In his 1927 novel Envy, Yury Olesha describes the difficulties of adapting one's emotional life to the new post-Revolutionary society. The novel is about how some people manage to make the transformation of their personality required by the new Soviet culture and economy, and how others, who have more trouble, envy them. In Olesha's novel this difference is dramatized by two brothers: Andrei Babichev is a successful manager of a new Soviet salami factory; his brother Ivan is a would-be inventor-cum-slackerish dandy who realizes that neither his values nor his emotions fit in the new Soviet world.

Socialism as anti-depressant: this is indeed how socialism is preasented in Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, the 1927 novel about peasant life in the Russian steppe in the years leading up to and following the October revolution. While the notion of socialism as salve for depression may in the present day context of Prozac and capitalist triumphalism seem at best counter-intuitive, for the reader of Chevengur, the realization by the self-named «Dostoevsky» about halfway through the novel that he had been depressed for lack of socialism does not come as a surprise.