Plenty of this makes for hilarious reading. On the train, where tickets are paid in grams of vodka, Erofeev finds himself a few drinking buddies and begins to wax both prosaic and poetic about the nature of hiccups and the connection between creation and the bottle. The bulk of the novel recounts his subsequent trip from Moscow to Petrushki where, supposedly, a beautiful woman who bore him a child awaits at the station. He measures everything in grams and their portents, beginning with a bizarre diagram delineating the connection between worker productivity and libation that ultimately loses him his job. The physical and mental slavery of addiction, in this case to spirits, is presented to the reader in ways that are both humorous (with a heavy dosage of the pitch-black) and horrifying.Įrofeev stars in his own novel as the obsessive compulsive (but chaotic) alcoholic writer who finds himself waking up in hallways and lamenting the hours that will pass until the liquor stores open their doors. Moscow to the End of the Line is a harrowing look at the link between addiction and madness with a sense of desperation akin to that of Hamson’s Hunger or, indeed, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Under the Carpet (as my Russian speaking professor use to insist was the actual title).
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