The text speaks of the writer’s naming to the central, not numerous characters in his novel Envy. The character’s name is seen to be a description of character, while the name/signifier draws its surfeit of meaning from the language it is a part of, from Russian and European literary and cultural Lradilion, as well as from Russian everyday life In close connection to this arc the names of historical persons or literary characters which the novel mentions, dehistoricizes and mythologizes and which partake in the function of characterization within this novel. Namely, the fact of mentioning or of recognizing, or of drawing comparisons with some name/personality familiar to us from European culture, as well as the relation to a particular name, even on the level of sound, determines, to a large extent, the characters of Oleša’s novel. Naming in this novel is not only a privilidge of the author but of the characters as well, so that the names regularly express the character’s consciousness of language; what can be named is an industrial firm (Qarter), an imaginary non-existant anti-machine (Ophelia) or the chiming of a bell that is transformed into a name which gives rise to what it denotates (in the last two cases, the name/signifier and the signified have their existence only on the level of language while within the reality of the novel these signifiers lack a something they would denotate). The names the characters in the novel give to their creations always indicate their conception of the world since in the Oleša’s novel Oleša language (speech) and the conception of the world are identical, so that a given idea can be expressed only through one, appropriate speech. Using language (speech), the author narrator identifies with particular characters in the novel (Kavaljer, Ivan Babič) showing in this way that this conception of the world is identical with that held by the representatives of the “old world”; in this fashion he is numbered (according to the story) among the loosers in the “new world”, this “new world” being the common enviroment of the characters and the author of the novel.
