Preface: this Russian-language book has three translations, which (in order of both publication and quality) are Moscow to the End of the Line, Moscow Circles, and Moscow Stations. Its title in the original Russian is “Moscow-Petushki”. Being a big-brain genius, I’ve read all three (except I didn’t finish the first one because it sucked), and the original Russian text; I’ll be referring to the work as “Moscow-Petushki” (that’s how it is generally referred to in literary journals), and will be using Moscow Stations translated by Stephen Murline for quoted text throughout.
I. IF YOU WANT TO GO LEFT, GO LEFT; IF YOU WANT TO GO RIGHT, GO RIGHT
“I, who have consumed so much that I’ve lost track of how much, and in what order – I’m the soberest man in the world.”
Moscow-Petushki is a 1970 Soviet novel, a cult-classic (a phrase meaning “disliked by some, unknown by most, beloved by enough”) about a man who gets drunk on a train. Ostensibly it’s a absurdist tragic-funny text, warmly relatable to those who handled life’s troubles with the bottle — but it’s also a desperate attempt to maintain humanity in a nightmarish world; to construct a mental shelter in the face of an totalitarian storm using the debris of one’s culture, intellectualism, and subjectivity; and to use this subjectivity communicate with you and I across time and space (yes, your fourth grade teacher was right, books are magic). It’s as much a funny-sad book about the Soviet Union as a genuinely mystical text. It’s also got recipes of cocktails you can make with eau-de-cologne and shoe polish!
And it’s written by this man, Venedikt Yerofevev. A straight-A student expelled from one university for not showing up, and from another for reading the bible, he worked as a cable-layer, a drunk-tank warden, and drank a lot. His mother abandoned him as a kid; his father spent 16 years in the gulags. It’s speculated Yerofevev’s alcoholism was a way to avoid the notice of the KGB.
Let’s walk through the start together; then we’ll stroke our chins and discuss. It begins:
Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. They all go on about it, but I’ve never seen it. The number of times (thousands) I’ve been drunk or hung over, traipsing round Moscow, north–south, east–west, end to end, straight through or any old way – and I’ve never once seen the Kremlin.
For instance, yesterday – yesterday I didn’t see it again, though I was buzzing round that area the whole evening and it’s not as if I was particularly drunk. I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody’s so far dreamed up anything better.
Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that – on Kalyaev Street – another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e., it refreshes your parts but it weakens your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts went all to hell. But I do agree it’s dehumanizing, so that’s why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some Albe-de-dessert straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalyaev Street.
Of course, you’re saying: come on, Venya, get on with it – what did you have next?
Our protagonist Venya (also referred to as Venechka — these are diminutives of Venedikt, the name of the author; in Russian they have a child-like ring) spends a lot of time drunk, and relishes telling us about it. Venya, who has never seen the Kremlin (a hard-to-believe fact for a Muscovite) is wandering the Moscow streets on a fine morning with a horrific hungover, and it’s 1970, the Brezhnev years, a time of great economic and cultural Soviet stagnation. Kruschev’s thaw is over; things didn’t work out. Venya’s life didn’t work out, either. He’ll tell us more on that later. Right now he’s telling us how he, last night, again tried to see the Kremlin. He went to Kursk Station, where he was “supposed to be going”, but then made for the city centre to see the Kremlin “just this once”. Google Maps tells the modern reader this is a 51-minute walk. Venya, alas, didn’t make it and ended up falling asleep in a building lobby, “clutching his suitcase to his little heart”. And in the morning…
[…] when I came out this morning into the fresh air it was already dawn. And if you’ve ever fetched up unconscious in some entry, and emerged from it at dawn, well, you’ll know a heavy heart I bore down the forty steps of that godforsaken place, and out onto the street.
Still, what the hell, I said, it doesn’t matter. Look, there’s a chemist’s, you see? And over there – there’s some old bugger in a brown jacket scraping the pavement. So, relax. Everything’s fine. If you want to go left, Venya, go left, I’m not forcing you. If you want to go right, then go right.
In the horrible hungover light of dawn, having failed again to see the Kremlin last night, he goes to Kursk Station. It’s in central Moscow, and it’s a big station, so naturally, it’s full of people.
You think I want all these people? I mean, even Our Redeemer said – and to his own mother, mind: ‘What art thou to me?’ So what’s this nasty seething mass got to do with me, indeed?
I’d better find a pillar to lean against, and shut my eyes tight, so I won’t feel so sick …
Someone sang out from on high then, so softly, and oh, so sweetly: ‘That’s right, Venya pet, just shut your eyes tight, and you won’t feel so sick …’
Oh, I know that voice! It’s them again! The angels of the Lord!
‘Is it you?’
‘Well, of course it’s us!’ they sang, and again so sweetly. ‘
And do you know something, angels?’ I said, just as softly.
‘What?’ said the angels.
‘I feel terrible,’ I said.
‘That’s right, we know you do,’ sang the angels.
‘But you just have a bit of a walk, you’ll feel better, and it’ll be opening time in half an hour. Of course, there’ll be no vodka till nine, but they’ll give you a spot of red first thing …’
‘Red wine?’
‘Red wine,’ chorused the angels of the Lord again.
‘Nicely chilled?’
‘Of course chilled …’
This is the most sensible thing the text has told us so far. Here is an alcoholic: tender, confused, and about to board a train. How could he survive a morning like this without angels? It’s interesting to watch for religious references throughout the book, and to consider how much lonelier and harder it would be, if Venya (like most Soviet men and women) were deprived of them.
