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Prose
Moscow Stations - a novel by Venedikt Yerofeev
Moscow Stations was written in 1970 but until just a few years before Yerofeev’s death in 1990 it had only circulated as a typescript in a few major cities. This translation by Stephen Mulrine only appeared in 1997, published by Faber and Faber, though a dramatisation by the same writer made its stage debut in 1993 with Tom Courtenay playing the lead role.
The book ostensibly charts the events of the author’s journey by train from Moscow to Petushki, eighty miles east, though its scope, in both time and space, goes well beyond the extent of this journey. In one sense it is an autobiography of his life, but it is also the painting of a canvas by an alcoholic philosopher who is part of a disaffected under-class. This may all sound extremely bleak, but despite its basically tragic elements, the story is told with an incredible humour and spirit which has a startling ability to make you laugh out loud.
Yerofeev was born in Poyakonda, a small town in the arctic circle in a treeless frozen landscape. He excelled at school and won a place at Moscow University, but was expelled half way through his second year for absenteeism and insubordination. From then on he drifted from town to town doing a variety of jobs and his hard-drinking career also began. His experiences over these years are graphically illustrated in the novel, his journey through life fuelled by various and alarming alcoholic concoctions and laced with his own highly original philosophy.
Yerofeev sweeps you along from a hard, stark, gutter perspective examining major issues like employment, love, economics, sex and religion, all with the intelligence of what, despite everything, remained a scholarly mind. He also takes you off on hilarious tangents, achieved with equal aplomb, like why no-one has ever been able to come up with a formula for the interval between hiccups brought on by drinking. He also offers some rather alarming recipes for cocktails containing everything from sock deodorizer to brake fluid; if you wonder about the veracity of these recipes, one of his female friends recalled after his death having to hide bottles of perfume when he visited.
Yerofeev was not a dissident in the way that Solzhenitsyn, for example was, but the novel can clearly be seen as an indictment of the faltering Soviet Union as well as a testament to the remarkable power and will of the human spirit. If you have ever watched a Russian Orthodox church service it has the same sort of rhythm as the chanting and singing which pauses every now and then, and then recommences with its own distinctive structure and beauty.
Moscow Stations is a highly original work and makes you wonder what else
is out there in the world of Russian literature and art in general which
has not
yet surfaced since the fall of the USSR. It deserves a wider audience and
I recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the human condition; it
will delight and horrify you, make you laugh and cry as Yerofeev, to quote
from
the book’s own summary, ‘goes into the night with a sodden
dignity.’
Copyright Bare Nibs 2009