The scene is a tavern…

On the right - a counter with bottles. In the depths - a door leading outside. Above it, outside, hangs a red, grimy light. The floor and benches by the walls are full of pilgrims and passersby. Many, due to an absence of a place, sleep sitting. It is the middle of the night. With the lifting of the curtain, one hears thunder and sees lightning in the doorway. 

(A.P.Chekhov, Full Collected Works and letters, Moscow, 1978, vol.11, p. 183)

“Moscow at the End of the Line” is the “Confessions of a Child of a Century”, “A Sentimental Journey”, and the “Confitemini Dolio”.

In days of doubt, in days of agonizing reflections on the fate of my home, thou alone art my stay and my staff, oh, the great, mighty, true and free Russian pour! If thou wert not, would it be possible not to despair at this moment over all that is happening in my home?

It is an oil-painted spectacle with piano and orchestra in the pit that was written during a shift of criteria, and thereby the most truthful. Predicting the phenomenon of Erofeev, the great Russian poet wrote: 

“Let’s raise the glasses, let’s squish their reason!

All hail the muses, all hail them together!”¹

Drinking is always funny. It is funny to the drinker, it is funny to those observing him. Any abstainer is confronted with the inseparability of the drunk and the funny: what is funny can no longer be dangerous. Sacred laughter encapsulates the history of the human spirit, which consisted and consists of a deep positive beginning. A cleansing of the previous “serious” cycle, a renewal of life’s forces, a return to the initial act of creation. Global laughter (not the humor and satire of meager realism) is a life-bearing force. The topsy-turvy, carnivalesque world of Rabelais and Gogol is the finished specimen of such laughter. 

This carnivalesque, world-creating laughter has always been followed by an exuberant call: “Hic bibitur!” - “Let’s wack one out!” (Dieriabnem!).

When we laugh at a drunkard crawling across the road, the sacred laughter tickles our throat, and in the alcoholic, cackling, we greet a revolutionary who sets out to exchange the “serious” world for a funny one. 

In the literary essence of “Moscow at the End of the Line” lies a fantastical novel in the utopian subgenre.  Venedikt Erofeev created a world in which drunkenness is the law, sobriety is an anomaly, and Venichka is its prophet. The world is the world we all know, and he cannot live with the awareness of how flawed and incomplete his existence is. Unlike the creator, Erofeev did not create in emptiness: the world already existed, but it was bad; it had to be created again. 

Venichka Erofeev is deeply convinced that sober humanity is killing its wonderful soul for all those things, for which “people try, fuss, work, swim, and fight so much”². No, man is a part of the eternal, and must live cleanly, lightly, and wonderfully. In such a way as not to err in the recipes. In the search for the bliss brought by the knowledge of God’s providence. And when man understands this, then in his soul there will be happiness and tranquility, and in his world there will always be udders and sherry, whereas he will simply sit and play either sika or on the mandolin³. And if there exists a hell of our wild earthly world, then there is a heaven of the high kingdom, in which man, undistracted by the race for meaningless values, sits and comprehends the elevated meaning of the incomprehensible hiccups. 

“But there is also divine judgement!”⁴ Venichka screams, and the angels hear him. 

“I arrive at the Sorbonne and say that I want to study the baccalaureate. Whereas they ask me: ‘If you want to study the baccalaureate, then something has to be innate in you, as in a phenomenon. What is innate in you as a phenomenon?’ …I tell them: ‘Well, what can there be innate in me as in a phenomenon? I am an orphan after all.’ ‘From Siberia?’ they ask. I tell them: ‘From Siberia’...I thought a bit and said: ‘What is innate in me, as in a phenomenon, is the self-growing logos.’”

We’d be fools if we tried to dig out meaning and crack a code in something that has no meaning and no code to crack. i.e., the pour (poliv).

The pour is the bastard of the great and the mighty; it alone is solace and repose. The pour shelters nonsense’s alogism from the enraged philosophy of cause and effect. If not the pour, then who will answer with the divine speaking in tongues (glossolalia), with the wondrous angelic language to the dim and gray voice of the weekdays? But what is the pour? 

The pour is a poly-associational, semantic-phonetic phenomenon that gives rise to quasi-logic. The pour is the ecstasy of language. The choking tongue-twister of meanings and rhymes, for “humanity speaks in rhymes more often than it thinks.”⁵ If the meaningless consonance “bov’-rov” definitively connects death with birth, then can the rhyme of names and concepts not be the beading needle to rip through the shadow of the everyday into the day of the supernatural, by the absurdity of the pour? After all, the tenth generation of schoolchildren repeats the genius pour of the immortal human: “A rare bird will fly till the middle of Dniepr”. A Brussels-Vologdan cunning tangle of absurdity, “dada” of the dadaists, the holy “om mani padme khum” of the Tibetan wisemen; is all this not just a lump of overly sensitive information? Is this not a call to God? And a clue to God?

