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Low Spirits and Immoderate Meditations in Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2022
Abstract
My article analyzes Venedikt Erofeev's cultivation of weakness via alcoholic intoxication in Moskva-Petushki against the grain of its standard interpretations. The critical consensus holds that the protagonist (and by extension, the author, with whom he shares his name and autobiographical details) is a sober drunk and a holy fool. By contrast, I read the protagonist's failure to reach his destination and his untimely death in a less celebratory light. Intoxication functions as a means of spiritual seclusion, of finding oneself through the process of “falling out” of all social systems. Via this categorical renunciation of any affiliation, the protagonist aims to escape conscription into any acts of cruelty or destruction ranging from historical atrocities to the most quotidian application of force. The protagonist makes a superhuman effort to avoid any form of belonging out of the ethical imperative not to injure, but ends up inflicting harm upon himself and his loved ones anyway. My point here, then, is that the poema does not celebrate the protagonist's attempt to reach salvation via weakness and solitude, but ambivalently explores the aesthetic and ethical possibilities and limits of his choice as well as the feasibility and desirability of such radical freedom.
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References
1. Cited from Savitskii, Stanislav, Andegraund: Istoriia i mify leningradskoi neofitsial΄noi literatury (Moscow, 2002), 317Google Scholar.
2. Erofeev, Venedikt, Zapisnye knizhki (Moscow, 2005), 1:519Google Scholar. The epithets given in quotation marks apparently derive from articles by critics, who borrowed them from the very writers they thus disparaged; for example, nytiki and khliupiki appear in Aksenov’s Ticket to the Stars (Zvezdnyi bilet, 1961). Remarking on the crisis of the positive hero in the late 1960s and early 1970s, O.V. Bogdanova differentiates among several categories of “non-heroes” (ne-geroi) that sprouted in Russian prose at the time, dubbing Erofeev’s Venichka the first postmodern example of this figure: “Almost simultaneously with the non-heroes of the Village Prose (‘passive’ non-heroes), non-heroes of urban prose (‘conformists’), and non-heroes of the prose of ‘the forty-year-olds’ (‘marginals,’ ‘ambivalent’ heroes), Venichka was the first literary representative of the non-hero to belong to the generation of watchmen and janitors, stokers and plumbers, the future postmodernist writers, who followed the writers of the early twentieth century in discovering that ‘in vino veritas’” (Ol΄ga Vladimirovna Bogdanova, “Moskva-Petushki” Venedikta Erofeeva kak pratekst russkogo postmodernizma: Metodicheskoe posobie dlia studentov-filologov i slushatelei podgotovitel΄nykh otdelenii [St. Petersburg, 2002], 21). While Bogdanova does not state it explicitly, her list of manual labor jobs, undesirable for members of the intelligentsia, is meant to demonstrate that these characters establish their non-heroism by avoiding markers of social success, by being “losers” in careerist terms.
3. This is not to suggest that other late-Soviet writers who employed the code of weakness embraced its ethics wholeheartedly, nor that they invested it with the same significance as Erofeev. Among the authors mentioned so far, Aksenov ultimately rejects this code, while Bitov continues to experiment with “weak” aesthetics throughout his writing, weeding out its questionable aspects and cultivating its strengths.
4. For more in-depth analysis of the generic multiplicity and intermixing in Moskva-Petushki, see ibid., 5–19; and Bezrukov, Andrei Nikolaevich, “Mezhzhanrovye vzaimodeistviia v tekste,” in Retseptsiia khudozhestvennogo teksta: funktsional΄nyi podkhod: Monografiia (St. Petersburg, 2015), 210–20Google Scholar.
5. “To Vadim Tikhonov, my beloved firstborn, I dedicate these tragic pages” (emphasis mine, JV). Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, trans. H. William Tjalsma (Evanston, Ill., 1994), 7.
6. Two significant recent attempts to exit the celebratory mode and account for the Poema’s tragic aspects have been made by Ann Komaromi in “On the Knife’s Edge: Venichka’s Performance in Moscow Stations,” in Ann Komaromi, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (Evanston, Ill., 2015), 102–28; and by Mark Lipovetsky in “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” in his Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Boston, 2011), 153–92. I will return to the arguments of both scholars later.
