalerov is twenty-seven years old. He dreams of his own glory. He wants more attention, while, according to him, "in our country, the roads of glory are blocked by barriers." He would like to be born in a small French town, set some high goal for himself, one day leave the town and work fanatically to achieve it in the capital. In a country where a sober realistic approach is required of a person, he is tempted to suddenly take it and do something ridiculous, commit some kind of ingenious mischief and then say: “Yes, that’s how you are, and that’s how I am.” Kavalerov feels that his life has changed, that he will no longer be either handsome or famous. Even the extraordinary love that he dreamed of all his life will not happen either. With longing and horror, he recalls the room of the forty-five-year-old widow Anechka Prokopovich, fat and loose. He perceives the widow as a symbol of his male humiliation. He hears her female call, but this only awakens rage in him (“I’m not a couple for you, you bastard! "). Cavaliers, so thin and gentle, is forced to be a "clown" under Babichev. He carries sausage made according to Babichev's technology to the indicated addresses, "which does not fail in one day," and everyone congratulates its creator. Cavaliers proudly refuses to eat her solemnly. He is dissected by anger, because in the new world that the communist Babichev is building, fame “flares up because a sausage of a new kind came out of the hands of a sausage maker.” He feels that this new, building world is the main, triumphant one. And he, Kavalerov, unlike Babichev, is a stranger at this celebration of life. He is constantly reminded of this, sometimes not letting him into the airfield of the airfield, where the Soviet airplane of a new design is to take off, then at the construction site of another brainchild of Babichev - "Chetvertak", a giant house, the future greatest dining room, the greatest kitchen, where lunch will cost just a quarter. Exhausted by envy, Kavalerov writes a letter to Babichev, where he confesses his hatred for him and calls him a stupid dignitary with lordly inclinations. He declares that he takes the side of Babichev's brother, Ivan, whom he once saw in the courtyard of the house when he threatened Andrei to kill him with the help of his Ophelia car. Andrei Babichev then said that his brother Ivan was "a lazy, harmful, contagious person" who "should be shot." A little later, Kavalerov accidentally witnesses how this fat man in a bowler hat and with a pillow in his hands asks a girl named Valya to return to him. Valya, Ivan Babichev's daughter, becomes the subject of his romantic aspirations. Kavalerov declares war on Babichev - "... for tenderness, for pathos, for personality, for names that excite, like the name "Ophelia", for everything that you suppress, a wonderful person." Just at the moment when Kavalerov, intending to finally leave Babichev's house, collects his belongings, the student and football player Volodya Makarov returns. Confused and jealous, Kavalerov tries to slander Babichev in front of him, but Makarov does not react, but calmly takes his place on the couch that Kavalerov loves so much. The letter of the Cavaliers does not dare to leave, but then he suddenly discovers that he mistakenly grabbed someone else's, and it was left lying on the table. He is in despair. Again he returns to Babichev, he wants to fall at the feet of the benefactor and, having repented, beg for forgiveness. But instead, he only taunts, and when he sees Valya appearing from the bedroom, he completely falls into a trance - he starts slandering again and in the end is thrown out the door. “It's all over,” he says. “Now I will kill you, comrade Babichev.” From that moment on, Cavalerov is in league with the "modern sorcerer" Ivan Babichev, a teacher and comforter. He listens to his confession, from which he learns about Ivan's extraordinary inventive abilities, who from childhood surprised others and was nicknamed the Mechanic. After the Polytechnic Institute, he worked as an engineer for some time, but this stage is in the past, but now he wanders around the pubs, draws portraits of those who wish for a fee, composes impromptu, etc. But most importantly, he preaches. He proposes to organize a "conspiracy of feelings" as opposed to the soulless era of socialism, which denies the values ​​of the past century: pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, honor, duty, love ... He convenes those who have not yet freed themselves from human feelings, even if not the most exalted who did not become a machine. He wants to arrange "the last parade of these feelings." He burns with hatred for Volodya Makarov and brother Andrei, who took his daughter Valya from him. Ivan tells his brother that he loves Volodya not because Volodya is a new person, but because Andrei himself, as a simple inhabitant, needs a family and a son, fatherly feelings. In the person of Kavalerov, Ivan finds his adherent. The "Magician" intends to show Kavalerov his pride - a machine called "Ophelia", a universal apparatus in which hundreds of different functions are concentrated. According to him, it can blow up mountains, fly, lift weights, replace a baby carriage, serve as a long-range weapon. She knows how to do everything, but Ivan forbade her. Deciding to avenge his era, he corrupted the machine. He, according to him, endowed her with the most vulgar human feelings and thereby dishonored her. Therefore, he gave her the name of Ophelia - a girl who went crazy with love and despair. His machine, which could bring happiness to the new age, is "a dazzling fiddle that a dying age will show to a born one." It seems to Kavalerov that Ivan is really talking to someone through a crack in the fence, and immediately hears a piercing whistle with horror. With a breathless whisper: "I'm afraid of her!" - Ivan rushes away from the fence, and together they flee. Kavalerov is ashamed of his cowardice, he saw only a boy whistling with two fingers. He doubts the existence of the machine and reproaches Ivan. Between them there is a quarrel, but then Kavalerov surrenders. Ivan tells him a tale about the meeting of two brothers: he, Ivan, sends his formidable car to the Chetvertak under construction, and it destroys it, and the defeated brother crawls to him. Soon Kavalerov is present at a football match in which Volodya takes part. He jealously follows Volodya, Valya, Andrey Babichev, surrounded, as it seems to him, by everyone's attention. He is hurt that they don’t notice him, they don’t recognize him, and Vali’s charm torments him with his inaccessibility. At night, Kavalerov returns home drunk and finds himself in the bed of his mistress Anechka Prokopovich. Happy Anechka compares him to her late husband, which infuriates Kavalerov. He beats Anya, but this only delights her. He falls ill, the widow takes care of him. Kavalerov has a dream in which he sees "Quarter", happy Valya together with Volodya, and immediately notices Ophelia with horror, who overtakes Ivan Babichev and pins him to the wall with a needle, and then pursues Kavalerov himself. Having recovered, Kavalerov runs away from the widow. A lovely morning fills him with hope that now he will be able to break with his former ugly life. He understands that he lived too easily and arrogantly, he had too high an opinion of himself. He spends the night on the boulevard, but then returns again, determined to put the widow "in place." At home, he finds Anechka sitting on the bed and Ivan drinking wine in a businesslike way. In response to Kavalerov's astonished question: "What does this mean?" - he invites him to drink for indifference as “the best of the states of the human mind” and reports “pleasant”: “... today, Kavalerov, it’s your turn to sleep with Anechka. Hooray!"

