Is this seedy and honest samizdat novel an expose of a wasted life or a comic masterpiece? Stephen Mulrine;s first rate translation helps us to decide.
You know it's weird, nobody in Russia knows how Pushkin died, but everyone knows how to distill varnish
One of the huge bugbears of social life in the towns and cities of Russia is the Sociable Drunk. Get together with a few acquaintances in a public area, maybe speak a little English and – kazam! -up pops the Sociable Drunk. He – it is most often a he – fastens onto you like a lamprey. He wants to shake your hand, to practise his Englsh and is brimming with theories and observations which he just has to tell you all about.
Well, the Sociable Drunk has his very own novel: Moscow Stations by Venedikt Yerofeev.
This novel began life in 1969 as a photocopied document which was passsed from hand to hand in the cities of Russia. It would be twenty years later that this cult product would receive official blessing – of sorts -by getting printed as a serial in a journal called Sobriety and Culture. Then it gatecrashed the Anglophone world after being transmuted into the English tongue by the talented Glaswegian translator Stephen Mulrine (whose death, at 82 in January of this year, is another loss to Russian-Western cultural exchange, to add to that of Jamey Gambrell). He adapted sections of the writing into a one man play (more of which later) and then translated it all for Faber & Faber in 1997.
Venedikt Yerofeev is not to be confused with Viktor Yerofeev! In fact, they are poles apart. Viktor Yerofeev is a modernist and a critic who writes with great coherence about social and cultural matters.Our Venedikt, however, is more a sort of Vodka soaked Dylan Thomas of Russian lower class urban life.
Born in 1938, he originated from the provincial far north, excelled at school, undertook some teacher training in Vladimir and then seems to have spent most of his days travelling from town to town doing odd jobs whilst in the grip of alchoholism.
Like all too many men would do of subsequent generations, he died way too young at 51. His satirical drama Walpurgis Night was published after his death but his name remains synonymous with Moscow Stations.
This he dashed off in a few months whilst working as a layer of cables. He wrote with friends in mind (one of them would later recall seeing him chuckling over his first draft in a disused railway station).
The main interest a reader might have in this work now is in seeing whether it resonates with modern Russian life or whether it can be consigned to the shelf markedPeriod Piece from the Time of Stagnation.
Diary of a Heavy Drinker.
Moscow Stations comprises of a day in the life of young Venya (no doubt the author in a very thin disguise). His world consists of wandering through central Moscow as he downs Kuban vodka or Zubrovka or any other strong spirits or wine that he can afford and, to this end, he knows all about brand names and liquid volumes.
We discover him engaged on a Friday night ritual of boarding a train at Kursk station. He is destined for Petrushki, a high rise suburban district some 124 kilometeres East of Moscow, in a trip that would take around two and a half hours. (We are not talking Trans-Siberian express here!) His new girlfriend awaits him there as does his son, both of whom, in his inebriated state, he idolises.
This banal premise allows us to be privy to the protagonists internal monolgue as -in chapters named after the train station stops – he gets thrown out of a cafe for demanding non-available sherry, hooks up for some rambling intellectual banter with fellow Career Drinkers in the train carriage, has his baggage stolen, engages with hallucinatory dreams involving military glories and then wakes up returning to Moscow having passed out on the train overnight (that, at least is what we surmise has happened: it is not the sort of novel which lays things out for the reader). Needless to say, following all his musings over the pitiable details of his sordid life, he fails to disembark at Petushki.
Plain-speaking hobo.
The voice is book-learned and streetwise in the Henry Miller manner and the novel functions as a free-form romp. The first person past rense confessional, much of it a kind of stream-of-consciousness, ends up spiralling into chaos and ambiguity and with the execution of the narrator by shadowy assailants.
I was reminded of the peripatetic anti-hero of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger . In contrast, though, Venya’s issue is not one of material need, he belongs to a society of near full employment after all, it is how to score his next liquid fix and then to stave off the after-effects in the meantime:
...you should have seen me, holding my eyes shut tight for ages, trying to keep down the nausea, effing and blinding.... One minute the glass I'd drunk lay smoking somehwere between my belly and my gut, next minute it was shooting up and falling back down again (p-13).
(His warts and all expose of drinking’s downsides fails to mention the horrific absence of toilets on these suburban trains, however!)
The strenuousness of Mulrine’s rendition of Venya’s vernacular is nothing short of awe inspiring. He has reallyh brought to life for the English language reader something rooted in colloquial Russian:
So to hell with you! You can leave all that extragalactic astronomy to the Yanks, and the psychiatry to the Germans. Let all those Spanish bastards go watch their corridas, let those African shits build their Aswam dam, go ahead, the wind'll blow it down anyway, let Italy choke on its idiotic bel canto, what the hell! (P-44)
Moscow Stations does feel quite fresh for something with a 1969 vintage. In fact I can recognise possible tributes to it in later Russian novels: the intimate misfit’s voice in Arslan Khasavov’s Sense, for example or the madcap army games which Venya dreams up finding an equivalent in Dmitry Bykov’s Living Souls.
Yerofeev is sometimes dignified with the term dissident, but, from this novel alone, this label does not seem appropriate.Venya protests nothing – not the Brezhnev doctrine, or the growing tensions between Russia and China, nor the use of pschiatric institutions as political weapons. He even advocates pusillanimity which some might argue has since become the national vice. So does the novel have anything else to announce to today’s reader?
Unintended cautionary tale?
Some critics have imagined there to be a core religious significance to this work on account of the references to the Lord and to angels and matters spiritual in the text. However, these Christian name-checks are handled with the same kind of offhand facetiousness that every other intellectual subject is in this book.
Others just frame the novel as a good comic one. Indeed, there is a lot of playfulness in evidence throughout. The infamous recipes for cocktails, however – which itemise such ingredients as brake fluid and sock deoderant -would be easier to laugh with if they did not have a basis in fact. (A female acquaintance of Yerofeev’s recalls having to hide perfume bottles whenever he paid a visit). The best joke, for me appears right at the novel’s outset. Venya admits that he has never seen the Kremlin. Then: For instance. Yesterday - yessterday I didn't see it again (p-1) Much of the rest of the humour is a drunk’s humour – far funnier to the teller than to the listener.
The novel highlights the squalid horridness oif a life devoted to drink. Unlike J.P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, for example, Yerofeev does not seek to glamourise such a life with shows of macho swagger. Thus I can see how this novel made its way into a journal like Sobriety and Culture, which was devoted to public health, and taken as a warning against drink abuse.
Redeemed by a staging.
The narrator of Moscow Stations, whilst full of wisdom beyond his thirty or so years, is one I find hard to get on with. Yes, he is gentle and betrays affection for his loved ones and erudite and vivacious; he is also supercilious and proud and full of self-pity, just as a raving dipsomaniac would be.
The dramatic monologue that Mulrine extracted from this novel was put on at the Traverse theatre in Edingburgh with Tom Courtenay (Billy Liar) in the role in 1994, to some acclaim, and then it toured.
Born in the same year as Yerofeev and bearing a physical resemblance to him, Courtenay was 57 when he performed this role – a more fitting age for the protaginist somehow. Indeed Venya is something like what Billy Liar’s Billy Fisher might have ended up as, if he had taken to the bottle in a big way. I have not seen the play, but I have an instinctive feeling that this format would have more impact that the novel itself.
YEROFEEV, VENEDIKT MOSCOW STATIONS (LONDON: FABER & FABER, 1997, 2016). All quotations are from this text.
Lead image: Yandex.ru