Venyae can’t be completely lonely, though, because (he tells us) he’s carrying presents. And he has someone to give them to, at the very end of a train line, a stop named Petushki. But Venya is in no state to great state to elaborate, until he gets a drink. He fails to get the angel-promised red wine, but (after unspeakable trouble — literally, he refused to speak of it) procures alchohol from an off-licence. After some societal commentary —
I tell you, if the whole world, and everybody in it, was as weak and frightened as I am now, and as unsure of everything – unsure of themselves, their place in the scheme of things – it’d be a far better place….
— our hero confesses to us he is unemployed. A sensitive soul, frequently misunderstood, Venya was recently fired from his job as the bridge leader of cable-layer. The job was pretty good: his subordinates and him played cards and drank all day, and did no work; he taught themIsrale-Palestine politics, read them a Pushkin work that motivated them to drink cologne (economically effective, good at blotting out the world). But Venya was not content to rest, and convinced himself he had higher responsibilities for the four men under his employ.
….you’re a total dimwit, Venya, a complete numskull: I mean, didn’t you read in some philosopher or other, that the good Lord only concerns Himself with the fate of princes, confident that He can leave the fate of the people in their hands? And here you are a brigade leader, yet, and as it might be, a ‘little prince’. Right then, where the hell’s your concern for the fate of your people? Have you looked into the souls of these parasites, into their benighted souls? Eh? The dialectic of the heart of these four shitheads – are you familiar with it?
This dialectic took the form of Venya deciding to construct graphs of his employees alcohol consumption during work hours.
Shall I tell you what they were like? There’s really nothing to it: on a sheet of vellum, in Indian ink, you draw two axes: one horizontal, the other vertical. On the horizontal, you set out all the working days for the past month; on the vertical, the quantity of booze consumed at work, estimated in grammes of pure alcohol. Boozing after work is, of course, more or less a constant and can offer nothing of interest to the serious researcher.
Here, for instance, is the chart of one Victor Totoshkin, Komsomol member: enjoy …
And this is Alexei Blindyaev, Communist Party member since 1936, and shagged-out old creep:
And behold – your humble servant, ex-brigade leader of the OTC cable layers, and author of the poem [Moscow-Petushki]
Interesting lines, n’est-ce pas? […] Anyway, to the seeker after truth (like myself, for example), those lines let every cat out of every bag about man and the human heart: about his virtues, from the sexual to the practical, and his failings, from the practical to the sexual; about his degree of mental equilibrium, his aptitude for treachery, and all the secrets of his subconscious, if indeed he’s got any.
This was fine and well, until shagged-out old creep Alexei Blindyaev accidentally sent them off to the head office, in place of the ‘Socialist pledges’ that they sent monthly. I assume the pledges were a real thing, though I’ve no idea, and am too lazy to ask my mum. Venya’s pledges handily included to eliminate industrious injuries, and to ensure every sixth worker takes a course at a higher education institute: excellent pledges for a team of five men who did no work.
This accident, “whether from stupidity or drink” , put to end Venya’s burgeoning month-long career.
My lucky star, which had flared up for four weeks, passed out of sight. My Crucifixion took place exactly thirty days after my Ascension. One month, that was all, between my Toulon and my St Helena. In short, they gave me the bullet, and replaced me with Alexei Blindyaev, decrepit old git and Communist Party member since 1936.
[…]
And I solemnly swear to you now, that to the end of my days I shall embark upon nothing which might bring about a repetition of my unhappy experience of life at the top. I shall remain at the bottom, and from down there spit on your whole social ladder. Yes. One spit for each rung. To climb up it, you’ve got to be a heathenish, thick-skinned bastard, a pervert, forged out of pure steel from head to foot. Which I’m not.
A moral case for a life of falling asleep drunk in building lobbies, clutching to one’s heart a suitcase full of booze! I’m not sure how much you believe Venya, if you think it’s cope or moral strength. I buy it because I buy the dichotomy: you brave the rickety rungs of the Soviet social ladder (the “top” of which is to be a cable-laying brigade leader), or languish in the gutter. An environment where one can get ahead with some hard work and smarts is, in Breznevian USSR, for most a distant inaccessible dream.
Our unemployed virtuous Venya is off to a place called Petushki, where his “happiness and salvation lies”.
Petushki is where the birds are never silent, day or night, where the jasmine never fails, winter or summer. Original sin – presuming there ever was one – doesn’t burden anybody there.
Petushki, a Moscow satellite town, is likely to have featured (like most other Moscow suburbs) grey Soviet apartment blocks, weeds pushing through cracks in asphalt roads, cigarette butts in the gutter, and, above, a lead-coloured sky. It’d be about a couple of hours' ride from the center. In Petushki, awaits Venya’s girlfriend —
that girl of mine, with the white eyes, white turning to whitish, that best-loved bitch of the lot, that flaxen-haired she-devil.
— and his son,
the chubbiest and best-behaved infant of them all.
Venya climbs aboard the train, excited to see them.
II. GRACEFUL AND NECESSARY SELF-DESTRUCTION
I’d call Moscow-Petushki “loser-fiction” (Eduard Limonov’s messed-up ‘83 novel Diary of a Loser, a Russian emigre’s fantasies of violence, homoeroticism, and resentment, is the guiding star of the constellation). While Venya is undoubtedly a loser, his Brezhnev-era context questions how responsible he is for his unenviable state. Being a loser in a paper office in Slough in 2001 is different from being a loser on a rattling commuter train in 1970s Moscow. Limonov talked of always remaining loyal to the “glorious tribe of losers”, and while I’d hesitantly put Venechka amongst storytelling’s loser-tribe, I posit losers exist at both tips of a horseshoe-like spectrum, with a loser like the American boss from the Office on one tip — sorry I don’t remember is name — and Venya on another (the middle of the shoe is “not losers”). This is defined by how debased their environment is. Here’s a highly scientific diagram.