Yuri Olesha

Yuri Karlovich Olesha was called "the king of metaphors" in the circle of contemporary writers. Olesha did not know how to write "dark and sluggish", long and boring, his prose sparkles with brilliant images and aphorisms, almost every paragraph is equivalent to a short story in terms of capacity and completeness.

The novel "Envy" is the pinnacle of Olesha's work and, undoubtedly, one of the pinnacles of Russian literature of the 20th century. The collection also includes stories by Yuri Olesha and the book "Not a Day Without a Line" - diary entries that are, in fact, a subtle and deep essay of a sophisticated stylist and a sensitive person.

PART ONE

He sings in the morning in the closet. You can imagine what a cheerful, healthy person he is. The desire to sing arises in him reflexively. These songs of his, in which there is neither melody nor words, but only one "ta-ra-ra", shouted out by him in different keys, can be interpreted as follows:

"How pleasant it is for me to live ... ta-ra! ta-ra! .. My intestines are elastic ... ra-ta-ta-ta-ra-ri ... Juices move correctly in me ... ra-ta-ta-du-ta-ta ... Shrink, gut, shrink... thump-ba-ba-boom!"

When in the morning he walks past me from the bedroom (I pretend to be asleep) to the door leading to the bowels of the apartment, to the toilet, my imagination is carried away after him. I can hear the hustle and bustle in the lavatory stall, where his large body is narrow. His back rubs against the inside of the slammed door and his elbows dig into the walls as he kicks. The lavatory door has frosted oval glass. He flips a switch, the oval lights up from within and becomes a beautiful, opal-colored egg. In my mind's eye, I see this egg hanging in the darkness of the corridor. It weighs six pounds. Recently, going down the stairs somewhere, he noticed how his chest was shaking in time with his steps. So he decided to add a new series of gymnastic exercises. This is an exemplary male.

