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Books that linger long out of their relevance are hard to judge. Envy is very much a novel of its time, that weird post-Revolutionary decade when the Soviet shit really started to hit the fan. The novel's antagonism between the sad-sack would-be avant-gardist and the New Man of Soviet Russia (here an overweight sausage manufacturer) resonates far less now than it did then. But their simmering, slow-motion conflict, exacerbated by the sausage maker's eccentric brother who sides with sad-sack, is often funny and not rarely poetical.
The eccentric brother is actually the centerpiece, with his weird notions of collecting emotions before the New Men do away with them and his cantakerous, dangerous machine named 'Ophelia' which is fueled by these emotions. Those bits are enough on their own, but there is enough fun and funny elsewhere to make it still worth reading.