I refer to the Office, because Moscow-Peutski brings to mind Ventakesh Rao’s RIbbanfarm post about cringe and shadow [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2021/10/05/storytelling-cringe-and-the-banality-of-shadows/]. I mean, Venya is a sad failure, with a girlfriend and son, spending his attention on drink and self-pity. Something cringe-adjacent is happening, and I’ll explain what.
Rao writes: “… what truly makes cringe is not that you’re watching a train wreck unfold, but that the train wreck is meaningless. It is sound and fury signifying nothing. There is no grand truth, either personal or universal, being tragically unveiled by cringe. Nobody learns anything because there’s nothing much to learn, even though there is plenty to lose. Cringe is the spectacle of graceless and unnecessary self-destruction that serves no lofty, ennobling purpose. It’s just stuff reasonable people would figure out how to avoid.”
I’m not sure if Venya’s life isn’t banal, but he does have dignity (spitting on the social rung), cunning and creativity (those graphs!) and magnanimity (care for employees). A grand truth is being unveiled already by Venya’s sufferings; if pressed, I’d claim it was the same truth most novels silently utter: the power structures in the world are all wrong (and then sheepishly remember Venya slept in an apartment lobby, talked to non-existent angels, and pissed away his job when he had a little kid).
Further in the article, Rao talks about cringe heorines, posing that a cringe heroine’s failure integrate into her social environment and inability to present “grace, composure, patience” is, in modern cringe mode, less a failure of character, and more a failure of society to make coherent demands of those who want to solve for dignity. In an unhealthy society, Rao says, the cringe character’s failing reflects poorly on society more than the character.
Moscow-Petushki inverts the cringe paradigm: in this Brezhnev-era USSR world, the cringe character is society. The USSR is a shadow-country! Little is available for a reasonably rational person: you cannot create except in the depths of alcoholic imagination, you cannot maintain dignity except for waking up in an apartment lobby with a suitcase pressed to your little heart. Thus the society’s failing reflects brilliantly on Venya; what we would consider idiocy in — pick your favorite country, social-democratic Norway, libertarian USA, Catholic TheoState, whatever — in our shadow-country is genius.
I took everything out of my little suitcase, and gave it the once-over, from the sandwiches to the fortified rosé at a rouble 37. I ran my fingers over it, and suddenly felt depressed and jaded. Oh, Lord, you see before You everything I possess … But is this what I need? Is this what my soul hungers for? No, this is what people have given me instead. And if they’d given me what my soul hungers for, would I really have needed this? You see, Lord? Have a look – fortified rosé at a rouble 37 …
III. A SOUR MASH OF SORROW AND FEAR
Aboard the train, Venya tells us:
…as far back as I can remember, I’ve done nothing but fake spiritual health, every second of the day, and that’s what I expend all my powers on (not a scrap remaining), mental, physical, what have you. That’s why I’m boring. Everything you talk about, all your day-to-day concerns, well, they just pass me by, I couldn’t care less. Whereas the things that really concern me, I never say a word about, not to anyone.
I remember a while back people would be holding forth on some topic or other and I’d say, ‘What d’you want to bother with that crap for?’ ‘What crap? If this is crap, kindly tell us what isn’t.’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, I really don’t know. But it does exist!’
He tells us he’s been within shouting distance of “the stuff that isn’t crap”. It feels, he says, like a “sour marsh of sorrow and fear”. I’m going to take Venya seriously, and I have two ways of interpreting him. One is simply Venya longs for a steady happy safe life, the one most of us have and take for granted.
The other interpretation calls to mind festival scene burnouts who chase eternal truth on 300ug of LSD on dusty long-weekend, like asymptotes always approaching yet never reaching The Final Understanding. Having once owned an Om tapestry, I confidently claim those who never gave up their quarry go loopy and become degraded, reminiscent of Venya himself. I do wonder about those truth-seekers who kicked the habit, traded Rainbow Serpent wristbands for a steady pay-check and morning jogs. Do they become degraded in a spiritual way, by turning their back on Truth; do they give up something vital? Personally I think doing mushrooms in a van isn’t any bringing you closer to any truth that doing your taxes in Excel — and yet Venya drunk on the train is closer to the truth than some shagged-out Komsomol creep climbing the cable-layer ladder.
He’s approaching not just truth, but Petushki. Every Friday Venya’s girlfriend waits for him there, on the train platform, as she will wait for him again today. Venya’s excited to deliver to her the presents in his suitcase: a handful of nuts, meant as a reward for his son for drawing the letter U so well. He draws it marvellously, though he knows no other letters.
The last time Venya saw his kid, it went like this.
…the last time I turned up they told me he was asleep. They told me he was sick, he was in bed with a fever. I sat by his cot, drinking lemon vodka, and they left me alone with him. He really did have a fever, even the dimple in his cheek was feverish – that was weird, that something so insignificant could have a fever […] Anyway, I’d had three glasses of lemon vodka by the time he woke up and looked at me, and at the fourth glass in my hand. We had a long chat then, and I said: ‘Hey, listen, kiddo – don’t die, eh? Just think (after all, you can draw letters, that means you can think) it’d be really stupid to die, knowing only the letter U and nothing else. You surely understand that, that it’s stupid.’
‘I understand, Father.’ .