Usually he does gymnastics not in his bedroom, but in that unspecified room where I am placed. It is more spacious, airy, more light, radiance. Coolness pours in through the open door of the balcony. In addition, there is a washbasin. A mat is carried from the bedroom. He is naked to the waist, in knitted underpants fastened with one button in the middle of the abdomen. The blue and pink world of the room moves around in the mother-of-pearl button lens. When he lays down on the mat with his back and begins to raise his legs one by one, the button does not hold. The groin opens. His scent is great. Delicate burn. Protected area. Groin manufacturer. Here is the same suede matte groin I saw in a male antelope. Girls, secretaries and clerks must be pierced by love currents from his one look,

He washes like a boy, blowing, dancing, snorting, yelling. He grabs handfuls of water and, without bringing it to his armpits, slaps it on the mat. Water on the straw crumbles into full, clean drops. Foam, falling into the basin, boils like a pancake. Sometimes soap blinds him - he, cursing, tears his eyelids with his thumbs. He gargles his throat with a scream. Under the balcony people stop and lift their heads.

The rosiest, quietest morning. Spring is in full swing. There are flower boxes on all windowsills. Cinnabar of the next flowering seeps through their cracks.

(Things don’t like me. Furniture tries to give me a leg. Some lacquered corner once literally bit me. I always have a difficult relationship with a blanket. The soup served to me never cools down. If some rubbish - a coin or a cufflink falls off table, then it usually rolls under the hard-to-remove furniture.I crawl on the floor and, raising my head, I see the sideboard laughing.)

Blue suspender straps hang down the sides. He goes into the bedroom, finds a pince-nez on a chair, puts it on in front of the mirror and returns to my room. Here, standing in the middle, he lifts the straps of his braces, both at once, in such a movement, as if he were hoisting a load on his shoulders. He doesn't say a word to me. I pretend to be asleep. In the metal plates of the suspenders, the sun is concentrated in two burning beams. (Things love him.)

He does not need to comb his hair and tidy up his beard and mustache. His head is cut low, his mustache is short - just under his nose. He looks like a big fat boy. He took the vial; the glass stopper chirped. He poured the cologne into his palm and ran his palm over the ball of his head - from the forehead to the back of the head and back.

In the morning he drinks two glasses of cold milk: he takes a jug from the sideboard, pours it and drinks without sitting down.

The first impression of him stunned me. I couldn't assume. He stood before me in an elegant gray suit, smelling of cologne. His lips were fresh, slightly protruding. He turned out to be a jerk.

Very often at night I wake up from his snoring. Dude, I don't understand what's wrong. It's like someone is threateningly saying the same thing: "Krakatow... Krra... ka... touuu..."

They gave him a wonderful apartment. What a vase stands at the door of the balcony on a lacquered stand! Vase made of the finest porcelain, round, tall, translucent with delicate crowned redness. She looks like a flamingo. Apartment on the third floor. The balcony hangs in a light space. A wide country street looks like a highway. Opposite below is a garden; a heavy wooded garden typical of outskirts of Moscow, a disorderly gathering that grew up in a vacant lot between three walls, as if in an oven.

He is a glutton. He eats outside. Last night he returned hungry, decided to eat. There was nothing in the buffet. He went downstairs (on the corner of the store) and dragged a whole bunch: two hundred and fifty grams of ham, a can of sprats, canned mackerel, a large loaf, a good half moon of Dutch cheese, four apples, a dozen eggs and marmalade "Persian peas". Fried eggs and tea were ordered (the kitchen is shared in the house, served by two cooks in line).

Bury, Kavalerov, - he invited me and he fell on himself. He ate scrambled eggs from a frying pan, chipping off pieces of protein, like peeling enamel. His eyes were filled with blood, he took off and put on pince-nez, champed, sniffed, his ears moved. I enjoy observing. Have you paid attention to the fact that salt falls off the tip of the knife without leaving any traces - the knife shines as if untouched; that the pince-nez runs over the bridge of the nose like a bicycle; that a person is surrounded by small inscriptions, a scattered anthill of small inscriptions: on forks, spoons, pince-nez-rimmed plates, buttons, pencils? Nobody notices them. They are fighting for existence. They pass from view to view, up to huge signboard letters! They rebel - class against class: the letters of the street signs are at war with the letters of the posters.