7. Yuri Levin, the author of one of the two commentaries to Moskva-Petushki, warns against the “common mistake” of conflating the author with the character bearing his name (Iurii Levin, Kommentarii k poeme ‘Moskva-Petushki’ Venedikta Erofeeva [Graz, 1996], 23). The distinction between author and protagonist is central to my argument; the incommensurability between Erofeev and Venichka enables the former to use the latter to interrogate his own most cherished views.
8. Vlasov, Eduard, “Bessmertnaia poema Venedikta Erofeeva ‘Moskva-Petushki:’ Sputnik pisatelia,’” in Erofeev, Venedikt, Moskva-Petushki (Moscow, 2000): 121–574Google Scholar.
9. On Erofeev’s holy foolishness, see Gaiser-Shnitman, Svetlana, Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’ ili ‘The Rest is Silence’ (Bern, 1989), 116–20Google Scholar; Lipovetsky, Mark, “From an Otherworldly Point of View: Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line” in Lipovetsky, Mark, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, Borenstein, Eliot, ed., (London, 1999), 66–82Google Scholar; and Paperno, Irina and Gasparov, Boris, “Vstan΄ i idi,” Slavica Hierosolymitana 5–6 (1981): 389–400Google Scholar.
10. See Lipovetsky, “From an Otherworldly Point of View.” Lipovetsky’s revision of this argument in “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster” is motivated by recognition that the poem’s tragic end conflicts with the interpretation of Erofeev as unreservedly espousing apophatic negation (whether of the postmodern or holy-foolish variety): “[T]he poem’s tragic finale. . .is itself at odds with the now classical interpretation of Moskva-Petushki as an apophatic (holy-fool-like) affirmation of the Christian ‘transcendental signified’ in the midst of drunken hell and universal chaos” (180).
11. Epstein, Mikhail, “Posle karnavala, ili Vechnyi Venichka,” in Erofeev, Venedikt, Ostav΄te moiu dushu v pokoe: Pochti vse (Moscow, 1995), 3–30Google Scholar.
12. Beraha, Laura, “Out of and into the Void: Picaresque Absence and Annihilation,” in Ryan-Hayes, Karen L., ed., Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki: Critical Perspectives (New York, 1997), 20Google Scholar.
13. Lipovetsky, “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” 173.
14. Ibid., 167. At one point in the narrative, Venichka defines himself as “a phenomenon” in possession of “self-generating Logos” (samovozrastaiushchii logos). Venedikt Erofeev, Moskva-Petushki, in Erofeev, Ostav΄te moiu dushu v pokoe, 97.
15. Lipovetsky, “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” 191.
16. I have no intention, of course, of moralizing on Venichka’s (and by extension, Erofeev’s) alcoholism. My point of departure, rather, is the consideration of alcoholism in the novel as an expression of a particular worldview.
17. Some argue that the novel’s end is not tragic at all; that with it, rather, the Christ-like Venichka kenotically sacrifices himself for the sake of humanity. I will discuss this interpretation later in the article.
18. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher (New York, 2008), 19.
19. Vasilii Rozanov, Opavshie list΄ia (Moscow: Iurait, 2015), 8; and Erofeev, Zapisnye knizhki, 1:629.
20. Rozanov, Opavshie list΄ia, 81; and Erofeev, Zapisnye knizhki, 1:624.
21. Rozanov, Opavshie list΄ia, 8; and Erofeev, Zapisnye knizhki, 1:629.
22. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 16.
23. The authors of Venedikt Erofeev: Postoronnii likewise highlight this central conflict within Moskva-Petushki, calling it “a dialectic contradiction between the theme of seclusion and the theme of meeting.” In their interpretation, during the drunken feast on the train, the book takes on the shape of the Platonic symposium, dialogic in form and relational in content (with the subject being love). According to the scholars, this symposium, the acme of Venichka’s encounter with the world, quickly devolves back into the Munchausen-like travelogue: “at this peak of accord, the hero cannot help himself and slides back into estrangement” (Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Il΄ia Simanovskskii, Venedikt Erofeev: Postoronnii [Moscow, 2018], 251).