[…]
‘When I haven’t got you, kiddo, I’m all on my own. You understand that? You were running around in the woods this summer, weren’t you. You’ll probably remember what pine trees look like. Well, that’s me, I’m like a pine tree. They’re so tall, really tall, and so lonely – really, really lonely, same as me. And all they do is look up at the sky, same as me, but as for what’s under their feet, they don’t see that, and they don’t want to see it. They’re so green, and they’ll be green forever, until they fall down. And that’s like me – I’ll be green forever, till I fall down …
‘Green,’ said my little boy.
If you’re tallying up Venya’s failures of responsibilities and wondering if having a kid out of wedlock is taboo in the Soviet Union, the answer is a firm “yes”.
#
Pacing anxiously along the carriage, excited to get to Petushki, Venya shares with us his cocktail recipes. This is a famous part of the novel: devoted fans know well the Caanan Balsam:
“…you’d better write down the recipe for Canaan Balsam. You’ve only got one life, and if you want to see it out, you don’t make mistakes with recipes:
methylated spirits 100 g
milk stout 200 g
clear varnish 100 g
The Spirit of the Geneva:
White Lilac toilet water 50 g
sock deodorizer 50 g
Zhiguli beer 200 g
spirit varnish 150 g
The teaks of the Komsomolka:
Lavender water 15 g
Verbena 15 g
Forest Water eau-de-Cologne 30 g
nail varnish 2 g
mouthwash 150 g
lemonade 150 g
During preparation, the mixture should be stirred for twenty minutes with a sprig of honeysuckle. Honestly, when I see these people using bindweed instead of honeysuckle, I could split my sides laughing, I really could.
And, of course, the Dog’s Giblets:
What’s the most beautiful thing in life? The struggle to free all mankind. But here’s something even more beautiful – write it down:
Zhiguli beer 100 g
Sadko the Wealthy Guest shampoo 30 g
anti-dandruff solution 70 g
superglue 12 g
brake fluid 35 g
insecticide 20 g
Let it marinade for a week with some cigar tobacco, then serve.
Venya is teaching us such beautiful cocktail recipes, and we’re not sure if his son is still sick (or ever was), and he hasn’t talked about his girlfriend much, either. If you’ve shoved your nose into the corners of the internet where the acronym TLP means something, you might be tempted to ask: is Venya a narcissist? Recall that the Laschian definition is someone trying to fill an unfillable void inside themselves; driven by self-hatred they escape into a grandiose conception of reality (according to author of The Culture of Narcissism Christopher Lasch, this is most people in the modern world, and according to his spiritual disciple TLP, it’s you).
Well, lucky us, because the next part of the book demonstrates the social Venya. Our hero meets his fellow passengers, drunks on their own unhappy journeys.
Venya befriends a “grandfather” and “grandson” in his carriage (he notices they stole his vodka, but the offense is quickly forgiven). Soon they are joined by two others, passengers dubbed “Black Moustache” and “Decemberist”. The new friends drink and talk of the fate of the nation. It’s a soup of literary references and garbage-ideas vomited from every mouth, but in the mix are nuggets of undigested carrots with undeniable nutritional value. Like the theory provided by passenger “Black Moustache”, which claims all great Russians were heavy drinkers.
…Kuprin and Maxim Gorky were hardly ever sober [..] You know what Chekhov’s last words were? “Ich sterbe,” he said, “I’m dying”. Then he said, “Give me some champagne.” And then, and only then, did he die.”
…And Schiller drank a glass of champagne for each act he wrote, and Gogol drank vodka out of a champagne glass, and Mussogorsky was found drunk in a ditch by Rimsky-Korsakoff and forced to write his immortal opera Khovanschina. All of Russia’s honest men were alcoholics, Black Moustache claims, because they couldn’t relieve the people’s suffering. The Russian peasant drank because nothing else was available (he can’t buy books, because there’s no Gogol or Belinsky in the market, only vodka – yes, there’s plenty of vodka, any sort you like, draught or bottled). As for the intellectuals:
All Russia’s honest men drank like fish, yes. And why did they drink? They drank out of sheer desperation. They drank because they were honest! Because they weren’t able to relieve the people’s suffering […] every thinking person in Russia now drinks without coming up for air, agonizing about the peasants. And that’s how it is still, right up to our own times!
I’m not certain that’s why Venya drinks, but I’m not certain it’s not. Perhaps there’s truth to that, although not everyone buys the theory.
‘Stop!’ the Decembrist broke in. ‘Surely it’s possible not to drink? Just to take yourself in hand, and not drink. I mean, what about Goethe? He didn’t drink at all.’
‘Didn’t drink? Not a drop?’ Black Moustache half stood up in amazement and put his beret back on. ‘No, it can’t be done.’
‘It can, you know. The man was able to take himself in hand, and he never touched the stuff.’
‘D’you mean Johann von Goethe? Privy Councillor Goethe?’
‘The very same. He never touched it. Not a drop.’
‘That’s weird. So what if Schiller offered him a glass of champagne, say?’
‘Not even then. He’d get a grip of himself and he’d say, “No, thanks, old boy, never touch it.”’
Black Moustache visibly slumped, crestfallen. His entire theory, his whole elegant system, constructed out of impassioned and brilliantly stretched points, had been publicly demolished.
And — crutially — Venya sticks up for Black Moustache.
“So you reckon Privy Councillor Goethe never touched a drop?’ I turned to the Decembrist. ‘Well, do you know why? D’you know what stopped him drinking? All the best minds of the day drink like fish and he doesn’t? Eh? [….] “you think he doesn’t fancy a drink? Of course he does. But he doesn’t want to make an arse of himself, so he gets all his characters to do his drinking for him!”