Envy
Summary of the novel
“He sings in the morning in the closet. You can imagine what a cheerful, healthy person he is.” One cannot do without this textbook, which has become a flying phrase, with which Olesha's novel begins. And it is about a former revolutionary, a member of the Society of Political Prisoners, now a major Soviet business executive, director of the food industry trust Andrei Babichev. He sees him like this - a mighty giant, the master of life - the main character, a man lost in life, Nikolai Kavalerov.
Andrey

Babichev picked up the drunken Kavalerov, who was lying near the pub, from which he was thrown out after a quarrel. He took pity on him and gave him shelter in his apartment for a while, while his pupil and friend, a representative of the “new generation”, an eighteen-year-old student and football player Volodya Makarov, is absent. For two weeks he lives with Babichev Cavaliers, but instead of gratitude, he feels tormenting envy towards his benefactor. He despises him, considers him below himself and calls him a sausage man. After all, he, Kavalerov, has a figurative vision, almost a poetic gift, which he uses to compose pop monologues and verses about the financial inspector, sovladyshne, NEPmen and alimony. He envies Babichev's prosperity, his health and energy, celebrity and scope. Kavalerov wants to catch him on something, to find a weak side, to find a gap in this monolith. Painfully conceited, he feels humiliated by his covetousness and Babichev's pity. He is jealous of Volodya Makarov, who is unfamiliar to him, whose photograph is on Babichev's desk.
Kavalerov is twenty-seven years old. He dreams of his own glory. He wants more attention, while, according to him, "in our country, the roads of glory are blocked by barriers." He would like to be born in a small French town, set himself some lofty goal, one day leave the town and work fanatically to achieve it in the capital. In a country where a sober realistic approach is required of a person, he is tempted to suddenly take it and do something ridiculous, commit some kind of ingenious mischief and then say: “Yes, that’s how you are, and that’s how I am.” Kavalerov feels that his life has changed, that he will no longer be either handsome or famous. Even the extraordinary love that he dreamed of all his life will not happen either. With longing and horror, he recalls the room of the forty-five-year-old widow Anechka Prokopovich, fat and loose. He perceives the widow as a symbol of his male humiliation. He hears her female call, but this only awakens rage in him ("I'm not a couple for you, you bastard!").
Kavalerov, so thin and gentle, is forced to be a "clown" under Babichev. He carries sausage made according to Babichev's technology to the indicated addresses, “which does not fail in one day,” and everyone congratulates its creator. Cavaliers proudly refuses to eat her solemnly. He is dissected by anger, because in the new world that the communist Babichev is building, fame “flares up because a sausage of a new kind came out of the hands of a sausage maker.” He feels that this new, building world is the main, triumphant one. And he, Kavalerov, unlike Babichev, is a stranger at this celebration of life. He is constantly reminded of this, either by not letting him into the airfield of the airfield, where the Soviet airplane of a new design is to take off, or at the construction site of another brainchild of Babichev - “Chetvertak”, a giant house, the future greatest dining room, the greatest kitchen, where lunch will cost just a quarter.
Exhausted by envy, Kavalerov writes a letter to Babichev, where he confesses his hatred for him and calls him a stupid dignitary with lordly inclinations. He declares that he takes the side of Babichev's brother, Ivan, whom he once saw in the courtyard of the house when he threatened Andrei to kill him with the help of his Ophelia car. Andrei Babichev then said that his brother Ivan was “a lazy, harmful, contagious person” who “should be shot”. A little later, Kavalerov accidentally witnesses how this fat man in a bowler hat and with a pillow in his hands asks a girl named Valya to return to him. Valya, Ivan Babichev's daughter, becomes the subject of his romantic aspirations. Kavalerov declares war on Babich - "... for tenderness, for pathos, for personality, for names that excite, like the name "Ophelia", for everything that you suppress, a wonderful person."
Just at the moment when Kavalerov, intending to finally leave Babichev's house, collects his belongings, the student and football player Volodya Makarov returns. Confused and jealous, Kavalerov tries to slander Babichev in front of him, but Makarov does not react, but calmly takes his place on the couch that Kavalerov loves so much. The letter of the Cavaliers does not dare to leave, but then he suddenly discovers that he mistakenly grabbed someone else's, and it was left lying on the table. He is in despair. Again he returns to Babichev, he wants to fall at the feet of the benefactor and, having repented, beg for forgiveness. But instead, he only taunts, and when he sees Valya appear from the bedroom, he completely falls into a trance - he starts slandering again and in the end is thrown out the door. “It's all over,” he says. “Now I will kill you, Comrade Babichev.”
From that moment on, Kavalerov is in league with the "modern sorcerer" Ivan Babichev, a teacher and comforter. He listens to his confession, from which he learns about Ivan's extraordinary inventive abilities, who from childhood surprised others and was nicknamed the Mechanic. After the Polytechnic Institute, he worked as an engineer for some time, but this stage is in the past, but now he wanders around the pubs, draws portraits of those who wish for a fee, composes impromptu, etc. But most importantly, he preaches. He proposes to organize a “conspiracy of feelings” as opposed to the soulless era of socialism, which denies the values ​​of the past century: pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, honor, duty, love ... He convenes those who have not yet freed themselves from human feelings, even if not the most exalted who did not become a machine. He wants to arrange "the last parade of these feelings." He burns with hatred for Volodya Makarov and brother Andrei, who took his daughter Valya from him. Ivan tells his brother that he loves Volodya not because Volodya is a new person, but because Andrei himself, as a simple layman, needs a family and a son, fatherly feelings. In the person of Kavalerov, Ivan finds his adherent.
The "Magician" intends to show Kavalerov his pride - a machine called "Ophelia", a universal apparatus in which hundreds of different functions are concentrated. According to him, it can blow up mountains, fly, lift weights, replace a baby carriage, serve as a long-range weapon. She knows how to do everything, but Ivan forbade her. Deciding to avenge his era, he corrupted the machine. He, according to him, endowed her with the most vulgar human feelings and thereby dishonored her. Therefore, he gave her the name of Ophelia - a girl who went crazy with love and despair. His machine, which could bring happiness to the new age, is "a dazzling fig that a dying age will show to a newborn." It seems to Kavalerov that Ivan is really talking to someone through a crack in the fence, and immediately hears a piercing whistle with horror. With a breathless whisper: "I'm afraid of her!" - Ivan rushes away from the fence, and together they flee.
Kavalerov is ashamed of his cowardice, he saw only a boy whistling with two fingers. He doubts the existence of the machine and reproaches Ivan. Between them there is a quarrel, but then Kavalerov surrenders. Ivan tells him a tale about the meeting of two brothers: he, Ivan, sends his formidable car to the Chetvertak under construction, and it destroys it, and the defeated brother crawls to him. Soon Kavalerov is present at a football match in which Volodya takes part. He jealously follows Volodya, Valya, Andrey Babichev, surrounded, as it seems to him, by everyone's attention. He is hurt that they don’t notice him, they don’t recognize him, and Vali’s charm torments him with his inaccessibility.
At night, Kavalerov returns home drunk and finds himself in the bed of his mistress Anechka Prokopovich. Happy Anechka compares him to her late husband, which infuriates Kavalerov. He beats Anya, but this only delights her. He falls ill, the widow takes care of him. Kavalerov has a dream in which he sees “Chetvertak”, happy Valya together with Volodya, and immediately notices Ophelia with horror, who overtakes Ivan Babichev and pins him to the wall with a needle, and then pursues Kavalerov himself.
Having recovered, Kavalerov runs away from the widow. A lovely morning fills him with hope that now he will be able to break with his former ugly life. He understands that he lived too easily and arrogantly, he had too high an opinion of himself. He spends the night on the boulevard, but then returns again, determined to put the widow "in place". At home, he finds Anechka sitting on the bed and Ivan drinking wine in a businesslike way. In response to Kavalerov's astonished question: "What does this mean?" - he offers him a drink for indifference as “the best of the states of the human mind” and reports “pleasant”: “... today, Kavalerov, it’s your turn to sleep with Anechka. Hooray!"

