Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia

In Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia, Yelena Zotova argues that the concept of envy underwent a peculiar transformation in the Russian Modernist prose of the 1920s due to a series of radical shifts in societal values, with each subsequent change thwarting Russia's volatile axiological hierarchy. Industriousness and austerity, inferior to playful genius in Pushkin's ';Mozart and Salieri,' became virtues, while the intrinsic value of nonutilitarian art was officially nullified by the Bolshevik state.Consequently, a new literary type emerged, and envy, described as ';wingless desire' by Russia's chief poet Alexander Pushkin, obtained new ownership as the envied became the envier. Superimposing twentieth-century theories of envy onto Mikhail Bakhtin's ';Author and Hero in the Aesthetic Activity' (1923), Zotova proposes that Salieri's envy could be the wingless embryo of the Bakhtinian authorship.