Lekmanov , Oleg Sverdlov , Mikhail Simanovskii , Il'ia Venedikt Erofeev: postoronii (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 351 avoids the pornographic by deploying a ‘structure of anticipatory desire’ which portrays sexual desire without either producing […] unintentional absurdity […] or risking the arousal of his reader’ (p. 209). In this way, Nabokov ‘protects Dolores from our pity as well as our arousal or our mockery’, and also ‘protects us from ourselves’, but in doing so, ‘makes it even harder for us to maintain a distinction between aesthetic and ethical responses to his work’ (p. 210). The collection concludes with an essay by Michael Wood, who discusses Nabokov’s response to literary and cultural modernism, and the extent to which, by creating the false universes of his fiction, he is indulging in an im/moral act. The essay returns to the questions posed at the outset about the ‘moral difference’ between good and bad reading which, Wood concludes, is a matter of ‘scruple’ — ‘not whether the imagination is used but how it is used’ (p. 221 — my emphasis). Ultimately, ‘questions as large as those raised by the conjunction of Nabokov and morality will continue to require readers to deal with ambiguity, contradiction, and creative tension’, dynamics that enable Nabokov to hold a position somewhere between the ‘fervently didactic’ and the ‘perniciously frivolous’ (p. 122). Yet David Rampton perceives these dynamics of ‘resistance’ as a ‘productive’ force in Nabokov’s work, recalling the playfulness emphasized by the volume’s editors in their introduction, a playfulness which extends, as the essays here attest, to the hunt for that elusive ‘somewhere’. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Lekmanov, Oleg; Sverdlov, Mikhail and Simanovskii, Il´ia. Venedikt Erofeev: postoronii. Izdatel´stvo AST, Moscow, 2018. 464 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. R719.00. This is an exceptional book, a writer’s biography which could never have been expected to be written. Erofeev was, as the title of this study suggests, an outsider — he did not belong to any establishment and was officially recognized as ‘disabled’ on the grounds of his alcoholism. In the early 1970s a ‘poem in prose’ called Moskva–Petushki spread throughout metropolitan samizdat. The book describes a train journey by an alcoholic Venichka Erofeev — the hero’s name replicates that of his author — from Moscow to the small town of Petushki. Consumption of alcohol on the way takes Rabelaisian proportions. Venichka’s journey plays out on two levels: physical, from a morning hangover to delirium tremens, and metaphysical, from a dubious resurrection to a horrifying vision of mystical crucifixion. Erofeev’s grotesque masterpiece, with its breathtaking mastery of the Russian SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 352 language, sharp satire and brilliant humour ending in nightmarish tragedy, left its readers shaken, perplexed and fascinated. When in 1989 the ‘poem’ was finally published in Russia, its author immediately became a recognized classic, the most loved and admired writer of his time and generation. For Erofeev, however, fame was to be short lived: he died the following year at the age of 52. After his death came a flood of memoirs, witness accounts, stories and anecdotes, some based on factual knowledge but many clearly products of wild imagination. His circle encompassed learned intellectuals and poets, but also the alcoholics and drunkards with whom he consumed immeasurable amounts of spirits, lived and worked at various periods of his life. To add to the confusion, Erofeev loved mystifications, inventing stories about himself and often distorting real events in order to give them more colour. In the absence of many written documents (Erofeev, defying the Soviet regime, often lived without any official papers), his real-life story became an enigma, wrapped in mystery and driving researchers to despair. His death from throat cancer strangely and disturbingly mirrored the last nightmare of his hero — death at the end of the journey by four apocalyptic assassins: ‘They stuck their awl deep into my throat. I did not know pain like that was possible in the world... And since then I have not regained consciousness, and never will.’ It is this fact which clearly inspired the unique structure of his biography by the three authors of this book. It consists of eight chapters, seven of which have twoparts:biography,relatedtocertainperiodsofErofeev’slife,andaninterlude with concise but thorough analysis of the relevant chapters...