Moskva-Petushki (translated in English as Moscow to the End of the Line), Venedikt Erofeev's greatest work, is the drunken journey of one man on the Moskovskaia- Gor’skovskaia train line to visit his lover and child in the blissful Petushki. Along the way, Venichka speaks both with other travelers and in monologues about drinking, Russian literature and philosophy, and their sad experiences. The novel becomes increasingly more dark, disoriented, and hallucinogenic as the intake of the narrator’s alcohol increases. The chronicle ends when the speaker cannot find Petushki and is murdered by an anonymous group of attackers.

The text of Moskva-Petushki was written in 1970. At this time, Erofeev was traveling around the Soviet Union as a telephone cable layer. Friends of the author maintain that it was written to entertain his fellow workers as they traveled about and that he incorporated many of them into his story’s characters. (Ryan-Hayes, p6) The text of the novel began to be circulated in samizdat within the Soviet Union, and then in translation when it was smuggled to the West. Its first official publication in the original Russian came out in Paris, 1977. With glasnost, Moskva-Petushki was able to be put out in Russia. However, rather than appear in its original form, it was published, abridged in the government pamphlet Sobriety and Culture as a campaign against alcoholism. In 1995, eighteen years later after it was first written, the novel was able to be officially published, including all the previously editd obscenties, without any censorship in Russia.

Although an alcoholic, the hero of Moskva-Petushki does not come across to the reader as a despicable character. It seems, rather, that Venichka tries to escape his miserable reality through drinking, not because he is stupid or ignorant , but because he is not able to put his intelligence to use. The reader can easily determine that he is obviously very well educated from his references to literature and religion. However, because there is no such outlet for him in such a restrictive society, he is forced to expend his creative instincts in his drink recipes and visions of sphinxes, angels, and devils. As one scholar of Russian literature notes about Moskva- Petushki, "Although it makes grotesque sport of Soviet society, it is not a satire but, rather, an anguished cry from the heart." (Brown, 151) Venichka is not a hopeless character, but the situation in which he lives, is. Erofeev writes this semi-autobiographical novel not to show the fatal consequences of alcoholism, but instead to reveal the reasons that drinking is so tragically necessary in finding any humor within Soviet rule.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Deming. The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction 1975-1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Ryan-Hayes, Karen L. . "Introduction." Venedikt Erofeev’s "Moscow-Petushki". Ed. Karen L. Ryan-Hayes. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1997. pp1-17.