MOSCOW TO THE END OF THE LINE

by Venedikt Erofeev ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1980

Oh, freedom and equality! Oh, brotherhood, oh, life on the dole! Oh, the sweetness of unaccountability. Oh, that most blessed of times in the life of my people, the time from the opening until the closing of the liquor stores."" Yes, something a bit different: a blissfully alcoholic samizdat novel (written at least a decade ago). Venichka, the first-person narrator of this monologue-book, is a sort of EveryAlkie, trying to make his way by train from Moscow (he's lived there for years but has never seen the Kremlin because of his drunken stupor) to Petushki--the end of the line--where a girl waits for him. . . maybe. But Venichka's logical processes are positively pickled: ""On the one hand, I liked that they [women] had waists. . . . but, on the other hand, they stabbed Marat with a penknife. . . . On the other hand, like Karl Marx, I liked the weakness in them. . . . But, on the other hand, didn't one of them shoot at Lenin?"" So he never does get to Petushki but instead stumbles off the train at a station and mistakenly gets back on another going toward Moscow again. His sodden journey, however, is often quite funny: a catalogue of favorite Russian cocktails, with ingredients including furniture polish, Freshen-Up cologne, insecticide; a discussion of the dangers of imminent attack by Norway (!). And the tone of Venichka's inexorable self-destruction remains breezy throughout, though the point of Erofeev's satire--that modern Russian life is tolerable only in a state of round-the-clock inebriation--comes through clear and militant. All in all, a minor, pell-mell little oddity, with many of the references apparently lost in translation while the drunk-joke at the center seems downright universal.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1980

ISBN: 0810112000

Page Count: -

Publisher: Taplinger

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION