Hollow Spirits

"YOU SEE, man is not just a physical being. He is also a spiritual being, nay, more, a mystical, supra-spiritual being. And here I was, waiting for all three.. to throw up." The voice, belonging to Erofeev, the author-narrator of Moscow Circles, reeks of cheap vodka and ironic self-revelation. Erofeev, you see, is not merely drunk--he's metaphysically smashed, floating somewhere on the far side of oblivion, in the alcoholic backwater of heightened consciousness. His sodden satirical monologue is a latter-day Notes from Underground (and under the influence)--a profoundly funny novel that ranks as a satirical masterpiece. In his preface, Erofeev explains that "The first edition of Moscow Circles sold out fast, since it came out in only one copy." However, tongue-in-check, this statement reveals much grim truth about present official Soviet culture. Moscow Circles is a product of the samizdar (from sam--"self" and izdatel' stvo--"publishing"), whereby unpublishable novels circulate clandestinely in typescript copies. Appearing in this form in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, it eventually made its way abroad, and became a best-seller in France and Italy.

Little can be gleaned about the author himself from the cryptic "biographical" information on the dustcover, which sounds much like the drunken fiction inside. But if his background is unclear, Erofeev's literary heritage is not: his prose is in the great Russian grotesque tradition, hearkening back to Gogol by way of such earlier Soviet satirists as Bulgakov, Zamyatin, and Zoshchenko. There are also traces of authors as diverse as the Symbolist Andrei Bely (in some of the bizarre urban imagery). Rabelais, and J.D. Salinger (whose Catcher in the Rye was widely circulated in the Soviet Union)

BUT EROFEEV'S narrative is essentially unique--suigeneris from a bottle; the story is told entirely from the viewpoint of a drunken man riding the train from Moscow to the outlying village of Petushki, a paradise of sorts where he will find true love or, at the very least, great sex. But his journey is doomed from the start. Just as in Moscow, he has never seen the Kremlin so he is fated never to view Petushki either.

The journey itself takes on epic proportions, though like most great Russian picaresques (such as Dead Souls) the distance traveled is insignificant and indeed pointless. His monologue, punctuated only by the names of train stations along the Moscow-Petushki line, lurches into and out of reality like a rusty zoom lens. Sometimes whispered confession, sometimes giddy rhetoric, it continually breaks into schizoid dialogue, accosting the reader as an ill-at-ease fellow-traveler and involuntary confidant.

THE NARRATIVE is leavened, however, by Erofeev's prodigal powers of comic invention. There are countless passages of Rabelaisian discourse. One entire chapter is devoted to a detailed analysis of Russia's greatest calling--hiccups. Another chapter is a bartender's manual for some of the most bizarre drinks ever conceived, including an unorthodox mixture of beer, two kinds of shampoo (one anti-dandruff), and insect repellant. The humor ranges from the highly subtle to the truly gross, most of it reasonably well-served by J.R. Dorrell's colloquial translation.

Though a comedy, Moscow Circles is dense with darker implications as Erofeev mercilessly reveals the absurdities of Soviet life. The reader learns, for example, of his stint as a construction foreman; the workers would lay some cable one day, get drunk, take it out the next, get drunk, and so on ad nauseam. He was eventually fired because he made the system more efficient--be dispensed with the cable altogether. The turgid rhetoric of state propaganda is lampooned in the workers' hypocritical socialist pledges, but the humor does not eclipse more sinister themes: "I like the fact that my compatriots have such vacant and protruding eyes. They fill me with virtuous pride...They harbour no thought--but what power!"

On yet another level, Moscow Circles is a literary odyssey. Erofeev and his fellow-passengers engage in some hilarious literary polemics tracing alcoholism in German and Russian authors (Chekhov's last words: "Let's have some champagne!"), even as his own journey takes on a mythico-literary cast. Erofeev is Sheherezade, avoiding one thousand and one train fares by telling obscene stories to chief Ticket Inspector Semyonych. He is Oedipus, parrying the ribald riddles of a drunken Sphinx. He is Dante descending through the Moscow circles of Hell, his Virgil a bottle of Stolychnaya. And in the tragic denouement, Erofeev becomes Christ on Golgotha, crying out in anguish "Why, oh Lord, did you forsake me?"

It is indeed at this point that the already-present bitterness corrodes the satire away completely, leaving nothing but the inherent despair of Erofeev's situation. Having somehow missed Petushki altogether, he is hopelessly back in Moscow. The alcoholic haze dissipates, and the Kremlin looms up as a terrifying symbol of reality. At his absurd journey's end he is crucified by four shodowy figures--one of them an unmistakable echo of Stalin.

THOUGH the spirit-soaked pages of Moscow Circles are a grim testimony to the destructiveness of alcoholism in the Soviet Union--Erofeev makes it clear he's lived through it himself--the novel's implications reach far beyond the topical or the social. Erofeev's alcoholic innocence is ultimately a spurious from of escape: "I have seen the world close to and from a distance, from within and from without, I understand it but I cannot accept it...I am the soberest man on earth."

In the stifling oppressiveness of the totalitarian world, there is no escape--only alienation. When the cup of satire is drained and the bracing giddiness wears off, we are left to stare at the bottom which holds nothing but tragedy.