Under the Soviet Volcano
GLUSMAN, JOHN A.
Under the Soviet \folcano Moscow to the End of the Line By Venedikt Erofeev Translated by H. W. Tjalsma Taplinger. 164 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by John A. Glusman_ "The Russians," Dostoyevsky wrote...
...The acuteness of his perception and his dissatisfaction with Soviet society make him want to ease his pain by indulging in the luxury of those higher on the social ladder in the USSR ??drink...
...The author himself, of course, has survived...
...When Venitchka finally disembarks, he finds himself not in Petushki, but back in Moscow...
...In Petushki you'll find your salvation and your joy, go.'" For awaiting him there are his little ones and his sweetheart, that white-eyed, red-haired "most beloved of trollops...
...Venitchka's boozing became all-consuming after he was fired as brigade foreman for alloting work time to gambling and drinking, a scheme that was exposed when he accidentally sent the Administrative Section individualized graphs charting his friends' productive days against theamountof alcohol consumed...
...In bold strokes, Erofeev paints a world riven with opposites ??where time is warped and space compressed, where voices are heard and visions seen...
...Against this background, as Vera S. Dunham observes in her Introduction, Moscow to the End of the Line emerges as a work of poignant humor and penetrating political insight...
...among us it amounted really to esteem...
...Erofeev's hero, a cable-fitter who started drinking young, shares his name and background...
...One week Venitchka got so soused that "The boundary between heart and reason had disappeared and they both recited in one voice: 'GotoPetushki...
...Thus he assuages his "inconsolable grief at being alienated from society by courting self-destruction...
...Reviewed by John A. Glusman_ "The Russians," Dostoyevsky wrote in his prison memoirs, "always feel a measure of sympathy for the drunken man...
...In the novel's concluding paragraph the narrator tells us that he has been murdered by three mysterious attackers...
...most of thepica-resque and plotless action takes place in the dreamlike past...
...Weare forced to wonder whether everything that went before was a journey through the imagination, a mere dipsomaniacal nightmare...
...But if in Tsarist times, as Dostoyevsky also wrote, "intoxication was regarded as a sort of aristocratic distinction," in Soviet society it has become a chronic problem of steadily increasing proportions...
...And alcohol is so ingrained in the lives portrayed by the great Russian writers that it is hard to imagine one of Gogol's feasts without plenty of fine wines and Liquors, or Tolstoy's cossacks bereft of their jugs of chikhir, or Chekhov's peasants not in a helpless stupor...
...He wryly reports...
...He is well versed in literature and philosophy, and he is fully conscious of his political position...
...So we have been reading the story of a dead man, killed by his own society...
...To reach Petushki, he must take the Kursk train from Moscow to the end of the line...
...a sluggard who spends large amounts of his already meager wages at beer stands...
...As the train moves from station to station, the level of his intoxication intensifies, and soon we are traveling with Venitchka through altered states reminiscent of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch...
...The author depicts a Russia where most crimes are committed by citizens under the influence of alcohol, moonshining is quite profitable, vodka occasionally is used as currency, andaconcoctioncalled"Bitch-es' brew" is valued more highly than the struggle for human liberation...
...It is not an easy trip...
...A recent samizdat pamphlet issued by Leningrad feminists describes the typical Soviet man as "a drunkard leaving almost all the work of the family to women...
...The narration is woven from recounted stories, shared memories and hallucinations...
...If the contrarieties of experience can't be resolved, they can temporarily be tippled away...
...since then I have not regained consciousness, and I never will...
...And in living through the pain and disenchantment of Soviet life to challenge its politics of repression with his masterful writing, Venedikt Erofeev stands out as the true hero...
...Family stability, worker productivity and civic consciousness all suffer from the epidemic of drinking...
...Venitchka is an intellectual, too...
...Indeed, Venedikt Erofeev's most widely read samizdat novel to date is a sodden phantasmagoria that flatly contradicts theclaims of the Soviet Communist Party...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 2