You are now reading: Summary Envy - Olesha Yuri Karlovich

In 1927, the Soviet writer Yuri Karlovich Olesha wrote a novel called Envy. According to readers, in it the author reveals the tragedy of the "extra person" in a new way: the hero does not dispose to himself, evoking positive emotions or empathy, like Chatsky Griboedova, Pushkin's Onegin, Pechorin Lermontov, Rudin Turgeneva, Bender Ilf and Petrova. On the contrary, the "superfluous person" in Yuri Olesha's novel "Envy" rather causes hostility: he is envious, cowardly and petty. Olesha shows the reader just such a representative of the intelligentsia in the young Soviet society. All this can be seen by reading the summary of "Envy", a brief retelling of the events of this novel.

Meeting of the main characters

The summary of Olesha's novel "Envy" begins with a narration on behalf of the protagonist. Nikolai Kavalerov is twenty-seven years old. While drunk, he got into a fight in a pub. Kavalerov was thrown out into the street. In such an unattractive form, he was picked up by Andrey Babichev, a communist, a successful director of a food industry trust, who was passing by in his car. The Savior is generous: he brings Kavalerov to his house and allows him to live there in a separate room, warning that the sofa in this room belongs to his adopted eighteen-year-old son, football player Volodya Makarov. Therefore, the sofa will have to be vacated when the son returns from Murom. Babichev also offers Kavalerov a simple job: he is required to proofread documents and select materials.

