Abstract
First published in the West in 1973, Venedikt Yerofeev's novel MoskvaPetushki now has an assured place in the canon of modem Russian fiction. At one extreme, it has been compared to Gogol's Dead Souls in miniature, and at another, to Kerouac's On the Road without the marijuana, but the critical consensus is that it precisely maps the spiritual wasteland of the Brezhnev years — what Russians refer to as vremya zastoya, "the period of stagnation" — with great charm and wit, in a highly personal idiom. Yerofeev himself called the work a "poem," and while that might be overextending the genre, its emotional range, from deep despair, through ironic detachment and black comedy, to ecstatic joie de vivre, readily invites the term "lyrical," while its range of allusion — biblical, historical, political, literary — suggests the epic.
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