These figures are cast within texts that develop fundamental strategies of modernity in order to position literature as a means revealing illusions and tensions within the modern world, specifically those inherent in closed, totalizing systems. Helena Rasiowa, Klemens Szaniawski, Marian Przelecki, Ryszard Wjcicki, Jerzy Pelc, Stanislaw Surma, Witold Marciszewski, Tadeusz Kubiski, Leon Koj. Synchronically, the intentional correspondences between Kavalerov, Quixote and the underground man, and between Olesha’s literary strategies and those of his predecessors, position Zavist’ in a literary context in which these figures bear relation to one another, as the work does to other literary forms.
Diachronically, the significance of Zavist’ being modeled on the earlier Zapiski iz podpoliâ should be overlooked given the political context during which Olesha’s work was written. In comparing them, I claim that Olesha constructs a self-contained novel in which its literary referents act on the level of correspondence with the figures of other literary works, thereby doubling the modes of other literary movements and epochs to preserve them. Producing art beyond mimesis and reference to particular contexts, they preserve a unique space for literature’s creativity, yet one also critical of its possibilities. These texts promote literature as a craft of enacting possibility itself. Although it is unsuccessful, Olesha contextualizes this project in a system of literary reference and applies similar strategies of critique and parody as are present in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Dostoevsky’s Zapiski iz podpoliâ. In his novella, Olesha reveals the limitations of Kavalerov’s project to transform everyday reality, or words as mundane objects, via metaphor. Olesha’s Zavist’ presents a critique of modern society, though not a naïve one promoting literature as transformational of language or social conditions. From this arose a specifically Russian tradition of linking poetics and politics, which I term the "imperial sublime." Whether utilised in praise of the tsar or to question his authority, the imperial sublime provided a powerful means of formulating the relationship of poetic language to the state: the reconstruction of this genealogy allows us to see the connections between Petrine ideologies of the state Boileau's revival of the Longinian sublime, and the enthusiastic adaptation in Russia of new genres such as the ode and even the elegy. Arising from the need to glorify the Russian state and its expanding territories, the imperial theme quickly became enmeshed in a wider range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and Russia's ruling monarchs. The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme alongside the creation and evolution of modern Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840. The establishment of the imperial state by Peter the Great led to the birth in Russia of the modern literary system.
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