The birth of envy

For two weeks, Kavalerov lives with Babichev and watches him. He is annoyed that he is so successful, passionate about his work: Andrei comes up with a name for chocolates, works on creating a new type of sausage, and is building a communal canteen called Chetvertak.

Kavalerov despises his benefactor, calling him a sausage man and considering him a person inferior to himself. Kavalerov considers himself so refined, possessing a poetic gift, because he composes verses and monologues for the stage, and Nepmen, financial inspector, sovladyshni, alimony become his themes. He painfully envies Babichev, his successful life, career, his good health and energy. Cavaliers is trying his best to find weaknesses, vulnerabilities. His jealousy for Volodya Makarov, whom he doesn't even know, is boundless.

Unfulfilled dreams

Kavalerov dreams of becoming famous, obsessed with some lofty ideas. He would be born and live in a provincial French town, and then go to the capital and do something grandiose. And he is doomed to live in a country where a successful person is required to have a realistic perception of reality. The hero understands that his life did not work out, he will not achieve anything in it. And he won't be famous.

Kavalerov dreams of great love, although he understands that she, too, will no longer be in his life. Forty-five-year-old Anechka Prokopovich, a fat and flabby widow, is the one with whom he can be content in love as a man. He realizes that he is humiliated to the limit, and this infuriates him.

foreign glory

The hero is forced to help Babichev: to carry sausages made using a new technology to the right addresses.

People congratulate the creator, and Kavalerov is tormented and angry that the glory goes to the sausage maker. The summary of “Envy” by Olesha conveys the experiences of the hero, who everywhere painfully feels his uselessness, feels like a stranger. And the people around him constantly remind him of this: either he is not allowed to go to the airfield, where a completely new airplane is supposed to take off, or to the construction site of the greatest dining room "Chetvertak".

Letter

Envy tormented Kavalerov. She deprived him of a peaceful life. In desperation, the hero decides to write a letter to Babichev. He reports in it about his hatred for him, in every possible way tries to offend him. The hero also writes in a letter that he supports Ivan, Babichev's brother, whom Andrei called a lazy person and a person harmful to society. Kavalerov recalls a recent scene that he witnessed, how Ivan asked Valya, his daughter, to return to him. Then, seeing her, the hero decided to make the image of Vali the subject of his romantic dreams.

Unforgivable oversight

Kavalerov decides to leave Babichev's house. During his training camp, Volodya Makarov, a student and a football player, returns. Kavalerov is confused, he jealously watches how he took a seat on the couch he loved. Kavalerov makes attempts to slander Babichev. However, Makarov quietly ignores his accusations. Leaving, the hero does not dare to leave the letter he wrote, so he takes it with him. However, later he realizes that he accidentally took a completely different letter instead of his own, and left his own on the table. Summary Yu. K. Olesha "Envy" makes it clear that this oversight will play a fatal role. Having discovered his mistake, Kavalerov falls into despair. He returns to Babichev. The hero is ready to beg him for forgiveness and repent. But when he sees his benefactor, he forgets that he wanted to ask for forgiveness. Kavalerov insults Andrey, and when he sees Valya coming out of his bedroom, he completely loses his head with envy and jealousy. He ends up being thrown out the door. The hero is full of evil revenge and threatens to kill his hated savior.

History of Ivan Babichev

In the summary of Olesha's "Envy", one cannot fail to mention one more hero - brother Andrei. After the final break with Andrei Babichev, Kavalerov becomes an ally of his brother Ivan, who turned out to be the same loser in life. From his confession, the hero learns that Ivan from childhood showed the ability to invent, for which he was called the Mechanic. After graduating from the Polytechnic Institute, he briefly worked as an engineer. And now his life is pubs in which he is looking for himself: he paints portraits, composes impromptu and preaches.

Ivan calls on all those who are not alien to human feelings to protest against the soullessness that, according to him, socialism brings in itself, making a machine out of a person. With undisguised hatred, he treats his brother Andrei, who, in his opinion, took his daughter Valya from him, as well as his adopted son Volodya Makarov. All this brings Ivan closer to Kavalerov.

"Ophelia"

Ivan intends to show his newfound ally his invented machine, which contains a huge number of different functions. According to the story of the creator, this device can do everything, but he forbade it to do so. This machine could make all people happy, but Ivan decided to avenge his era by corrupting it. He put into her the most vulgar human feelings. It is no coincidence that the inventor called this device "Ophelia" - the name of a girl who went crazy from despair and love. Kavalerov is watching Ivan, who seems to be talking to someone on the other side of the fence. A piercing whistle terrifies Ivan and Kavalerov. They run away together.