Venichka sits in the loft, the mezzanine, the outhouse, the storage room, the attic, and forges an essay on the questions of love with a French name: “Chic and Glamour Immer Elegant”, all while the absurd keeps grimacing in the pour bursting with all the latent and sincere clarity in nonsense: the clarity of the shrieking holy fool, whose angelic language is intelligible only to her and God. 

Why is “Moscow at the End of the Line” so similar to “The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”? Not because it is also a journey; there we have Khotilov, here Saltykovskaya, there we have Krestsy, here Drezna. But because of this: “And I beheld, that man’s afflictions come from man, and often only because he gazes indirectly on the objects that surround him.” Where is this from? It is clear, clear from the language that this comes from Erofeev, but even the noble (dvoryanskiy) revolutionary Alexander Nikolayevich could have written something like this.⁶

Or this: “Everything in the world should happen slowly and incorrectly, so that man does not become overly prideful, so that man will be sad and lost.” This statement, of course, is by Radischev, a profoundly religious person despite his free thought, but it could just as well have been Erofeev. 

Is it not in essence the same thought that shines through in both of these Russian writers: “A member of society only becomes known to the government that protects him when they break the social union, when they become a villain.” In a country where there is always space for heroic feats, the government knows each member of society, because each member is a villain, and thus the villain is each one of us; the dialectic spiral has raised this thesis to a new height. And Venichka, a scoundrel, in his pernicious frivolity escapes to the beauties of Petushki, for he “indirectly gazes at the objects that surround him.” Such an escape could not have been allowed under any circumstances. He rebelliously searches for a corner where there will not always be a place for heroic feats. 

Critics have not once underlined that “Moscow at the End of the Line” is not simply a travel notebook: “However, this work is not merely a description of travel. This book carries a completely different character; here, the journey takes on a symbolic meaning…[it] was a form of synthesis, a typification of his many journeys around Russia, and his indirect experience in this field, the synthesis of all that he heard and found out…relating to his country.”⁷

How the world changed from the time of the evangelists! Where do we find the naive and wise simplicity of their expression? When the day comes, so will the food.

Innumerable are the flips and quirks done by the engineers of people’s souls. What is the point? Everything has already been said and in different ways. Erofeev came to the world with a new world. How do we tell his story? After all, a new world needs a new language. Where do we find it? 

So Venichka took all the books that existed before him. And from each, he took a little bit; he took the best from the best and the worst from the worst. He did not offend anyone from Antonín Dvořák to Nikolai Ostrovsky. He brought it all together and narrated to the ancients, as a warning, a novel about people’s passions and the yearning of the soul. And it turned out that all the great engineers danced to Venya’s tune, and even if Venya did lie somewhere, it remains unknown who did it better. 

Venya’s tale seems so unpretentious and simple, yet there is so much verbal filigree in his refined phrase. We only lack the skipped over chapter “Serp i Molot - Karacharovo” to truly value the surprise in his adjective and the wondrous rhythm of his inversion, the pathos of the elevated syllogism and the syntaxis of his stream of consciousness, the cunning intent of speech characteristics, and the lyricism of his prayers—the montage of citations, and the collage of memories. 

Who else, other than Erofeev, could glorify the beauty of the incomparable woman from Petushki, whose braid runs down from her neck till her butt? Only that wiseman of the ancients, who wrote: 

“Oi, Oi, It is not a butt that she has, but a celebratory parade!”⁸

The composition, the overall design - these gothic, sharp-edged word-skeletons - oh, how poorly they fit into Venichka’s aprocrypha. But as soon as you look into the blissful pace of the buzz, the familiar gaze discerns, amid the pseudochaos of words and actions, proper proportion and harmony. From the first unsure sip to the torturous absence of the last. From the closed stores in the morning till the closed stores in the evening. From the hungover excitement of rebirth till the sober death. The exposition smoothly moves toward the plot, the plot toward a culmination, and from there to the tragic endspiel, with the inevitable catharsis. Oh, how sharp and precise the clinical image of drunkenness is in its classicist three-pronged form! Oh, how the author knows his theme and how it submits itself to him! And oh, how the soaring alcoholic spirit obligingly fawns over to the stomach’s delights. Yes, the spirit, Venichka’s powerful idea, is until humiliation connected to each sip of the odorous ambrosia. 

