Venedikt Yerofeev – författare

Venya is more interested in how much he and his colleagues can drink during the working day than in his job. Once he is fired, he spends the last of his money on booze and sets off on a train journey to visit beautiful, picturesque, utopian Petushki, where his beloved and child are waiting for him. But Venya's drinking gets out of control on the train, and Petushki seems to lie increasingly beyond his grasp. Funny and sad, Yerofeev's alcohol-soaked story of a man on a train perfectly captures Soviet society on the brink of doom: exhausted, corrupt and heading into the night in sodden dignity.'A dark and hilarious work cocktailing the satire of Gogol with the gutter-level eye of Bukowski and the menace and nightmare vision of Genet.' Time OutMoscow Stations -- the only novel published by the Russian writer Venedikt Yerofeev -- was written in 1969 and existed first only amongst samizdat circles, as a typed manuscript passed hand to hand by readers in Soviet Russia. It was first published officially in the magazine Sobriety and Culture in 1989. This translation was first published by Faber in 1997.

Moscow Stations, Venedikt Yerofeev's autobiographical novel, is in many ways the successor to Gogol's Dead Souls. The two works are comic historical bookends, with Gogol's novel portraying the sloth and corruption of feudal Russia and Yerofeev's novel portraying the sloth and corruption of feudal Communism. The truth is that while the streets of Moscow may be clogged with Volvos and Mercedes sedans these days - in keeping with the new capitalism - the anguish and dissipation of the late, coruscating empire are still the real fact of life for most people. Moscow Stations remains a lesson in the current events of the Russian soul.The novel is a mixture of high, drunken comedy - a portrait of a soul filled with wisdom and pickled in Hunter's vodka who spends his days traipsing around Moscow but has never once seen the Kremlin. With this cheerful admission we are off on a hallucinatory ride through the increasingly desperate mind of Venedikt Yerofeev. He once remarked that Moscow Stations was 'ninety pages of funny stuff and ten pages of sad stuff' but it is mostly about a clear-eyed man who can still say, no matter how much he has drunk: 'I, who have consumed so much that I've lost track of how much, and in what order - I'm the soberest man in the world.'

An account of the cultured alcoholic and self-mocking intellectual Yerofeev’s heroic odyssey from Moscow to neighbouring Petushki. The production successfully transferred to the West End (1995), where Tom Courtenay’s performance and the play received much acclaim.Cast size: 1