Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’, ili The Rest is Silence by Svetlana Shnitman-McMillin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’, ili The Rest is Silence by Svetlana Shnitman-McMillin David Gillespie Shnitman-McMillin, Svetlana. Venedikt Erofeev: ‘Moskva-Petushki’, ili The Rest is Silence. Nauchnaia biblioteka. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2022. 248 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ₽396.00. Venedikt Erofeev lived from 1938 to 1990, and in that time wrote a handful of long and short prose works and a play, but is best known for his ‘poema’ Moskva-Petushki, first published abroad in 1973 and in the Soviet Union only in 1988–89 (ironically, given its subject-matter, in a journal entitled Trezvostˊ i kulˊtura: ‘Sobriety and Culture’). The narrator Venichka travels by train from Moscow to the small suburban town of Petushki, drinking heavily and increasingly beset by alcohol-fuelled hallucinations, all of which enable him to engage in philosophical, artistic and, in particular, religious musings. Indeed, reality and fantasy are often confused. Back in Moscow he is attacked by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and stabbed in the throat (another irony is that Erofeev died of throat cancer in 1990). This, the first full-length monograph devoted to Venedikt Erofeev’s ‘masterpiece of Russian literature’, as Mark Lipovetskii notes in his ‘Introduction’, was first published in Switzerland in 1989. Essentially a re-issue [End Page 553] of the original volume, it contains some significant updated material, not least in the name of the author, who published in 1989 under the name Svetlana Gaiser-Shnitman. Since little if anything was known about Erofeev in 1989, there is some welcome additional and updated background information on his life and times. Most of the changes are of a structural nature, such as the removal of some subsection headings and their incorporation into the body of the main text. Others no doubt originate in the publisher’s marketing department, and it is to this reviewer’s regret that photographs of Erofeev, as well as the many illustrations of the poema’s numerous religious motifs, have been omitted from this edition. Quotations in French, Italian, English and German from the earlier edition have now been translated into Russian, with the original languages deleted, and some quotations expanded. A most welcome addition is the updated bibliography on the secondary literature on Erofeev that has blossomed since the 1980s. What remains is an excellent and detailed analysis of the philosophical and aesthetic depth of a work now considered a classic of Russian postmodernism. The Rest is Silence remains the definitive study of Erofeev’s poema over thirty years since its original publication. The author provides an exhaustive and rewarding study, paying particular attention to references to religious motifs in the art of Andrei Rublev, El Greco, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt, Pieter Breughel and Giovanni di Paolo. The analysis of the many references to Shakespeare, Rabelais, Dante, Pascal, Villon and Bergengruen testifies not only to Erofeev’s depth of erudition, but also to Dr Shnitman-McMillin’s powers of perception and scrupulous attention to detail. It is to be hoped that this study will find its way into English translation, and thus make Erofeev’s work more accessible to both undergraduates and the broader public, given that Moskva-Petushki is now available in more than one English-language edition. David Gillespie Moscow City University Copyright © 2022 David Gillespie