This is a colossal display of magnanimity. Amidst Black Moustache’s complete nonsense that is not quite nonsense, and yet that Venya clearly does not buy, Venya sticks up for his fellow passenger. He does not have to! He could easily let the subject drop, but his soggy soul finds the energy to rescue Black Moustache’s theory.
And, later, when the “Grandfather” tries to tell a story about a friend of his, a chairman unlucky in love who used to “cry and piss on the floor”, but is unable to finish it — bursting into tears — Venya reacts like so:
“…I sat there and felt for [him], I understood his tears. He was just so sorry for everything and everybody: for the chairman, for the lousy nickname they’d given him, for the wall he’d pissed on, for the boat, and the blackheads – he was sorry for everything. First love, or final pity, what’s the odds? When Christ was dying on the Cross, he commanded us to have pity, he certainly didn’t command us to mock. Pity, and love for the world, are one and the same thing. Love for every clod of earth, and every womb. And pity for the fruit of every womb.
‘Hey, come on, old man,’ I said. ‘I’ll stand you a drink, you’ve earned it! That was a terrific love story!”
We’re all on the wagon of life together; Venya knows it. In his warm heart he understands we must treat one another like brothers and sisters. Venya might be escaping from reality, but into nothing especially grandiose, and his own conception of himself seems measured; he is driven by self-pity and the pity of “the fruit of every womb”, not self-hatred or love. Those around him are not instruments of gratification but fellow sufferers. His own suffering is central, let’s grant that; he does tell his possibly-sick son he’s a lonely tree. And yet, the brotherhood of man is alive in Venya.
IV. DRINKING IN A WORLD WHERE FACTS DON’T MATTER
Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist hated by swathes of the internet, wrote a book called Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World where Facts Don’t Matter in which he brags about predicting Donald Trump’s election, and explains how he thinks he did it. In the book Adams talks about a concept called “mental filter”. People experience, Scott says, not unmediated reality but a sea of mental constructs, coloured by biases, faults, perceptions, the incomplete information we receive, and so on — that is, our mental filter. Uncontroversial so far, but Adams goes on to claim the way to evaluate if one’s mental filter is “any good” (since we don’t need to know the True Nature of Reality to live happy lives) is to ask: 1. does it make me happy and 2. is it any good at predicting the future?
Adams provides some crude examples: his childhood “Christian kid” mental filter, bad because it didn’t predict the future (prayer didn’t work); his edgy teenage atheist phase had an insufferable atheist filter, better with predictions, but made him miserable. He settles on his current filter, which he calls the “wet robot” filter. This filter states humans are biological machines subject to analogous issues and biases that any machine is subject to. In other words, his mental filter is, he claims, “humans have mental filters”.
This has the sophistication of a drunk middle-aged man with shit-stained chinos when compared to more thought-out points of view like, critical rationalism’s “approaching the truth like an asymptote”, David Bentley Hart’s theism, or, even the narcissist-modernity view of the world trumpeted by podcasters who haven’t read anything other than that one Lasch book. The crux of the problem, the shit staining the chinos, is the boxing of oneself in with a simplistic arbitrary worldview, the fitness of which is evaluated on happiness and predictive ability, and is justified as “well, everyone has an arbitrary worldview, so I might as well built mine”.
Isn’t Venya, consciously or unconsciously, constructing himself a such worldview; isn’t he taking Scott Adams advice? Kind of, but with one critical opposite.
I assume (with little evidence) that Scott Adams, like a lot of American bloggers, lives a largely cerebral, virtual life. Contact with material reality is diminished — contact with a digital reality (a recent construct made of biases and noisy human bickering, mediated by social and traditional media) the norm. Adams can say whatever he wants about Trump’s campaign, he’s not seriously affected, he’s commenting on spectacle with a spectacle of his own, taking part in a grandiose theater, a game of emotions played on his screens. He dwells in a collective hallucination, and in Win Bigly, his self-aggrandizing tale of navigating it skews a lot closer to Laschian narcissism than Venya’s story.
Venya’s world, meanwhile, is real, brutal, and completely controlled. His system affords him no freedom. Scott Adams’s screeds don’t matter overmuch except as what other people, whose opinions also don’t matter overmuch, think of him. For Venya, stating the opinion thing to the wrong person can mean imprisonment or death, and having an ill-fitting world-view can mean despair or suicide. Hell — consider this story, this very novel, and ponder on what it might have cost the author.
So, yes, both construct their own reality. Adams, spectrally drifting and unmoored in meaningless digitalism, constructs a spectacle-reality in which to be a successful blogger. Venya, trapped in crushing Breznevian misery, builds a booze-world as a bolthole from his pain, in which he can be human (and dodge responsibilities to his girlfriend and son). It’s a shame that his bolthole is filling up with vodka, and he’s going to drown.
A classic Moscow-Petushki book cover. Shades of Wally from Dilbert?
V. A FREELY ACCELERATING LOGOS
Back on the carriage the conversation devolves. Everyone is even drunker than before, as expected when the drinking is ceaseless, and Venya descends into something that, to be charitable we’ll call inspirational story-telling (to be accurate, we’d have to call it lying). He explains to his sojourners that not only has he been to America (a place of “playthings of capitalist ideology, puppets in the hands of the arms barons”), he’s even gallivanted around Europe.
“…I was in Italy, and they don’t pay Russians a blind bit of notice there. All they do is sing and paint. I mean, one Italian’ll be standing singing, and another’ll be sitting beside him, painting the one that’s singing. And a bit further off there’ll be a third Italian, singing about the one that’s painting. It’d make you weep, and they don’t understand our sorrow.”
Neither can we, readers of rationalist blogs, understand this sorrow of his. We can only read on, as Venya walked around the Maginot line; kept meaning to visit Luigi Longo (secretary of Italian communist party; I assume a topical witty reference in the ’70’s but I had to look it up), and even tried to study at the Sorbonne.
