In this blog post, we’ll explore how the formal ingenuity of this work—which spread through samizdat—and Yerofeyev’s tumultuous life intertwined to create the utopia of Petushki.
The Work and First Impressions
To most readers, the name Benedict Vasilyevich Yerofeyev (1938–1990) and the title ‘The Train from Moscow to Petushki’ will likely feel somewhat unfamiliar. While Moscow is a familiar name, it is difficult to guess what “Petushki” is. Petushki is a small town on the banks of the Klyazma River, 115 kilometers east of Moscow, and the terminus of the Moscow suburban railway line.
The work’s original title, ‘Moscow–Petushki’, refers to the railway line with its 36 stops, while simultaneously symbolizing the two worlds represented by the starting point and the terminus—the real world where the protagonist lives and the other world he seeks to reach. Although the relationship between these two worlds is revealed through the work, the true nature of Petushki ultimately remains an unattainable utopia.
‘The Train from Moscow to Petushki’ is regarded as Yerofeyev’s masterpiece and a classic of Soviet literature. During the Soviet era, when official literary styles dominated, this work spread among the public through samizdat and was widely loved. The official first editions were published abroad—in Israel in 1973 and in France in 1976—and English translations appeared in the early 1980s.
The complete text was not officially published within the Soviet Union until 1989, during the final years of the Soviet Union. The author was able to witness the book’s domestic publication and critical acclaim one year before his death.
Yerofeyev: Biographical Background of His Life and Work
While a clear distinction must be made between the characters in the novel and the author himself, in ‘The Train from Moscow to Petushki’, the author’s personal experiences are strongly projected onto the characters, so familiarity with his biography aids in understanding the work. Yerofeyev was born in 1938 in Chupa, Karelia.
He excelled academically, receiving a gold medal upon completing elementary school, and enrolled in the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University in 1955, but was expelled after only three semesters. While various theories circulate regarding the reasons for his expulsion—including participation in an unauthorized student play and failure to attend mandatory military reserve training—it is clear that his behavior during this period revealed a tendency to reject conventional norms.
His family history also influenced the formation of his worldview. In 1946, his father, a railroad worker, was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda; his mother was fired from her job; and the three children were forced to live in a children’s home in Kirovsk, Murmansk Oblast, until their father’s release in 1954.
After leaving university, he received further education at institutions such as the Vladimir City Teachers’ College, where he interacted with young writers and artists.
However, he was forced to leave school for reasons such as writing satirical poetry or possessing a Bible.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Yerofeyev drifted from one job to another, working as a grocery store porter, a stonemason’s assistant, a heating engineer, a security guard, a recyclables collector, and a highway construction worker. From 1964 to 1969, he was mobilized to install telephone cables, traveling throughout the Soviet Union, and from 1969 to 1974, he worked as a telephone line repairman in the Moscow region.
This way of life was closely linked to the creation of his works. His experiences during this period were projected directly and indirectly into his writing, and his friends sometimes recognized themselves in the characters and events depicted in his works. With the exception of his final years, Yerofeyev lived without a fixed residence; he even lived without a residence permit until 1974, which meant that, officially, his life was quite different from that of the average Soviet citizen. It is no coincidence that his protagonists are often portrayed as homeless wanderers.
On a personal level, he was a charming yet shy man; he met his first wife, Valentina Zimakova, while attending the Vladimir State Pedagogical University, and they had a son. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he frequently visited Musilino near Petushki to see his son and wrote several works and textbooks for him. The first page of the book contains a dedication to his son.
His second wife, Galina, provided him with a relatively comfortable home during his final years, preserved his manuscripts and notes, and worked hard to have his works published. Among Yerofeyev’s other works is ‘Dmitri Shostakovich’ (1972), which features a recycling collector as the protagonist.
In the mid-1980s, he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and after surgery, he could speak only with the aid of a mechanical device. Although he was offered treatment in Paris, the Soviet authorities did not grant him permission to travel abroad. His condition worsened, and he died on May 5, 1990, at the age of 51.
Yerofeyev loved reading and was deeply immersed in history and literature. He recited Symbolist and Acmeist poetry, read books in Latin and German, and took great emotional pleasure in classical music. He cited the influence of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Gogol, the early Dostoevsky, Stern, Sasha Chorny, and Vasily Knyazev, among others.
Alcoholism had a significant impact on his life and contributed to his posthumous mythologization. However, there are varying interpretations as to whether alcohol was merely a source of suffering for him or also a creative wellspring. It is also worth noting that the oppressive and seemingly hopeless reality of Soviet life helped nurture his talent for satire.
Form and Structure
This work adopts a unique structure consisting of 44 episodes, with the titles of the actual railway stations along the route from Moscow’s Kursk Station to Petushki Station serving as chapter titles. The story unfolds in tandem with the train’s journey as it stops at each station and then departs again.
What is particularly interesting is that the actual travel time from the departure station to the destination—approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes—almost exactly matches the time it takes to read the entire work aloud; this temporal structure further enhances the work’s rhythm and the reader’s experience.