24. Komaromi, “On the Knife’s Edge,” 116–17.
25. Erofeev, Zapisnye knizhki, 1:513.
26. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 46.
27. Ibid.; and Vattimo, Gianni, “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” in Vattimo, Gianni and Rovatti, Pier Aldo, eds., Weak Thought (Albany, 2012), 39–52Google Scholar.
28. This principle of negation, or what Lipovetsky calls the “categorical anti-imperative” (“Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” 164), is what leads so many commentators to see in Venichka a postmodern iteration of apophatic holy foolishness.
29. Interview with Leonid Prudovsky, “Sumasshedshim mozhno byt΄ v liuboe vremia,” in Venedikt Erofeev, Zapiski psikhopata (Moscow, 2001), 427.
30. Ibid.
31. It should be kept in mind that Erofeev was expelled from several universities for draft evasion and for keeping a Bible in his drawer; and long existed as а person “with no fixed abode.”
32. Here and below, Erofeev’s use of “power” is ambiguous, potentially referring to “his” (allegedly beloved) Soviet power, or to his own power.
33. Prudovsky sounds a rhyming, poetic note here: ee slova, ee usta, ee postup΄ i postupki. Notably, Soviet power, sovetskaia vlast΄, is grammatically feminine.
34. Erofeev, Zapiski psikhopata, 441.
35. Epstein, “Posle karnavala,” 16.
36. Ibid.
37. In the notebooks, Erofeev records Rozanov’s attitude toward loftiness: “Everything lofty [velichestvennoe] was permanently alien to me. I did not love and did not respect it” (Zapisnye knizhki, 2:70).
38. Ibid., 1:540.
39. Indeed, having established that Hitler sincerely loved dogs, Erofeev admonishes himself: “Be sure not to love dogs.” Ibid., 1:476.
40. Cited in Erofeev, Zapisnye knizhki, 1:45.
41. Ibid. Erofeev reminds himself that the same idea has been expressed by other important Christian thinkers, including Augustine, Martin Luther, and Lev Tolstoi. Later in the same notes, he derives a similar idea from Martin Heidegger and, of course, from Rozanov.
42. Ibid., 1:471.
43. In his notebook, Erofeev remarks (ibid., 1:562) that “All the Riveras, Mussolinis, Francos, Goebbelses, and Zhdanovs do not favor ‘art for a select few.’” In contrast to these authoritarians (and Diego Rivera, who apparently made this list because of his political commitments to authoritarian communism), Erofeev resolves to create precisely this kind of art, embracing and cultivating artistic individuality.
44. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 20.
45. In one of his notebook entries, Erofeev codes weakness in ideological terms as a form of anti-Leninism, alluding, that is, to “Lenin’s hated word ‘spinelessness’ [beskhrebetnost΄], ‘spineless scum’” (Zapisnye knizhki, 2:170). Curiously, Erofeev here transfers Lenin’s sentiment from the quality the word describes to the word itself, despite the clear implication that Lenin was, to the contrary, fond of using this word. Registering the affective charge with which Lenin imbued it, Erofeev demonstrates that he himself does not find beskhrebetnost΄ particularly objectionable—neither the word, nor especially what it signifies.
46. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 20.
47. On alcohol as the source of inspiration in Moskva-Petushki, see Vlasov, “Bessmertnaia poema,” 350.
48. Erofeev, Zapisnye knizhki, 1:513, 399; (golova poteriana, nervy rasstroeny, ruki opushcheny, serdtse razbito, tonus snizhen).
49. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 20. In his perceptive article “In Praise of Booze: ‘Moskva-Petushki’ and Erasmian Irony,” Slavonic and East European Review 88, no. 3 (July, 2010): 437–67, Oliver Ready argues that drinking in the poema functions much like folly in Erasmus’s “In Praise of Folly”: Erofeev presents a “lengthy demonstration—as erudite and silly as Stultitia’s argument that all people are fools—that all men. . .are drunkards” (459–60). In Ready’s view, these respective assertions of universal folly and drunkenness speak to the human condition generally: the fact that truth remains elusive or inaccessible to people, who would be wise to abstain (so to speak) from believing in their own wisdom and infallibility.