It’s striking to me, here, that Venya is obviously lying. He hasn’t (I naively think) lied before; at least these are believable, modest, lies.
“….I arrive at the Sorbonne and I tell them: “I want to study for a baccalaureat.” And they say: “If you want to study for a baccalaureat, you need some sort of inherent phenomenon. What’ve you got in the way of an inherent phenomenon?” Well, really, what could I say? “How can I have any sort of inherent phenomenon? I’m an orphan, for God’s sake.” “What, from Siberia?” they ask. “Yes, Siberia,” I say. “Oh well, if you’re from Siberia, there must be some sort of inherent distinction about your psyche. So, what is it?” Well, I had a think. I mean, this isn’t Khrapunovo, this is the Sorbonne, I’ve got to say something really clever. Anyway, after a bit of thought, I said: “Okay – as an inherent phenomenon, I am a freely accelerating Logos.” But while I was thinking up something smart, the Director of the Sorbonne had been creeping up behind me, and he suddenly wallops me on the back of the neck. “You’re an idiot,” he says. “You aren’t any kind of Logos! Get out, Yerofeev!” he shouts. “Go on, get the hell out of our glorious Sorbonne!”
His companions start snoring.
Venya is now publicly constructing another reality, playing with possibility like plasticine, which is another way of saying he’s making shit up. This is a shift, and we should wonder if we glimpse the self-grandiosity of Laschian narcissism. Perhaps he’s not a narcissist yet, but one day the Sorbonne will take him, and suddenly there’s a yawning void inside his heart he’ll trying to fill. It’s interesting to consider what a contemporary Western Venya would be like; I’ve no doubt he’d be a full-on narcissist and a total shithead.
Our actual Venya’s constructed reality, mind you, is so powerless that his sojourners are asleep.
#
Things get bad now. Did you expect them to? Things sour; they begin to — slowly, but unstoppably — go awry. At the next station, after an encounter with a ticket inspector who, in lieu of collecting monetary fines for those without tickets, simply demands a single ml of vodka per kilometer traveled, poor Venya is caught in the rush of disembarking crowd, spins around “like a turd in an ice hole”, and collapses on the train bench, disoriented.
There, the troubles really begin.
VI. DURCH LEIDEN - LICHT
“My, my,’ cried the Decembrist. ‘Isn’t it nice we’re all so cultured! We’re just like characters out of Turgenev, all sitting around arguing about love.”
Venya’s an intellectual guy. He’s had an education, and at least some of it must’ve been autodidactic because few will teach you the Bible in the USSR. I don’t think the reference-soup that tumbles from his, and his companion’s, mouths, like trash from an upturned bin, exists to show us just how fallen Venechka is,to highlight some wasted potential. What we, in fact, see is the debris of a failed system, that’s necessarily a part of Venya. Venya is perfectly sane and reasonable; his actions are both a response to his living conditions, and living living conditions, living through him.
Venya and friends are ruled by a stagnant dysfunctional system making strong objective false claims on the telos of society — “building communism”, socialist pledges — while at the same time ostensibly valuing knowledge, and even providing (in many ways) an okay education. It’s not that you won’t stumble out of highschool ignorant of mathematics and Turgenev: it’s that the society you stumble into has little use for it, unless you are lucky or well-connected enough to latch onto the correct social ladder. It’s not even that the system’s degraded; the system is tragic. What good is Kant and the New Testament if you’re a laid-off cable-layer in the USSR? Philosophy and literature that feeds the human soul finds the soul suffering and drunk in a rattling train carriage.
It would also be incorrect to say that this debris finds no practical use: the Biblical references in much of Venya’s sympathies almost provide a functional system for his love. The angels help, too. The debris of Christianity, as it exists in a Soviet alcoholic, infuses with grandeur and kindness both the suffering of the poor man and of those around him. With his debris, religious and intellectual, Venya is adapting to an inhumane world with the humanity he has available. He’s preserved his curiosity, energy and humanity in an alcoholic magic kingdom. It kind of works. But it can only work for so long.
VII. AN EXTREMELY NASTY RIDDLE
An appropriate Moscow-Petushki book cover
With Venya slumped and disoriented on the train seat, the text leaves material reality entirely; let’s leave Venya alone as he (passed out, on a train bench, most likely) leads a hallucinatory revolution in a Russian village, declares war on Norway, and shortens the Russian alphabet. On return to the physical world, our utterly disoriented hero crawls into a corner of the wagon in a state of paranoia.
He is very frightened.
He is pressing his face to the window. Outside, it’s dark, but it should be light.
“I don’t like this darkness. I don’t like it one bit.’
Well, the six swigs of Kuban vodka were already hitting the spot, gently, one at a time, getting to the heart of the matter; and my heart went into battle with my reason …”
“So what’s so special about this darkness, that you don’t like it? Darkness is darkness, there’s nothing you can do about it. Darkness gives way to light, and light gives way to darkness – that’s how I see it. Yes, and like it or not, the darkness isn’t going anywhere, so there’s only one solution – you’ve just got to accept it…”
The joy is gone. Venya is scared. Why is it dark? He’s been on the train for a long time. Why hasn’t he arrived yet?
The self chastisement begins, then.
“ ‘So what about the other people, eh? D’you think you’re superior to them? They’re on the same train, they’re not asking why it’s taking so long, or why it’s got dark. They’re just sitting quietly staring out the windows. Why should you be travelling faster than them? God, you’re really funny, Venya – funny and disgusting. It’s all go with you. I mean, you’ve had a drink, Venya, you want to be a bit more discreet, don’t think you’re smarter or better than them.”
