The Poet's Fatal Flaw: Venedikt Erofeev's Don Juan Subtext in Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander

Abstract

Venedikt Erofeev's 1985 tragedy Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander (Val'purgieva noch', iii shagi komandora) has received a surprisingly minimal critical response, considering its frequent productions. Like Erofeev's earlier magnum opus, Moscow-Petushki (1969), his only complete play presents a diverse and intricate array of literary sources. But although the various allusions to the Bible, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, and innumerable other Russian and world writers and cultural figures in Moscow-Petushki have been exhaustively analyzed, few critics devote more than a passing reference to the subtexts in Walpurgis Night.' The general tendency to view Erofeev as a one-work writer may contribute to this lack of commentary. Mikhail Epstein's argument that Erofeev consciously destroyed himself as an author with Venichka's death in MoscowPetushki, and that the rest of his oeuvre consists merely of momentary flashes of fading creativity, implies a certain superfluity about his later works.2 Since Walpurgis Night features many of the same themes (alcoholism, holy foolishness, the absurdity of Soviet life) and literary techniques (juxtaposition of high and low language, diffuse intertextuality) as Moscow-Petushki, it is tempting to ask whether the play does not simply clothe the concerns of the poema in a different genre. The sheer scale and ambition of Walpurgis Night in comparison to the rest of Erofeev's post-Moscow-Petushki output, though, render a view of it as an exhausted rehearsal of earlier themes questionable.3 Petr Vail' and Aleksandr Genis justly refer to the play as