The story begins with the protagonist, Benichka, waking up in the morning at the entrance of a strange apartment building after falling asleep there while completely intoxicated, and trying to piece together his memories of the previous day. He is an alcoholic who wanders aimlessly, homeless, with nothing but a single suitcase. However, it becomes clear from the very first paragraph that he is not merely a drunkard.
Benichka is a peculiar character who lives in Moscow and roams the entire city at will, yet has never once seen the Kremlin. The passage where he declares that everyone talks about the Kremlin—and that he, too, has heard everyone talk about it—but has never actually seen it is quite significant.
What rescues the protagonist—who is acutely aware of the Soviet regime’s oppression and the sorrow of the victimized Russian people—from despair and emptiness is the presence of his beloved wife and young son. They live in Petushki, a place where birds sing ceaselessly day and night, and where jasmine blooms and never withers, whether in winter or summer. These beautiful, lyrical descriptions of nature appear only when the work depicts memories associated with Petushki. Consequently, they stand in stark contrast to the rest of the work—which, like Dostoevsky’s novels, contain no descriptions of nature beyond urban landscapes and offer only brief depictions of Moscow’s streets, taverns, and people. Moreover, it is a place where the weight of original sin does not oppress the people. The protagonist begins his journey by boarding a train bound for Petushki at Kursk Station.
There is no sense of tension on the train, which is filled with ordinary Russian people whose eyes show no interest in anything. Benichka feels love and pride as he looks into the eyes of his people—eyes that remain unfailingly vacant even in times of trial and disaster, and even in times of doubt.
Later on the train, a feast of conversation unfolds between the passengers and the protagonist. Starting with the “utterly foolish man” and his companion, the “utterly clever man,” Benichka observes and gets to know new characters. Through conversations with them—or through the protagonist’s soliloquies—an astonishingly diverse range of topics related to literature, art, religion, philosophy, politics, and sexuality are discussed. In fact, this work can be considered a prime example of intertextuality. Every discourse in the novel is interwoven with historical figures or events, literary and artistic works, and philosophical discourses, with references to the Bible being particularly dominant. One can identify traces of Shakespeare, Goethe, Pasternak, Kuprin, Chekhov, Bunin, and Bulgakov, as well as the borrowing of Dostoevskian themes—such as drunkenness and suffering. Without the various background notes included in the footnotes of this book, it is difficult to accurately grasp the author’s intended meaning.
However, the way these elements are presented is somewhat absurd, and the repeated rambling makes the text difficult to follow at times. Not only in the language Benichka uses but also in the dialogue between the characters as a whole, serious and problematic themes are treated in an exaggerated and caricatured manner. In the work, profound statements about religion or the meaning of life are intertwined with profanity and vulgar language; this mixture of discourses at disparate levels is not only deliberate but also a central device in Erofeyev’s prose.
Meanwhile, as the protagonist becomes increasingly intoxicated, the story takes on an increasingly hallucinatory and nightmarish quality. Finally, Venichka is horrified to realize that the train is not heading toward Petushki. Now, the boundary between reality and fantasy has blurred, and everything is rendered ambiguous. The protagonist may have fallen asleep and missed the station, or he may never have left Moscow in the first place.
The train is completely empty, and Benichka trembles with fear and anxiety. Amidst this, Satan, a riddle-posing Sphinx, and the black-clad duchess from Kramskoy’s painting appear, engaging Benichka in arguments or physical altercations. After experiencing bizarre situations—it is unclear whether they are dreams or hallucinations—the protagonist suddenly finds himself wandering near the Kremlin.
As he turns into an alley, four anonymous figures approach him; Benichka immediately recognizes their faces but does not reveal their identities. The work concludes with him being beaten, chased, and ultimately captured and killed by them.
Despite its brevity, this work allows for multifaceted approaches and interpretations due to the diversity of literary and cultural codes condensed within it.
Typically, this work has been explored through the lenses of the picaresque genre, parody, and postmodernism. As a result, it has been interpreted both as the journey of a nihilist heading toward the void and, on the other hand, as a profound expression of religious faith. At times, it has been hailed as a Rabelaisian masterpiece, while at other times, the entire work has been disparaged due to the inconsistent and rambling speech and behavior of the protagonist, an alcoholic.
The multifaceted nature of the characters—particularly the protagonist, Benichka—has played a significant role in enabling these diverse interpretations. On the surface, Benichka is simply an alcoholic. Rather than engaging with the Kremlin—the symbol that shapes and dominates the modern world of Moscow—what matters most to him is drinking. The protagonist vomits, staggers, is ignored, and suffers from hangovers, yet he constantly seeks out alcohol. He even holds the belief that “human life is nothing more than a brief period of intoxication.” Some drink less, some drink more, but we are all intoxicated in our own way.
According to the work, the nightmare that haunts Benichka is not the fact that he is misunderstood by the world. What matters is that the world sees him completely upside down, in a contradictory way. Life has already transcended the realm of making oneself understood and being understood. Just as one must turn oneself upside down to see an upside-down world—or as if the world is right but he himself is upside down—the protagonist drinks alcohol consistently throughout the story. This is why the work is sometimes referred to as an “alcoholic narrative.” The landscape of the world as seen through the blurred eyes of a drunkard forms the core of this work.
