For me, this novel really works in tandem with The Three Fat Men. Anyone who knows a little about the author will recognize him in Nikolai Kavalerov, the protagonist of the Envy story. Just as Yury Olesha himself, Kavalerov feels capable of great deeds and, at the same time, unable to find his place or accomplish anything in the new Soviet Russia. These are the "sausage makers" like Andrey Babichev that the country needs, not poets and philosophers.

I've read Envy right after finishing The Three Fat Men. Divided by only three years (TTFM was written in 1924, Envy in 1927), they demonstrate a big change in the society and in the author's view of the Soviet Russia. There is a bitter irony in the fact that a writer who was one of the prophets of the 1917 revolution didn't manage to become a "new Soviet person". There are many other examples of people who found themselves unnecessary after the initial post-revolutionary period: futurist poets (especially Mayakovsky), constructivist artists (El Lisitsky, Malevitch), but I think Olesha's example is one of the most vivid.