50. Lipovetsky writes that “getting wasted” allows Venichka to “accomplish ritualistic expenditure” and thereby gain symbolic power, see “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” 169–70.
51. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 31. I revised the translation slightly to make the quote more faithful to the original.
52. “Antinomially” (antinomichno) is the word used in the original: “All my life this nightmare has haunted me, this nightmare of being misunderstood not just wrongly, but in exactly the opposite way to what I intend,” Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 34.
53. Ibid., 30. Venichka’s sense of shame is perceptively explained by Komaromi, who categorizes it with that of the protagonists of Aksenov and Bitov: “In all these novels, the feeling of shame signals a broken social connection. We can relate this to the dissident decision to refuse the general illusion and take up a stand apart, making oneself an object of ostracism, misunderstanding, censure, and ridicule,” see “On the Knife’s Edge,” 120. Komaromi does not elaborate on this point, but it seems to approach my own view of the text’s betrayal of a sense of dissatisfaction, or at least incomplete satisfaction, with its own proposed “solutions.”
54. Ibid., 46.
55. Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow Stations: A Poem, trans. Stephen Mulrine (London, 1998), 25.
56. Yuri Levin’s explanation seems the most convincing: this must be where Venichka boards the wrong train and begins heading backwards to Moscow (Levin, Kommentarii, 75).
57. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 126–27.
58. Ibid., 17. By the end of the poema, these solicitous angels turn so malignant as to remind Venichka of the cruel children he witnessed laughing at a man cut in half by a train: “[S]ome children ran up to [the accident victim], three or four children, they had picked up a lighted cigarette butt from somewhere and stuck it in the dead man’s half-open mouth. . ..[A]nd the children ran around roaring with laughter. That’s how the heavenly angels laughed at me then,” ibid, 163. This grotesque scene with monstrous children is told right before the final scene of Venichka’s own execution, and seems to strangely prefigure it: the number of the assassins echoes the number of the cruel children, and the assassins’ choice of murder-method, an awl stuck into the protagonist’s throat, matches the cigarette that the sardonic children stuck into the dead man’s mouth.
59. Ibid., 149.
60. Ibid., 145.
61. Vlasov, “Bessmertnaia poema,” 521.
62. Discussing the significance of Kramskoi’s painting in the poema, Karen Ryan-Hayes associates it with “a recurrent theme of Moscow-Petushki”: “the impossibility of emotional and spiritual bonding,” in particular, the “profound privacy of the experience of grief”: “Erofeev’s Grief: Inconsolable and Otherwise,” in Ryan-Hayes, ed., Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki, 104–5. Konstantin Kustanovich continues this train of thought in his contribution to the same volume, “Venichka Erofeev’s Grief and Solitude: Existentialist Motifs in the Poema,” in Ryan-Hayes, 123–51. Kustanovich categorizes the possible causes of Venichka’s grief: psychological—depression over his alcoholic intemperance; ideological—disconsolateness over his complex relationship with the Soviet system; philosophical—sorrow over the human condition, its transcendental homelessness and existential abandonment. Both critics oscillate between locating Venichka’s grief within or externally to him, although Ryan-Hayes leans more toward the latter explanation, reading him as evincing “the widespread ennui of the zastoi period,” “Erofeev’s Grief,” 118, while Kustanovich leans toward the former, the idea that grieving, solitary Venichka stands for the agonizing search for authentic and unherdlike being.
63. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 47.
64. Ibid, 14.
65. Ibid., 48.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., 49.
69. Vlasov, “Bessmertnaia poema,” 242.
70. Gaiser-Shnitman, Venedikt Erofeev, 121.
71. See, for example, E. A. Kozitskaia, “Put΄ k smerti i ee smysl v poeme Ven. Erofeeva ‘Moskva-Petushki,’” in I. V. Fomenko, ed., Analiz odnogo proizvedeniia: “Moskva-Petushki” Ven. Erofeeva: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Tver΄, 2001), 17–22.
