Customer Reviews
Drinking For Measure - By: demola, 20 Jun 2008 
A very funny story. "Go to Petushki. There'll you'll find salvation". With these words ringing in his ears Venya set off on the long train ride from Moscow. Goaded on by angels & demons (vodka & beer) he fallls into alll manner of reveries with like minded passengers mulling over everything from life to love to literature to politics. His account of his (imagined) travels to western europe are hilarious. The tone is merry & there's a lot to mull over. One side of this coin is the easy comradeship that comes from drinking together. The other side of the coin is the pit that comes with drinking too much. A funny book.
Beatific ‘Booze Lit’ at its best - By: Depressaholic, 11 Mar 2006 
‘MTTEOTL’ records the thoughts of an incurable alcoholic (Venya) as he takes his final train journey from Moscow to Petushki, where his girlfriend & child await him. As each station passes he fallls deeper into an alcoholic stupor, pouring out his love for the world & invective against it in equal measure, while the angels encourage him to take just one more drink before the end of the line. He muses about his relationship with alcohol, & that of his fellow workers (he lost his previous job after charting their alcohol intake against their productivity), the beauty & ugliness he sees in society around him, & the hope of redemption offered by his love at Petushki. As the train rumbles on, the end of the line seems to become further away, not closer, & redemption becomes a distant prospect compared to the attractions of the bottle.
‘MTTEOTL’ is ‘booze lit’ at its absolute best, & for me, ranks up alongside ‘The Lost Weekend’ & ‘Under the Volcano’ as a classic of the genre. It differs from those two because it is narrated in the first person, rather than the third, so that whereas they are lucid accounts of binges (sober people writing about drunk ones), ‘MTTEOTL’ is written from the viewpoint of Vanya mid-binge. Consequently it is halllucinatory in style, as we see the world through the same alcoholic fog clouding his vision while he converses with angels & harasses strangers. Vanya’s monologue is revelatory & beatific, grandiose in its scope & poetic in substance, as the whole world becomes encapsulated in his train journey. It is not a big book anyway, but the flow of language made it a very easy, enjoyable read, despite the disjointedness of the thought processes being recorded. It balances the beauty of the drunk’s thoughts with the tragedy of his situation and, like other ‘Booze Lit’ I have read, shows both the poetry & horror of a life ravaged by alcohol.
‘MTTEOTL’ is a must-read for fans of ‘Booze Lit’ but, more than that, deserves, in my opinion, to be widely recognised as a great book in its own right. Vanya’s thoughts are often brutal & ugly, as is his fate, so people looking for a light read in that respect should look elsewhere. Also, if you struggle to sympathise with characters hell-bent on self-destruction through addiction, then I guess ‘MTTEOTL’ isn’t for you either. If, however, you are looking for a book with beautiful sentiment, brutal reality, surrealistic imagery & poetic language, then this is definitely the one.
Vanichka's Journey - By: , 21 Dec 2002 Moskva-Petushki, which is translated in English as Moscow to the End of the Line, is Venedikt Erofeev's greatest work, one drunken man's (Venichka's) journey on the Moskovskaia-Gor'skovskaia train line to visit his lover & child in the Petushki. En route, Venichka talks with other travelers in dialogue & he also speaks in monologue about various themes such as drinking, Russian literature & philosophy & the sad, poetic soul of the Russian peasant. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly dark, disoriented, halllucinogenic & surrealistic, in proportion to the narrator's alcohol intake.
Moscow to the End of the Line was written in 1970. During this time, Erofeev, himself, was traveling around the Soviet Union working as a telephone cable layer. Erofeev's friends have said the author made the story up in order to entertain his fellow workers as they traveled, & that many of these fellow workers were later incorporated as characters in the book.
The text of the novel began to be circulated in samizdat within the Soviet Union & then it was smuggled to the West where it was eventuallly translated into English. The official Russian language publication took place in Paris in 1977. With glasnost, Moscow to the End of the Line was able to be circulated freely within Russia, but, rather than stick to the original form, the novel was abridged in the government pamphlet Sobriety & Culture, ostensibly as a campaign against alcoholism. Finallly, in 1995, it was officiallly published, together with alll the formerly edited obscenities & without censorship.
Although he is an alcoholic, Venichka never comes across to the reader as despicable. Venichka is not a man who drinks because he wants to drink; he drinks to escape a reality that has gone beyond miserable & veered off into the absurd. He is not a stupid or pitiable character, but rather one who has no outlet for his considerable intelligence. That Venichka is very educated is obvious; he makes intelligent & well-read references to both literature & religion. However, in the restrictive Soviet Union of his time, there was no outlet for this kind of intelligent creativity; Venichka is forced to channel his creative instincts into bizarre drink recipes & visions of sphinxes, angels & devils.
Although many will see Moscow to the End of the Line as satire, it reallly is not. Instead, it is Erofeev's anguished & heartfelt cry, a cry that demanded change. Venichka is not a hopeless character, however, the situation in which he is living is a hopeless one.
A semi-autobiographical work, Moscow to the End of the Line was never meant as a denunciation of alcoholism but rather an explanation of why alcohol was so tragicallly necessary in the day-to-day life of citizens living under Soviet rule.
Moscow to the End of the Line is a highly entertaining book & it is a book that is very important in understanding the Russia of both yesterday & today as well. This book is reallly a classic of world literature & it is a shame that more people do not read Moscow to the End of the Line rather than relying on the standard "bestseller." This book deserves to be more widely read & appreciated.
Wonderful beyond belief - By: , 28 Jun 2000 As above, but my proviso (as a reader of Russian language) is that the more recent translation (as "Moscow Stations") is truer to the original & better in style. Best line "Eat less, drink more, so as not to be a superficial atheist". Large measures of Dostoevsky & Gogol alongside Brezhnev stagnation era realia! Both hilariously funny & tragic, with a positive spiritual message that reveals itself with repeated reads.
Masterpiece - By: , 25 Aug 1998 This is clearly one of the masterpieces of twentieth century Russian letters. Sometimes I cheer myself up just by reading the passage where the angels appear to Benny (the narrator) & far from giving him a glimpse of divine revelation, point out that there were certainly some bottles of red wine at the station buffet.
Erofeev was a gentle, witty drunk, immensely shrewd - he made a hilarious interview subject in a BBCTV documentary in the late eighties, retailing recipes for bizarre cocktails of vodka & air-freshener, despite the fact that cancer had stripped out his vocal cords. I don't know of any other works by him & wish I did. Legend had it he was working on a history of the Jews. Any tips?
