In this classic of Russian humor and social commentary, a fired cable fitter goes on a binge and hopes a train to Petushki (where his "most beloved of trollops" awaits). On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.
Eight scholars examine Erofeev's (1933-90) Moscow-Perushki, considered both in the west and in Russia to be a postmodern masterpiece. The novel takes readers on Moscow's suburban train into the cultural milieu of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. The analyses describe picaresque absences and annihilation, the sacred and the monstrous, inconsolable and other grief, existentialist motifs, and other concerns. Two of the essays are in Russian. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Moscow Stations, Venedikt Yerofeev's autobiographical novel, is in many ways the successor to Gogol's Dead Souls. The two works are comic historical bookends, with Gogol's novel portraying the sloth and corruption of feudal Russia and Yerofeev's novel portraying the sloth and corruption of feudal Communism. The truth is that while the streets of Moscow may be clogged with Volvos and Mercedes sedans these days - in keeping with the new capitalism - the anguish and dissipation of the late, coruscating empire are still the real fact of life for most people. Moscow Stations remains a lesson in the current events of the Russian soul.The novel is a mixture of high, drunken comedy - a portrait of a soul filled with wisdom and pickled in Hunter's vodka who spends his days traipsing around Moscow but has never once seen the Kremlin. With this cheerful admission we are off on a hallucinatory ride through the increasingly desperate mind of Venedikt Yerofeev. He once remarked that Moscow Stations was 'ninety pages of funny stuff and ten pages of sad stuff' but it is mostly about a clear-eyed man who can still say, no matter how much he has drunk: '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.'
Wandering in Circles: Venichka’s Journey of Redemption in “Moskva-Petushki” examines the definition of redemption in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki. By placing Erofeev’s poema in conversation with other travel narratives from Russia and the West, the book explores the meaning of redemption across societies and cultures, and how Erofeev creates a commentary on the possibility of redemption in a broken political and social system. Through this comparative approach to Moskva-Petushki, this work offers a new reading of the text as a journey of failed social and personal redemption.
This text offers a critical study of postmodernism in Russian literature. It takes some of the central issues of the critical debate to develop a conception of postmodern poetics as a dialogue with chaos and places Russian literature in the context of an enriched postmodernism.
Eight of Russia's most popular and significant novels are presented in this important new guide for students. Works include: - "We" by Evgenii Zamiatin - "Red Cavalry" by Isaak Babel - "Envy" by Iurii Olesha - "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovskii - "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov - "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak - "Cancer Ward" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn - "Pushkin House" by Andrei Bitov In each chapter, David Gillespie examines one novel in detail and explores the career of the author and the critical reception of the work. Throughout, considerable reference is made to recently published scholarship and archival materials to provide students and scholars of Russian and Comparative Literature with a guide to these important Russian authors and their place in the world of literature. The book also includes an extensive bibliography of secondary literature and contains textual references in both the original Russian and in English translation.
Foolishness has long occupied a prominent place in Russian culture, touching on key questions of national, spiritual, and intellectual identity. Combining close readings with a contextual framework, this book offers a wide-ranging consideration of the causes and consequences of modern Russian literature's enduring quest for wisdom through folly.
Sergey Gandlevsky is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. His autobiographical novella Trepanation of the Skull is a portrait of the artist as a young late-Soviet man. At the center of the narrative are Gandlevsky's brain tumor, surgery, and recovery in the early 1990s. The story radiates out, relaying the poet's personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin. Gandlevsky tells wonderfully strange but true episodes from the bohemian life he and his literary companions led. He also frankly describes his epic alcoholism and his ambivalent adjustment to marriage and fatherhood. Aside from its documentary interest, the book's appeal derives from its self-critical and shockingly honest narrator, who expresses himself in the densely stylized version of Moscow slang that was characteristic of the nonconformist intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. Gandlevsky is a true artist of language who incorporates into his style the cadences of Pushkin and Tiutchev, the folk wisdom of proverbs, and slang in all its varieties. Susanne Fusso's excellent translation marks the first volume in English of Sergey Gandlevsky's prose, and it will interest scholars, students, and general readers of Russian literature and culture of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
A collection of short Christmas stories by some of Russia’s greatest nineteenth and twentieth century authors—several appearing in English for the first time. Running the gamut from sweet and reverent to twisted and uproarious, this collection offers a holiday feast of Russian fiction. Dostoevsky brings stories of poverty and tragedy; Tolstoy inspires with his fable-like tales; Chekhov’s unmatchable skills are on full display in his story of a female factory owner and her wretched workers; Klaudia Lukashevitch delights with a sweet and surprising tale of a childhood in White Russia; and Mikhail Zoshchenko recounts madcap anecdotes of Christmas trees and Christmas thieves in the Soviet Era—a time when it was illegal to celebrate the holiday in Russia. There is no shortage of imagination, wit, or vodka on display in this collection that proves, with its wonderful variety and remarkable human touch, that nobody does Christmas like the Russians.
Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in soviet and post-soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of cynical reason: to identify its symbols, discourses, contradictions, and by these means, its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s.