How non-narcissistic our magnanimous hero is!
Things don’t make sense, though. Last Friday, Venya’s girlfriend met him at 11am. It was definitely daylight.
“But this Friday, at 11 o’clock, it can be pitch-dark already, just use your eyes. You do know the days get shorter, right? You do know that? Obviously you know nothing, and you think you know it all.”
He begins to nod off, when —
“ There in front of me was a thing with no legs, no tail, and no head.
‘Who are you?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘Guess who!’ And it burst out laughing. Laughing like a cannibal.”
[…]
“So, you’re going to Petushki, eh? The town where the jasmine never fails, winter or summer, and so forth? Where the–’
‘That’s right. Where the jasmine never fails, winter or summer, and so forth.”
“Where that tart of yours wallows in silks and jasmine, and the little birds flutter down and kiss her wherever they fancy?’
‘That’s right. Wherever they fancy.’
It burst out laughing again and whacked me in the solar plexus.
‘Listen, chum – this is a Sphinx here. And it’s not going to let you through.”
Naturally, the Sphinx offers riddles.
“Anyway, I’m telling you – I’m not letting you through, and that means no. Or rather, I will, but on one condition only – that you answer five of my riddles.”
I think it would be fun for us to do a few with the Sphinx!
“Right, the famous shock-worker Alexei Stakhanov used to go for a piss twice a day, and once every two days for a crap. Only whenever he went on a bender, he’d take a leak four times a day, but not once a crap. Calculate how many times a year shock-worker Stakhanov went for a piss, and how many times for a crap, assuming he got smashed three hundred and twelve days in the year.”
312 days he went for a piss 4 times a day, giving us 1248 pisses . Assuming a non leap year this leaves 52 days in which he’d go for 104 pisses and 26 craps. The total is 1352 pisses and 26 craps.
Venya isn’t as game as us, though.
“That’s a lousy riddle, Sphinx, it’s got a really swinish subtext. I’m not even going to try and solve a crap riddle like that.’
‘Oh, so you won’t? Well, we’ll have you singing yet. Here’s the second one.”
The next riddle is a bit dark and nasty, let’s skip it, I won’t tell you about it. Even Venya hates it.
“No, I’m sorry, Sphinx, I’m not even going to try and solve it. That’s an extremely nasty riddle. Let’s have the next one.’
‘Ha-ha! Give us the next one! Right – as everybody knows, there are no points A in Petushki. Even more so, there are no points C. There are only points B. So – the great explorer Papanin, wishing to rescue Vodopyanov, left point B1, heading for point B2. At that same instant, Vodopyanov, wishing to rescue Papanin, left point B2, heading for point B1. For some reason or other they both ended up at point B3, located at twelve of Vodopyanov’s spits from point B1, and sixteen of Papanin’s spits from point B2. Bearing in mind that Papanin could spit a distance of three metres, seventy-two centimetres, and Vodopyanov couldn’t spit at all, did Papanin really set out to rescue Vodopyanov?”
Vodopyanov could not spit, so B1 is, in fact, B3. Papanin left B1. B2, we are told, is 16*3=48 meters from B1 (and also B3). We do not know if Papanin thought he was going to rescue Vodopyanov but we can infer he wasn’t, because they were at the same point and then Papanin left. Probably they had an argument.
If the riddling sphinx is happening in Venya’s overactive imagination, one would think he’d come to a similar conclusion. Can an alcoholic pose himself a problem he cannot solve? My answer is yes, because on a spiritual level everything happening here is true: Venya’s interior world is no more his to control than the rattle of the carriage or the shine of the vodka bottle.
I will now ask those of you who might yet read the book, and do not want to know what happens next, to alight here and switch trains to Section VIII, End of the Line. Everyone else, furrow your brows for another quiz.
“Lord Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the British Empire, slipped on somebody’s vomit, coming out of the buffet at Petushki Station, and when he fell, he knocked over a table. Prior to being overturned, the table held the following: two cakes at 35 kopecks, two portions of beef stroganoff at 73 kopecks, two portions of cow’s udder at 39 kopecks, and two decanters of sherry, each containing 800 grammes. The crockery stayed in one piece, but all the food was spoilt. As for the sherry: one decanter remained intact, but all the sherry spilled out of it; the other decanter was smashed to smithereens, but not a drop was spilled. Right then, counting the cost of an empty sherry decanter as six times that of a portion of cow’s udder – and every child knows the price of sherry – calculate the bill presented to Lord Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the British Empire, at Kursk Station buffet.’
‘Why Kursk Station?’
‘Why not Kursk Station?’
‘But where did he slip? He slipped at Petushki, right? I mean, Lord Chamberlain slipped in the buffet at Petushki!’
‘Yes, but he paid his bill in Kursk Station. So how much did it come to?”
This one is beyond my limits. Sorry. Maybe one of the readers can write a python script to solve it.
“Okay, okay, let’s hear the last one.’
‘Right then. Minin’s going along the road and who should he meet but Pozharsky. “You’re looking a bit off today, Minin,” says Pozharsky. “You must’ve been hitting the bottle.” “Yes, and you look a bit off as well, Pozharsky. You’re asleep on your feet.” “So tell us the truth now, Minin, what’ve you had to drink?” “Right,” says Minin, “I’ll tell you. First off I had 150 grammes of Rossiiskaya, then I had 150 grammes of pepper vodka, 200 grammes of Stolichnaya, 550 grammes of Kuban, and 700 grammes of half-and-half. What about you?” “I had exactly the same,” says Pozharsky. “So where are you headed for?” says Minin. “Where d’you think?” says Pozharsky. “Petushki, of course. What about you?” “But that’s where I’m going, my dear Prince. You’re headed in the wrong direction.” “No,” says Pozharsky. “It’s you that’s going in the wrong direction.” Anyway, to cut a long story short, they managed to convince each other they were going the wrong way, and they had to turn back. Pozharsky went the way Minin had been going, and Minin went the way Pozharsky had been going. And they both ended up at Kursk Station. Okay now, tell me this – supposing they hadn’t changed directions, but had stuck to their original route, where would they have ended up? Where would Pozharsky have got to? Tell me.’
