Our Notes & References

The Russian Bukowski: first book edition of this “Ultimate Underground Classic” (Lekmanov) “acclaimed both in the West and in Russia as a postmodern masterpiece” (Ryan-Hayes) “The second Russian prose poem after Dead Souls, written during the years of stagnation in the deep underground” (Oborin, our translation here and elsewhere).

Venedikt Erofeev (1938-90) finished his now-famous Moskva-Petushki in early 1970, and around a year later, a friend of his clandestinely brought the typewritten text on a microfilm to Jerusalem, where the “poem” was first officially published in 1973, in the third issue of the local almanack Ami. Though the issue’s printrun was only 300 copies, the poem widely circulated in underground publications in Erofeev’s homeland to become “the most popular literary work of samizdat” (Gabriel Superfin, quoted by Oborin).

Erofeev was already a world-famous writer by the time the first official Soviet edition (with censor’s omissions) was printed in 1988-89 in the magazine Trezvost i kultura [Sobriety and Culture] — “though it is hard to imagine a less suitable work for a propaganda campaign against alcoholism” (Lipovetsky): Moskva-Petushki had been translated into many languages, staged, and “the poem was admired by Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, and Mikhail Bakhtin” (Oborin). Even today Erofeev’s work holds “a unique status: in all likelihood, no other text of the unofficial culture has had greater resonance […] The poem and its author became symbols of the Russian underground of the 1970s” (Lipovetsky), and it “remains one of the most famous, published, and quoted Russian texts of the twentieth century” (Oborin).

The novel shows Venichka Erofeev, in a deep bender, travelling on an electric train from the Kursk railway station in Moscow to his beloved woman and child in the idyllic town of Petushki. On the way he tells about his life, phantasmagoric wanderings and philosophy of hiccups, meets a variety of fellow travellers and fatally changes the course of the journey. A famous part of the text is devoted to various home-made cocktails, allowing readers to delve into the alcoholic culture of the USSR and explore not only all possible alcoholic beverages sold at that time, but also their creative substitutes, including furniture polish, denatured spirit, “White Lilac” perfume, tooth elixir, and a remedy for sweaty feet. Among the names of the resulting cocktails are “Komsomol Girl’s Tear”, “Canaan Balsam”, “The Spirit of Geneva”, “Currents of Jordan”, and “The Kiss Forced”. “Beyond the alcoholic canvas, the journey is embroidered with biblical stories, folklore, Soviet propaganda cliches, and most prominently, references to Venichka’s favourite authors” (Parfenov).

The present first book edition was published by YMCA-Press in Paris with the illustrated wrappers showing a 1974 painting by the Moscow underground artist Viacheslav Kalinin (1939-2022) “Zhazhdushchii chelovek” [“Thirsty Man”], then kept in the “Musée Russe en Exil A. Gleser”, in the French town of Montgeron. A second edition came out by the same publisher in 1981 under the same cover.

A fine example of this ‘tamizdat’, rarely found on the Western market, as we could trace copies at auction outside Russia only in the last year or two, nothing before.

Bibliography

Lekmanov, Oleg, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky. “The Ultimate Underground Classic: Venedikt Erofeev and Moscow-Petushki”, in Mark Lipovetsky, and others (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture, Oxford Handbooks, 2022; Lipovetsky, Mark. “Venichka: a Tragic Trickster”, in Charms of the Cynical Reason: Tricksters in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture, Academic Studies Press, 2011, pp. 151–92; Oborin, Lev. “Venedikt Erofeev. Moskva – Petushki” // Polka academy, 2018; Parfenov, Leonid. “Moskva-Petushki” // 1977. Namedni. Nasha Era; Ryan-Hayes, Karen L. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki: Critical Perspectives, Peter Lang, 1997.