Рис. 1 

Look into this obtuse angle and thank God for its obtuseness. For in its climax is bliss, and in its corner beams is the ascent and the abyss. Just as in a winding line, showcased through the cane of Tristram Shandy’s well-respected father, hides the solution to life, so in this angle are hidden the ends and the beginnings of Venedikt Erofeev’s book and life. With the first dose of the warm “Kubanskaya” begins the ascent on the gentle slope of the left corner beam. And with each dose, Venichka’s adulation of the Almighty’s wisdom and eternity grows, and the world’s bright image with sherry and sika seems closer and in reach. But the connection of the two corner beams is too narrow, and the mortal man is not given the right to remain at the top. For it is said in the beautiful world: “If a quiet person drinks 750, he will be happy and exuberant. And if he adds more? Will he be even happier and more exuberant? No, he will again be quiet…he is already drunk, as a pig, that is why he is silent.” 

Yes, the summit is crowded, but there is no world more wonderful than that fleeting one at the Alpine heights. Maybe it is in the brevity of the drunk enlightenment that one can locate the retribution for the original sin of disbelief and doubt. But perhaps no human has the power to endure the enlightened mind’s eternal bliss? How can one not remember Napoleon here, who, for a five-minute ejaculation, promised the whole empire? But the usurper is not given five minutes, and Venichka is given the eternity of the full stop instead of the eternity of the straight line. And day is exchanged for night, hell for heaven, and demons become angels. 

Venya knows the harsh truth of life, but he, the bard and the prophet of the drunken world, is called to preach the highest revelation of the spirit, its holy gifts and ecstasies. Venya, the petrel, awakens and agitates the sober shamelessness of the day’s usual flow.

Venichka’s end will be the end of myth and legend, the final hour of the carnivalesque, the decal of the world: silence. Fly, crashing into the stars. There are no salary advances or breweries - SOBRIETY. 

And Vera Pavlovna sees a dream: “The golden tide shines, the aroma rushes, lights ignite the neighboring fields, there is aluminum everywhere, everyone is happy, all men are handsome, and all women are beautiful who lead a life of labour and pleasure.”⁹ V.P. Erofeev wakes up and writes “From the tales about new peoples,” and what is to be done, he knows himself: one must not succumb to Peter the Great’s and Dmitry Kibalchich’s Jesuit quirks, but search for one’s own, the primordial. Could a machine ever comprehend the high meaning of drunk hiccups? No, V.P. Erofeev puts the task of raising a new man before the task of creating a materialist-technical base. This task is not simple. I remember that one serious person proposed: “In the part of intellectual labor, translations and reverse ones, i.e, first from a foreign language into Russian by writing, and then from the Russian back into the foreign language. And in the part of physical [labor]...daily gymnastics and scrubbing.”¹⁰

Venichka, in truth, does not even need this advice. In his bright world, as soon as the capillaries in hangover’s pale-blue eye fill up with red port wine, man is transformed, he is inspired, and “one can approach him and for a whole half-hour from the distance of a meter and a half spit in his face, and he will not say anything to you,” because he is occupied with the high and the necessary. 

The categories of a harmonious world are full of such harmony. The ginger-haired succubus, quicker than Beatrice, runs down to the Petushki train platform. No imperfections, only the cherished curves, and no one is going to throw a rock at her, “for she is perfect, and there is no limit to perfection,” as there is no judgment for it either. 

An infant wiggles in the bed, next to which Venya drinks Limonnaya. He is the creator and the builder; he is Lobachevsky and Einstein. The infant, who knows how to pronounce the letter “Ю”, is the herald of the godly pour. Continuity and hope shine through this lemoney “Ю” at Venya. This infant is the singular enduring part of the world, in the space of what exists on the journey from Moscow to Petushki, and in time: from the opening until the closing of stores and for all eternity. Only for the infant Venya does not find the pour, because there is nowhere to break through, because there is no need for ecstasy or speaking in tongues (glossolalia), because the infant is already a haven, a shelter, an ark. 

That is why Venya never reaches Petushki; through a demonic circularity, he returns to Moscow. 

One can praise God in different ways. No tribe on the earth praises him the same, just like there is no blasphemy that does not sound like a prayer from the mouth of another. Truth be told, so little is needed to be on the right side of goodness and not on the far side of justice! How simple it is to discern grain from chaff! How seductively easy it is to find the answer to the question: “And is there?..”