‘Petushki?’ I said hopefully. ‘Petushki, right?”
“Ha! You’re kidding, aren’t you? Pozharsky ended up at Kursk Station, that’s where!”
Because, the Sphinx says, nobody ever gets to Petushki.
The Sphinx vanishes. Suddenly it’s not as pitch black as before. In fact, out the window, there’s a sign for Pokrov station. Wonderful! That’s only three stops away from Petushki! Venya’s misgivings subside and settle like sediment at the bottom of his heart.
But not for long. The sediment stirs, and cold unfriendly reason leads him to a dawning horror.
“Okay, I’m now going away from Pokrov Station, right. I’ve seen the station sign, and the bright lights. ‘Pokrov’ and bright lights, that’s great. But how come they appear on the right-hand side of the train? Fair enough, my reasoning’s somewhat eclipsed, but I’m not a kid, I do know that if Pokrov Station’s to the right of the track, then that means I’m travelling out of Petushki, and not from Moscow to Petushki! That mangy Sphinx!”
He is in complete panic. He rushes up and down the train. The other passengers are gone; he’s all alone. He has overslept and missed his stop.
Nobody gets to Petushki, where the jasmine grows.
#
“You know, it’s disgusting, those swines’ve turned my country into a shit-hole, it’s hellish – they make people hide their tears, and show off their laughter! Miserable bastards! They’ve left us nothing but grief and fear, and on top of that – on top of that, they’ve made laughter public, yes, and banned tears!”
Let’s leave the rest of the book shrouded in darkness. I will only say it’s tragedy upon tragedy. A blend of hallucinations and reality, but even the hallucinations are reality, because of course all events in this book are real. The house of cards is swept aside by a veiny Soviet arm, and everything is annihilated.
VIII. END OF THE LINE
The central square of Petushki, in real life, as of 2003.
Earlier we asked: is Venya’s self-destruction graceless or unnecessary? There’s a lot you could claim it to be, especially with the analytical toolbox of a 2022 rationalist blog reader (learned helplessness crossed my mind; I wonder if Integrated Family Systems can be shoved in there; what if Gendlin Focusing can be a metaphor for a riddle-posing Sphinx), but I want to go back to the “general” and “human” here, use only words that appear in the Bible, and make claim Venya’s self-destruction is graceful and necessary because it produced this book.
This is a novel, our character Venya is not the real Venedikt Erofeyev, so what! Both Venyas share with us their innermost “sour mash of fear”; entertain us, force us to pause and feel, show us their attempts to maintain sodden dignity in a mad world; they hand to us their knowledge and love even as they lay withering in history’s overgrown cemetery. Venya has gifted us poetry made from his own unfair pains, failures, and terrible decisions. Angels at a station, a free-wheeling logos. It works marvellously; he almost gets into the Soborune, and we ourselves see a glimpse of truth (not with a capital T, Venya graciously avoids grandiosity, let’s also do that; it’s just truth). He has, in a real way, communicated it with you and I through time and space, from beyond the grave; without such self-destruction there would be no book, no communication, no otherworldly message.
In 1985, the author Venedikt Yerofeyev developed throat cancer and soon could only speak through a squawker-box. In 1990, he passed away. There is a monument to Venya, the fictional, in central Moscow, where he is depicted on a train platform in a non-sober state. Nearby is a statue of his girlfriend, waiting.
The book Moscow-Petushki was distributed by samizdat (hand-made copies of a book, made illegally by readers) around the USSR and Russia. While it was first printed in Israel in ’73 (300 copies), its debut appearance in its homeland was in an abridged format in 1989, when it was printed in the journal Sobriety and Culture, as an example of the dangers of alcoholism.
Lecturning on Moscow-Petushki, Russian literary critic Yevgeny Zharinov reminisced on (I paraphrase) how wonderful those old Soviet train-wagons were, with their drunks and their sodden philosophizing. All across suburban train lines of Russia, sat Diogeneses in their barrels; intellectual garbage spewed from their mouth, and there was much clinking of glasses. They haven’t died out, Zharinov said, not yet; but, God, how much more degraded and terrible most have become, now that the bottle is second fiddle to what’s nowadays available, now that drugs have arrived. The happy clinking of glasses is replaced by Krokodil-eaten flesh, what’s 100ml of vodka when you have a syringe to truly re-arranges your world, no imagination needed. The alcoholic's pallid complexion is cherubic in comparison to the gargoyle-faces of the new century’s passengers.Venya’s sodden little train-wagon, with its snoring drunkards and riddling Sphinxes, is a cozy happy heaven compared to the wagons that crossed the country in the last decade. Those that will cross it this year are, to us all, a mystery, but since the grotesque nightmare that began February 2022; my bet is on them being rotten zombies, grotesque caricatures of something that was once beautiful, like their insane necrophilic homeland is fast becoming. Sweet, poor, degraded Venya and his friends didn’t know how good they had it. The unhappy lesson of this wonderful book is to love one another as we are now, because, no matter how bad things seem, they can always get worse.