However, as the story unfolds, the protagonist reveals other aspects of himself that had been hidden. Another reason the “drinking” motif is significant is that the protagonist, who possesses extraordinary knowledge and insight, paradoxically takes on the appearance of a iurodivyi (holy fool) through alcohol. Iurodivyi are Orthodox saints who imitate Christ’s asceticism and sacrifice to empty themselves, wandering the country and engaging in eccentric behavior like fools. They practice a paradoxical act of faith, ultimately seeking to reach perfection through self-emptying. Whether intentional or not, Benichka’s life as a homeless wanderer, gradually losing her possessions one by one, bears a resemblance to that of the iurodivyi. As mentioned earlier, the coexistence of two seemingly incompatible layers in Benichka’s speech also connects to the iurodivyi tradition.
In that it fuses modern alcohol culture with the tradition of the Yurodivy, this work can be understood as a “reconstruction of myth.” At the heart of the Benichka myth lies a refinement that borders on hypersensitivity. However, this refinement does not stem from a dignified tradition but rather belongs to the “otherworld”—emerging from the very midst of an environment that is anything but refined. Words like “eldest son” or “angel” are concepts quite foreign to Soviet culture, but in Benichka’s usage, they are imbued with a new kind of nobility. While it cannot be said that these words are entirely devoid of irony, it is not straightforward to interpret them solely as irony.
Rather, it can be described as anti-irony, giving birth to a new dimension of seriousness through irony about irony. This also aligns with the kitsch elements of postmodern anti-aesthetics that Mikhail Epstein and others have highlighted in this work. Epstein points out that themes previously difficult to classify within aesthetic categories paradoxically create anti-art, and that these kitsch elements connect with the tradition of the Eurodiv, which seeks the manifestation of God within foolishness and baseness.
Of course, as noted by Zorin, a contemporary Russian humanities scholar, this work is not free from Bakhtin’s so-called “Rabelaisianism,” which characterized the intellectual atmosphere of Russian culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In this work, the modern counterpart to the carnival is none other than “alcohol.” However, it is important to note that, unlike the characters in the carnival world—as Mikhail Epstein points out—the protagonist is thrown into a distorted, surreal, and grotesque Moscow—not in a state of “intoxication” from vodka, but in a state of “hangover.” The state of a hangover represents one pole in the dialectic between sobriety and intoxication, and this dialectic leads a person from arrogance to meekness. In this process, the arrogance of the sober person is resolved through intoxication, while the arrogance of the intoxicated person is resolved through a hangover. The hangover serves as a kind of “thesis” stage; in this state, the carnivalesque, upside-down world is inverted once more, giving rise to a bizarre seriousness that can no longer be called a carnival in the traditional sense. As a new worldview emerges, the work is reconstructed.Another image projected onto the protagonist, Benichka, is that of Jesus. Motifs of resurrection and biblical allusions are scattered throughout the work. As he repeatedly gets drunk and wakes up, maintaining the perspective of a Soviet-era dissident, the protagonist can be read as a modern Jesus who repeatedly undergoes resurrection and crucifixion. In fact, the phrase “Arise and go (Dalida-gum),” addressed to the resurrected, is frequently repeated in the work. Early in the work, as the narrator wakes up at the entrance of a strange apartment building and steps outside, the words he says to himself—“Go, Benichka, go”—are one instance of “Dalidagum” that runs throughout the entire work. This “Dalidagum” from the first chapter ultimately connects to the theme of execution: “Rise and prepare for the end.” The scene where the protagonist’s mind awakens after drinking Korean droba and his limbs wither away; the fact that the three figures who drag the protagonist out of the restaurant are referred to as “executioners”; and the passage in the following chapter stating, “Let us commemorate these two hours, which are like death, with a minute of silence”—all of these elements reinforce this association. Most intriguing of all is that the lynching scene in the square effectively evokes the theme of Jesus’s crucifixion. Furthermore, while the moment of resurrection is depicted as the protagonist coming back to life after drinking a hangover cure, the process of resurrection itself is treated as a mystery, as evidenced by the omission of certain chapters (such as the “Serfimolot—Karacharovo” chapter).In fact, the multifaceted nature of the protagonist, Benichka, gives rise to diverse interpretations of the work. At times, the protagonist’s character—which goes beyond mere diversity to the point of being contradictory and paradoxical—is also linked to the work’s genre. This work can be read not only as medieval literature of the “fool-saint” tradition, such as Benedict Yerofeyev’s ‘The Train from Moscow to Petushki’, a picaresque novel, travel literature, medieval literature of the holy fool, but it can also be read as a parody of Socialist Realism, an example of intertextuality (drawing on numerous literary works, social, political, and cultural texts, and biblical quotations), a quintessential example of 1960s “alcoholic prose,” the revival of 1960s Russian modernism, or a pioneering work of Russian postmodernism.
