Moscow Stations: From Novel to Play

Moscow Stations: From Novel to Play STEPHEN MULRINE First published in the West in 1973, Venedikt Yerofeev's novel MoskvaPetushki now has an assured place in the canon of modem Russian fiction. At one extreme, it has been compared to Gogol's Dead Souls in miniature, and at another, 10 Kerouac's On the Road without Ihe marijuana, bUI the critical consensus is that it precisely maps the spiritual wasteland of the Brezhnev yearswhat Russians refer to as vrernya zastoya, "the period of stagnation" - with great charm and wit, in a highly personal idiom. Yerofeev himself called the work a "poem," and while that might be overextending the genre, its emotional range, from deep despair, through ironic detachment and black comedy, to ecstatic joie de vivre, readily invites the term "lyrical," while its range of allusion - biblical, historical, political, literary - suggests the epic. Tatyana Tolstaya, in an afterword to the Prometei edition (1990), is in no doubt: In a sense it can be placed alongside Gogol's Dead Souls,albeit the product of adifferent era, on a different scale, and it is a teeny thing. to be sure, a bagatelle, where Dead Souls is a vast canvas. But it is entirely characteristic of modem literature that it succeeds , within a small compass, in conveying the essence, to say the most important things about our times, about Russia and aboutman in the Russian universe.1 Elsewhere, in a speech given in t988, at a party to celebrate Yerofeev's fiftieth birthday, the critic Aleksandr Velichansky stressed the universal appeal of Moskva-Petushki, not only translated into a multitude of languages - including Latin, he jokingly surmised - but also capable of uniting an educated elite, exploring the rich allusiveness of Yerofeev's text, with those semi-literate readers for whom the book is chiefly a source of murderous "cocktail" recipes . Velichansky likewise endorses Tatyana Tolstaya's view of Yerofeev's status as the spokesman of his generation: Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 49 50 STEPHEN MULRINE All OUT compatriots, born between the 19305 and the 1950s, will remain - and not only in the history of literature alone, but in the history of Russia as a whole - the YEROFEEV generation.2 It is perhaps for that very reason that the book was not published in Russia until December 1988, when the first of four serial episodes appeared in Trezvost ' i ku/'wra [Sobriety and Culture], a monthly magazine dedicated to promoting Gorbachev's drive against alcoholism.3 Clearly, its official sanctioning in such a context was not unconnected with its value as a cautionary tale, and the novel is significantly edited to enhance that. Indeed, one of the problems for any translator of Moskva-Petushki is the lack of a definitive Russian text, and Rachel Coward, in an unpublished dissertation, explores this to some effect.4 On the small scale, despite the new phenomenon of glasnost' in Gorbachev 's Soviet Union, Trezvost' i kul'tura is rather coy about Yerofeev's numerous obscenities, and Russian editions still tend to replace offending words with dots. On the larger scale, Yerofeev couldn't be allowed to poke fun at Soviet icons, and among the Sphinx's riddles, for example, those dealing with the heroic bodily functions of the shock-worker Stakhanov, and the explorer Papanin, are removed, as are some unflattering references to Lenin. On much the same grounds, Venya's comment about his tragic rail accident victim, looking "like the busts of all those various bastards you see on pedestals ,"5 also does not appear in Trezvost' i kul'tura. Soon after this first native publication, an anthology, Vest', printed what some Russian critics regarded as a full, authoritative text.6 However, Rachel Coward argues that this has been conupted by the Trezvost' i kul'lura version, and that among several now-extant Russian texts of Moskva-Petushki, the most reliable is the first - published in the Israeli journal Ami in 1973, not long after the novel was written.? Ami tended to specialise in the publication of works banned in the Soviet Union, so one might expect its editorial policy to be much less interfering, but there is anecdotal evidence that Yerofeev himself disapproved of the...