The novel is about a pathetic young man named Nikolai Kavalerov, who refuses to accept Communist values and is consumed by loathing and envy for his benefactor Andrei Babichev, a model Soviet citizen who manages a successful sausage factory.

With Andrei Babichev's brother Ivan, Kavalerov attempts to stage a comeback of all the old, petty feelings that were crushed under communism.

Olesha wrote the novel while working at the Gudok, a widely read newspaper of the Railway Workers' Union.

Other authors of the newspaper were Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Petrov.

Despite Olesha's enthusiasm for the new state of affairs, Envy is one of a number of 20th-century Russian novels in which the protagonists clash with Soviet reality and as a result find themselves marginalized.