Word: petushki
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...EROFEEV'S narrative is essentially unique--suigeneris from a bottle; the story is told entirely from the viewpoint of a drunken man riding the train from Moscow to the outlying village of Petushki, a paradise of sorts where he will find true love or, at the very least, great sex. But his journey is doomed from the start. Just as in Moscow, he has never seen the Kremlin so he is fated never to view Petushki either...
...journey itself takes on epic proportions, though like most great Russian picaresques (such as Dead Souls) the distance traveled is insignificant and indeed pointless. His monologue, punctuated only by the names of train stations along the Moscow-Petushki line, lurches into and out of reality like a rusty zoom lens. Sometimes whispered confession, sometimes giddy rhetoric, it continually breaks into schizoid dialogue, accosting the reader as an ill-at-ease fellow-traveler and involuntary confidant...
...indeed at this point that the already-present bitterness corrodes the satire away completely, leaving nothing but the inherent despair of Erofeev's situation. Having somehow missed Petushki altogether, he is hopelessly back in Moscow. The alcoholic haze dissipates, and the Kremlin looms up as a terrifying symbol of reality. At his absurd journey's end he is crucified by four shodowy figures--one of them an unmistakable echo of Stalin...
...samizdat (literally, self-publishing). Varlam Shalamov's lapidary concentration-camp stories, some of which were recently published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton under the title Kolyma Tales, have been in samizdat for 20 years. Currently the most prized samizdat work is Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki. The account of a phantasmagoric drunken excursion on a suburban train, Yerofeyev's novella may be the most innovative piece of prose written in the U.S.S.R. for more than four decades. The Russian text has been published in France...
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