Word: erofeev
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Though a comedy, Moscow Circles is dense with darker implications as Erofeev mercilessly reveals the absurdities of Soviet life. The reader learns, for example, of his stint as a construction foreman; the workers would lay some cable one day, get drunk, take it out the next, get drunk, and so on ad nauseam. He was eventually fired because he made the system more efficient--be dispensed with the cable altogether. The turgid rhetoric of state propaganda is lampooned in the workers' hypocritical socialist pledges, but the humor does not eclipse more sinister themes: "I like the fact that my compatriots...
...NARRATIVE is leavened, however, by Erofeev's prodigal powers of comic invention. There are countless passages of Rabelaisian discourse. One entire chapter is devoted to a detailed analysis of Russia's greatest calling--hiccups. Another chapter is a bartender's manual for some of the most bizarre drinks ever conceived, including an unorthodox mixture of beer, two kinds of shampoo (one anti-dandruff), and insect repellant. The humor ranges from the highly subtle to the truly gross, most of it reasonably well-served by J.R. Dorrell's colloquial translation...
...another level, Moscow Circles is a literary odyssey. Erofeev and his fellow-passengers engage in some hilarious literary polemics tracing alcoholism in German and Russian authors (Chekhov's last words: "Let's have some champagne!"), even as his own journey takes on a mythico-literary cast. Erofeev is Sheherezade, avoiding one thousand and one train fares by telling obscene stories to chief Ticket Inspector Semyonych. He is Oedipus, parrying the ribald riddles of a drunken Sphinx. He is Dante descending through the Moscow circles of Hell, his Virgil a bottle of Stolychnaya. And in the tragic denouement, Erofeev becomes Christ...
...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...
THOUGH the spirit-soaked pages of Moscow Circles are a grim testimony to the destructiveness of alcoholism in the Soviet Union--Erofeev makes it clear he's lived through it himself--the novel's implications reach far beyond the topical or the social. Erofeev's alcoholic innocence is ultimately a spurious from of escape: "I have seen the world close to and from a distance, from within and from without, I understand it but I cannot accept it...I am the soberest man on earth...