Hiccups. In their inscrutable rhythm: “thirteen, fifteen, four, twelve, five, twenty eight,” is there not a sign clearer than the burning bush? Yes, that sign hides there. For: “It [the hiccups], is God’s right hand, which hovers above all of us and beneath which only cretins and passersby shun to place their head. He is incomprehensible to the mind; consequently, He is…Yes. Drink more, snack (zakusyvat’) less.”

Is it really our luck to become like the cretins and passersby? Is it our luck to see blasphemy in revelation and parody in confession? 

Venichka came into the world to wash its moldy eyes clean with the “Teardrop of the Komsomolka”. To inspire the spiritlessness of being with the invented world of drunkenness. 

For a long time, such a world has existed in Russia, and it was created by vodka and books. Sometimes with a little more vodka, sometimes with a little more books. But people live in the nonexistent as easily as they live in a communal apartment: they got used to it, settled, and what even is there to do in the existent? Work, swim, fight? It is no accident that, for a long time, a thought has been maturing: the reality of art is more real than the reality of life. In contrast, the distance from the fictional world of art to the invented world of the drunk is much shorter than the distance between what is great and what is funny.

Venichka, the prophet of the world with perpetually open stores, leans on the activists of Sturm und Drang and The Five¹¹, just like Christ leaned on John the Baptist. Bunin drank, “whereas Kuprin and Maksim Gorky - those did not wake up at all.” The same goes for Schiller, Gogol, Pushkin, and Herzen. 

In Venichka’s new world, all writers drink, and all who drink are writers. Otherwise, where does grandpa Mitrich have the talent and pity to talk about love in such a way as he spoke about the knight Lohengrin: “...He’ll come to his kingdom, lie down on the floor…and you cannot even approach him, he is completely silent. And if you say a word against them, he’ll turn his head to the corner and start crying…he stands and cries…and pees on the floor like a baby…”

The fantastical (real) world of “Petushki” has its own history and knows its own heroes.  Here, the excellent theoretician Vadim Tikhonov, whose theses are nailed to everyone’s heart, walks out of the Jasmine bushes. An image glimmers, a prototype of that kingdom of aluminum harmony, where there are no Hellenes or Jews, but a unity of udders and sherry - the actualized dream of the gourmand and the humanist. Then, having marched out “in two columns, with standards in their hands...one column on Eliseikovo, the other on Tartino,” comrades President Erofeev and Chancellor Tikhonov carried powerful ideas on the restructuring of the universe. Their thoughts were pure, and their intentions noble: to oblige Auntie Shura in Polomy to open the store at six in the morning, to declare war on Norway, to force Auntie Masha in Andreevskoye to open the store at five thirty, to return to Jozef Tsyrankievich the Polish corridor, “and obliterate some letter, only it needs to be thought out which one.”

And only having ensured themselves that humanity does not desire an earthly heaven, Venya washed off his hands, finished the leftovers of Rossiyskaia, and left his military-political fame, having spat on Austerlitz’s low sun. He went from his Tulon to the heaven of Petushki, where he will be understood and accepted. 

A trembling kinship of souls, compassion appeared for the first time somewhere between Yesino and Fryazevo. Having disdained the baseness of everyday problems, the Decembrist Mitrich and the woman of a difficult fate spoke only of the sophisticated and the wonderful. There was nothing shallow and insignificant in their conversation. Like the hands of titular masons transform a pathetic trowel, so Lohengrin’s boils shine with a ruby light while proclaiming the high tragedy of unrequited love. Love, art, the fate of the people: only these objects are worthy of a person who carries two bottles of Kubanskaya into tabernacles of Petushki. In this conversation, tense to the point of ringing, intellectual, and stratospherically emotional, Nikolai Gogol drinks vodka from a pink glass, Modest Musorgsky lies in a ditch drunk, and one question painfully worries the mind: “Where is the Russian person more valued, on this or the other side of the Pyrenees?”

Serving the muse does not tolerate bustle. 

Venichka’s story begins with a nightmare. As he steps off the 40th step and walks out of the building into a city enlightened by the morning’s gentle light, ready to boil and grow in its might. Venya walks out holding his suitcase close to his heart and suddenly sees a faggot sweeping the sidewalk. With this sight, horror descends as a black kite; he realizes it is early. “From the sixth hour the darkness spread across the world till the ninth.” (Matt. 27:45) Yes, “Oh, the most powerless and embarrassing time in the life of my people - the time between the sunrise and the opening of the stores!”