Another fairy tale

Kavalerov is ashamed of his fear. After all, he saw a boy who whistled piercingly with two fingers. In addition, he does not believe in the existence of the machine that Ivan allegedly created. Kavalerov informs him about this. After the spat that followed, Kavalerov surrenders. Ivan immediately comes up with a new fairy tale - a story about how he sends his invented car to the construction site of "Chetvertak", and it destroys it. Brother Andrei, defeated, crawls towards him.

New meeting

Kavalerov was among the spectators at a football match where Volodya Makarov played.

He watches Volodya, Andrei Babichev and Valya with tormenting jealousy. It seems to him that they are surrounded by universal attention and are happy with it. Nobody notices Kavalerov himself. He is tormented by the fact that Valya is not available to him.

The drunken hero returns home at night. Once in bed with Anechka Prokopovich and having heard from her comparisons with her ex-husband, Kavalerov is furious. He beats the widow, which also delights her. The hero gets sick. Anechka takes care of the sick. In delirium, happy Valya and Volodya come to him, and "Ophelia", pinning Ivan to the wall with a needle, pursues him.

Last resort

Having recovered from his illness, Kavalerov is full of hope to change his failed life for the better. He runs from the widow, spends the night on the boulevard. Having decided to deal with Anechka, he returns to her. The last scene in the summary of Olesha's "Envy" takes place in the widow's room. Returning to her, the hero suddenly finds Ivan sitting on her bed, who offers him a drink. Just like the Cavaliers, he finds solace here.

Afterword

The summary of "Envy", Olesha's reviews of it, written in his diaries, testify to the author's special attitude towards the image of Kavalerov. He made it autobiographical. The hero is an intellectual, a poet and a dreamer, he has become an extra person in socialist reality. However, for all his humiliation, Kavalerov does not look like a loser, unlike Andrei Babichev, a successful and purposeful sausage maker. Sausage in this novel is a symbol of the well-being of the socialist system.

According to readers, the conflict in Y. Olesha's "Envy" is a conflict between the poet and society. The power and purpose of a poet in society is to speak the truth. The relationship between the artist and the crowd cannot be simple. The author contrasts the image of a creative person contemplating reality, a representative of the new government, a businessman, and a practitioner.

Considering the summary of the works of Yuri Olesha, it can be noted that the novel "Envy" is the pinnacle of his work, a literary success. The high artistic merit of this work was unanimously recognized by critics. However, philosophical issues, according to readers, caused heated debate.

Yuri Karlovich Olesha

He sings in the morning in the closet. You can imagine what a cheerful, healthy person he is. The desire to sing arises in him reflexively. These songs of his, in which there is neither melody nor words, but there is only one “ta-ra-ra”, shouted out by him in different ways, can be interpreted as follows:

“How pleasant it is for me to live ... ta-ra! ta-ra! .. My intestines are elastic ... ra-ta-ta-ta-ra-ri ... Juices move correctly in me ... ra-ta-ta-du-ta-ta ... Contract, intestine, contract ... tram-ba- boom!

When in the morning he walks past me from the bedroom (I pretend to be asleep) to the door leading to the bowels of the apartment, to the toilet, my imagination is carried away after him. I can hear the hustle and bustle in the lavatory stall, where his large body is narrow. His back rubs against the inside of the slammed door and his elbows dig into the walls as he kicks. The lavatory door has frosted oval glass. He flips a switch, the oval lights up from within and becomes a beautiful, opal-colored egg. In my mind's eye, I see this egg hanging in the darkness of the corridor.

It weighs six pounds. Recently, going down the stairs somewhere, he noticed how his chest was shaking in time with his steps. So he decided to add a new series of gymnastic exercises.

This is an exemplary male.

Usually he does gymnastics not in his bedroom, but in that unspecified room where I am placed. It is more spacious, airy, more light, radiance. Coolness pours in through the open door of the balcony. In addition, there is a washbasin. A mat is carried from the bedroom. He is naked to the waist, in knitted underpants fastened with one button in the middle of the abdomen. The blue and pink world of the room moves around in the mother-of-pearl button lens. When he lays down on the mat with his back and begins to raise his legs one by one, the button does not hold. The groin opens. His scent is great. Delicate burn. Protected area. Groin manufacturer. Here is the same suede matte groin I saw in a male antelope. Girls, secretaries and clerks must be pierced by love currents from one of his glances.

He washes like a boy, blowing, dancing, snorting, yelling. He grabs handfuls of water and, without bringing it to his armpits, slaps it on the mat. Water on the straw crumbles into full, clean drops. Foam, falling into the basin, boils like a pancake. Sometimes the soap blinds him - he, cursing, tears his eyelids with his thumbs. He gargles his throat with a scream. Under the balcony people stop and lift their heads.

The rosiest, quietest morning. Spring is in full swing. There are flower boxes on all windowsills. Cinnabar of the next flowering seeps through their cracks.

(Things don’t like me. Furniture tries to give me a leg. Some lacquered corner once literally bit me. I always have a difficult relationship with a blanket. The soup served to me never cools down. If some rubbish - a coin or a cufflink - falls from the table, it usually rolls under the hard-to-remove furniture.I crawl on the floor and, raising my head, I see the sideboard laughing.)

Blue suspender straps hang down the sides. He goes into the bedroom, finds a pince-nez on a chair, puts it on in front of the mirror and returns to my room. Here, standing in the middle, he lifts the straps of his braces, both at once, in such a movement, as if he were hoisting a load on his shoulders. He doesn't say a word to me. I pretend to be asleep. In the metal plates of the suspenders, the sun is concentrated in two burning beams. (Things love him.)

He does not need to comb his hair and tidy up his beard and mustache. His head is cut low, his mustache is short - just under his nose. He looks like a big fat boy.

He took the vial; the glass stopper chirped. He poured the cologne into his palm and ran his palm over the ball of his head, from the forehead to the back of the head and back.

In the morning he drinks two glasses of cold milk: he takes a jug from the sideboard, pours it and drinks without sitting down.

The first impression of him stunned me. I couldn't assume. He stood before me in an elegant gray suit, smelling of cologne. His lips were fresh, slightly protruding. He turned out to be a jerk.

Very often at night I wake up from his snoring. Dude, I don't understand what's wrong. As if someone is saying the same thing with a threat: "Krakatow ... Krra ... ka ... touuu ..."

They gave him a wonderful apartment. What a vase stands at the door of the balcony on a lacquered stand! A vase made of the finest porcelain, round, tall, translucent with delicate blood redness. She looks like a flamingo. Apartment on the third floor. The balcony hangs in a light space. A wide country street looks like a highway. Opposite below is a garden: a heavy, woody garden, typical of the outskirts of Moscow, a disorderly gathering that has grown up in a vacant lot between three walls, like in an oven.

He is a glutton. He eats outside. Last night he returned hungry, decided to eat. There was nothing in the buffet. He went downstairs (on the corner of the store) and dragged a whole bunch: two hundred and fifty grams of ham, a can of sprats, canned mackerel, a large loaf, a good half moon of Dutch cheese, four apples, a dozen eggs and Persian Peas marmalade. Fried eggs and tea were ordered (the kitchen is shared in the house, served by two cooks in line).

“Shovel, Kavalerov,” he invited me and he fell on himself. He ate scrambled eggs from a frying pan, chipping off pieces of protein, like peeling enamel. His eyes were filled with blood, he took off and put on pince-nez, champed, sniffed, his ears moved.

I enjoy observing. Have you paid attention to the fact that salt falls off the tip of the knife without leaving any traces - the knife shines as if untouched; that the pince-nez runs over the bridge of the nose like a bicycle; that a person is surrounded by small inscriptions, a scattered anthill of small inscriptions: on forks, spoons, plates, pince-nez rims, buttons, pencils? Nobody notices them. They are fighting for existence. They pass from view to view, up to huge signboard letters! They rebel, class against class: the letters of the street signs are at war with the letters of the posters.

He ate his fill. He reached for the apples with a knife, but only cut the yellow cheekbone of the apple and threw it away.

One people's commissar in a speech spoke of him with high praise:

– Andrei Babichev is one of the remarkable people of the state.

He, Andrei Petrovich Babichev, holds the post of director of the food industry trust. He is a great sausage-maker, confectioner and cook.

And I, Nikolai Kavalerov, have a jester with him.

He is in charge of everything that concerns eating.

He is greedy and jealous. He would like to fry all the scrambled eggs, pies, cutlets himself, bake all the bread. He would like to give birth to food. He gave birth to "Thursday".

His child is growing. "Thursday" - there will be a giant house, the greatest dining room, the greatest kitchen. A two-course meal will cost a quarter.