VENYA seems a man with a mission. Intent not so much on bringing about his own destruction as of allowing it to happen - "for is not the life of man simply the soul's sidelong glance, the soul's eclipse?" - he is preoccupied by thoughts both profound and banal, and wanders about Moscow on a perpetual drunken odyssey. Kursk Station draws him like a magnet, yet somehow he has managed never even to see the Kremlin, although he misses little else. The narrator of Venedikt Yerofeev's picaresque monologue Moscow Stations translated by Stephen Mulrine (Faber, £14.99 in UK), is far more than a depressed tragi comic character in search of escape.
While his personal turmoil dominates this good natured, sharp, original tale, Venya is essentially a witness, "a seeker after truth", recording the collapse of a society. It is as if anyone who thinks lives in hell, while the passive majority trudge on, unburdened by thought. "I like the way people in our country have such vacant, bulging eyes ... They bulge non stop without the slightest sense of strain. Utterly devoid of thought, but such power!"
Moscow Stations, written in 1969 when Yerofeev was working with a team laying underground telephone cables, was not published in Russia until 1989, when it was serialised and enjoyed cult status there as yet another underground classic. Yerofeev was dead within a year of publication. Little was known in the West about the book until the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh commissioned a stage version from Stephen Mulrine, which was produced in 1993. The production then moved on to the West End and later New York.
Even by the high standards of the Russian surrealist comic tradition, this is a brilliant performance. In common with Evgeny Popov, Yerofeev combines the best of the tradition forged in the 19th century by Gogol and continued by Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov down to Andrei Bitov. He was easy to overlook, because his world is more intensely personal than political Yerofeev is not an ideological writer - and because he neither directly satirises the system nor offers any specific political or historical insight. Yet a close reading reveals the depths of his understanding of the impact of totalitarianism on the individual's ability to think. Even at his most random, Venya is exploring existence in a bubble of apathy. "If you want to go left, Venya, go left. If you want to go right, go right. It makes no odds, you've no place to go, so you might as well follow your nose At the heart of the narrative is Venya's grasp of how immensely difficult life is.
Venedikt Yerofeev was born in the extreme north of Russia in 1938. His station master father was arrested for criticising Soviet rule and spent 18 years - also the first 18 years of his son's life - in various labour camps. Having been briefly abandoned by his mother, Yerofeev spent his early life in a children's home. He was a gifted student, and his talents eventually brought him to Moscow University where his literary career began. A smart aleck comment directed at an officer in charge of compulsory military training ended his college days and he began a life of drifting comparable to Gorky's.
Some of the passengers joining Venya on his endless train journey crisscrossing the city share his philosophical despair as well as his black sense of humour. Where else but in Russia would a group of drunken strangers amuse themselves by swapping Turgenev stories? A battered woman boards the train. Of course, she has a tale to add: "Yes, I heard you lot having a literary conversation, so right, I think, I'll join them, have a drink, tell them my story while I'm about it, how I got my head bashed in and four front teeth knocked out, all on account of Pushkin!" Details of her stormy love affair engage her listeners but the highlight of it for them is an observation made by her old, allegedly deaf and dumb grandmother. From her seat on the top of the stove, Grandma is reported to have remarked: "You see, Dasha love? You see where your search for identity's got you?"
Few characters in literature drink with quite the abandon of the Russians, and extraordinary feats of consumption are reported here. Aware of the problems plaguing their own country, Yerofeev's train passengers are also concerned with the plight of the world elsewhere. Venya confirms that freedom in the United States remains "still just a phantom on that continent of sorrow" and adds: "They've got so used to it, they hardly even notice."
Much of the genius of this work lies in its conversational tone which is brilliantly captured by the translator. There is no bitterness in Venya, he is neither hysterical nor exasperated, his observations are satirical yet his despair is obvious. Claiming to be "sick in my soul", he attributes this to having "done nothing but fake spiritual health, every second of the day, and that's what I expend all my powers on ... That's why I'm boring."
Even at its most fantastical and internalised, this book never loses touch with the often grotesque reality of Russian life. We are told of the fate of a man cut in two by a train. ". . . the top half, from the waist upwards, was left standing by the rails as if he was still alive ... the train moved off, and he that half of him, was left with a sort of worried look on his face, and his mouth half open." The facts of Soviet history are there but Yerofeev is perhaps more concerned with the godlessness of a life in which even the angels laugh at tragedy. And the angels duly laugh with God remaining silent as he kills off his narrator with a blow to the throat. "I never knew pain like that was possible. I writhed in torment, and a thick letter U spread over my eyes and started to quiver." Ironically, 20 years after writing it, Yerofeev was to die of throat cancer. Deceptively light and apparently effortless for all its blackness, Moscow Stations, well served by a superb translation, is human, funny and very Russian - a philosophical exploration of life endured with despairing humour and open eyes.