Like everyone, Venya has to go to the Kremlin. From the story’s first line, he has to get to the Kremlin. In a sickly-perverse, masochistic manner, he needs to go there where the steel is tempered, where the cavaliers of the golden star are married to cookmaids, where the earth curves most sharply, where the planet’s pulse beats. And until the final page, when “off the last step they jumped out to choke with five or six hands at once.” - until the final page, the ruby stars shine in the darkness, and the Marshall, who is famous across the whole country, rides out on his horse. But there is something that cares for Venya from the first to the last page, time after time bringing him out to Kursky railway station and carrying him away to Petushki. The stations close to his heart: Serp i Molot, Karacharovo, Nazaryevo glimmer outside, but there is no strength to swirl any longer; the bell suddenly falls silent. 

“You wanted to…from us…? You wanted to run away from us? - one of them hissed.” And in his question, there is less anger than a hysterical curiosity: “And he grabbed me by the hair and with all his might smashed me on the Kremlin wall.” On the wall of the ancient Kremlin, to which Venya finally arrived. 

And maybe in vain he ran from Kremlin’s hell to Petushki’s heaven, in vain he strained toward perfection: to the ginger-haired succubus with the braid from the neck till the butt, to the infant who knows how to pronounce the letter “Ю”, to the restaurants where, along with udders, sherry is brought meekly and without delay. The circle has shut, and the angels made fun of Venya. Are they even angels? Maybe it is demons who rush swarm after swarm in the limitless height, with a pitiful squeal and a howl that strains the heart. It is said after all: “with a squeal and a howl”, whereas Venya laughs!

There is no hell, there is no heaven, there is only what is in front of us, and there is nothing more fearful than this, and there is no salvation. At the beginning of the day-life-book it was said to the weak and the lost: “Talifa Kumi”, and so he got up and went, first wobbling from side to side from the cold and sadness, then growing savage and lightening up. And so the fortified rosé for a ruble and thirty-seven kopeks became his blood, and Kursky railway station, the gentle giant, opened the path to the Champs-Élysées. And in the end of the day-life-book, when he, hunched over on the top stairwell listened to the miserable creaking of doors they all came together: “Louis Aragon with Elsa Triole, the inspector Semenych in his underwear, Mitrich covered in his snot, the decembrist in his tweed overcoat, the executioners from the station restaurant, his comrades in the revolutionary coup…From this, from that side, from hell to heaven. Whereas THOSE rose, holding shoes in their hands, and nobody prevented them, only the angels, squealing a bit, guffawed. And in this wild mishmash of the day-life-book, he called out: “Or, or, lama savahfani!” But: “They pierced and awl into the throat…I did not know that there exists in the world such a pain, and so I hunched over from the torture, a thick red letter “Ю” sprawled over my eyes, and shuddered. And since then, I have not regained consciousness and never will.”

Because there is no hell, there is no heaven, there is only what is in front of us, and there is nothing more terrifying than that, and there is no salvation from it. 

¹ In the original publication of this article in Ekho, Pushkin’s poem is printed incorrectly. The correct translation would read:“Let’s raise the glasses, let’s squish them together! All hail the muses, all hail reason!”. This article sometimes gets reprinted with the correct original, sometimes with the incorrect one. Vail and Genis do not clarify whether they altered Pushkin’s original text or not, but it could very well be aesthetic play on their part.

A.S. Pushkin, Polnoye Sobraniye Sochineniy v 10 tomakh, AN USSR, Moscow, 1957, vol. 2, p. 269.

² F. Rabelais, Gargantua i Pantagruel, Moscow, 1956, p. 8.

³Here, Vail and Genis refer to the early part of Erofeev’s narrative, where at the restaurant at Kursky railway station, Venichka gets told that the restaurant has udder (to eat), but no sherry: “Interesting, they have udders, but no sherry!”

⁴ M.Y. Lermontov, Sobraniye Sochineniy v 4 tomakh, Moscow, 1975, vol. 1, p. 25.

⁵Abram Terz, Golos iz Khora, London, 1973, p. 18. 

⁶Here, Vail and Genis reference Radischev, whose first name and patronymic is Alexander Nikolayevich. 

⁷O.V. Orlov, V. I. Fyodorov, Russkaia Literatura, Moscow, 1972, p. 248. 

⁸Aristophan. Mir, Antichnaya Drama, BVL, Moscow, 1970, p. 470.

⁹N.G. Chernyshevsky, Sobraniye Sochineniy v 5 tomakh, Moscow, 1974, vol. 1, p. 364-365, 375, 383. 

¹⁰V.I. Lenin, Pis’ma k rodnym, 1884-1919, Moscow, 1934, p. 267-268. 

¹¹“The Five”, in Russian “Могучая Кучка”, was a 19th-century movement of Russian musical composers. 

(Translated by Nikolay Smirnov)