72. On the cruelty of the divine in the poema, see the brilliant discussion in Lipovetsky, “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” 187–91. Lipovetsky reads Venichka’s demise as the killing of “the individual voice, in accordance with the logic of power,” thus as evincing the cruelty of the divine Logos (187).
73. Venichka’s internalization of the sense of abandonment his sweetheart and child must have felt is conveyed, among other ways, by certain of his drunken metamorphoses; that is, in his delirium, he experiences his own transformation into (or very like) those he has abandoned, with one passenger addressing him as if he were a little boy (“You’d better stay home and do tomorrow’s lessons. Probably you haven’t done tomorrow’s stuff yet; your mama’ll get mad”), and another calling him “my wandering lovely” (or “lovely wanderess” [milaia strannitsa], Moscow to the End of the Line, 129). On Venichka’s androgyny as an attack on stable gender identity, see Beraha, “Out of and into the Void,” 40.
74. I cannot prove Erofeev’s knowledge of the poetic history of Ю; but his poema is of course densely intertextual.
75. “I am crazy about triple consonances / And damp rhymes—like for example those for words ending in ю.” Mikhail Lermontov, Poemy (St. Petersburg, 2008), 313.
76. Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal΄mont, Poeziia kak volshebstvo (Moscow, 1915), 64.
77. “All these unseemly love words play in wanton delight, they whirligig about, they [here follow three trans-sensical verbs, JV], out-drooling even the most Ю-ish poet Velimir Khlebnikov: napIAliaia klIUs΄ iasliuslIAika vbil΄E piizIAti” [more trans-sensical words that cannot be translated, but at least conjure the intimacy of Ю-ness and Я-ness, JV]. Igor΄ Terent΄ev, Rekord nezhnosti: Zhitie Il΄i Zdanevicha (Tiflis, 1919), 10, 12.
78. [Ю / Little Iuna / The Young / youthfully / youngifies / with iunas youth / While youthening in June. / Ю is wing-flappingly flowing, / Ю is rosy-morningly heavenly, / Ю is the bride of a Hundred Songs. / Ю and Я [I].] Vasilii Kamenskii, Ego-moia biografiia velikogo futurista (Moscow, 1918). Available electronically at ruslit.traumlibrary.net/page/kamenskiy-biografia.html (accessed February 2, 2022).
79. These categories themselves sometimes coded as “masculine” and “feminine” in culture. “Vowels are women,” declares Bal΄mont (Poeziia kak volshebstvo, 57–58), “consonants are men. Vowels are our very voice, the mothers who bore us, the sisters who kissed us, the original source from which, like drops and bursting current, we flowed out in our verbal countenance.” There is also attested a trend in American primary education by which children first learning the alphabet were taught to conceive of consonants as “boys” and vowels as “girls”; see for instance Ann E. Kammer, Cherlyn S. Granrose, Jan B. Sloan, Women’s Educational Equity Act Program, and Project for the Advancement of Women in Science Careers, Science, Sex, and Society (Washington, D.C., 1979).
80. Andrei Belyi, “Liniia, krug, spiral΄—simvolizma,” Trudy i dni, no. 4–5 (1912): 13–14.
81. On Belyi’s spiral, see ibid., 17.
82. In this context, the letter’s synesthetic color “red,” in conjunction with its Russian poetic tradition of being (likewise synesthetically) moist or fluid, unites the blood from Venichka’s fatal stab wound with “beer [flowing away] on a table top” after a spill—an image he had conjured earlier to convey, coding as he does all things through his central trope of drinking, a thought he cannot pin down. Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, 131.
83. On the motif of silence and muteness in the whole poema, and especially in the finale, see Lipovetsky, “Venichka: A Tragic Trickster,” 185–86.
84. As Komaromi perceptively observes (“On the Knife’s Edge,” 119), the son not only represents a singularly important human relationship in Venichka’s life, but also models the connection between author and reader: “The little boy represents a more serious hope for the real human results of the connection made at the site of the text, fruit of the union of author and reader that must, like the boy, grow into maturity and independence.”