Translated material
Truth at the bottom
On October 24, we will celebrate the 70th birthday of Venedikt Erofeev, who died of throat, from vodka, from loneliness, from need and despair back in 1990. He did not feel the fresh wind of Gorbachev changes. For him in 1988, little changed: the same flags, the same lie, the same Vodara.
I will surprise you now: the broom was not a drunkenness, did not belong to the “lost generation” and did not drown the mind in wine. He was an outcast, an “superfluous man”, could not fit into the Soviet way of life, was very afraid to “get lost” among the scoops and found his terrible and talented sagas about how the thoughtful intelligentsia emigrated into a binge, because all the other borders were closed, and the visa in emigration could really put itself in the wine department. Venichka was pure intellectual, marked from birth by the Stalinist claws. He was born in the cursed and pitch in 1938, in a place suitable only for exile, at the station of the orthoconda of the Murmansk region. His father served there the head of the station. Arrested in 1939, sat in camps until 1954. Venichka spent his childhood in an orphanage in Kirovsk, on the Kola Peninsula. It seemed - to walk a broom in the tramps. But he graduated from a school with a gold medal and entered the philological faculty of Moscow State University. And then it was necessary to adapt, rejoice at the miserable Khrushchev thaw, but he did not know how to lie. He was expelled. He tried to study in the province, in three institutes. He was knocked out and from there.
And he voluntarily chose the “bottom” and found other “universities”. From 1958 to 1975, Venichka lived without a residence permit, worked as a loader, a fiberglass receiver, a stoker and a driller. He knew the life of the hard workers and in 1970 he wrote his masterpiece “Moscow - Cockerels” (about how a simple Soviet people drink). The story was printed in Israel, and in the USSR - only in 1988. The second masterpiece is “Walpurga Night” (about how the dissident intelligentsia drinks to death).
He was looking for a point of support, in 1985 he even accepted Catholicism. Baptism was seditious, and Catholicism was doubly seducted. But this did not support it either. There was emptiness. Drinking from grief, looking for oblivion in a bottle - this is generally very characteristic of the Russian “little man”, who does not dare otherwise protest against the torture touches of the “tough porphyry of the state”, this, according to Mandelstam, “rude and poor turnover”. The beginning was laid by Marmelades, an official from "Crime and Punishment." “For that, I drink that I am looking for this of compassion and feelings in drinking. Not fun, but I’m looking for a single sorrow ... I drink, for I want to suffer purely! ”
And the idea of fleeing the intelligentsia from unbearable life for the first time beat A.N. Ostrovsky. Ozuzhev - Zhadov: “Maybe you’ll sink with my light hand, so don’t drink wine, but drink vodka. Wine is not affordable for us, but vodka, brother, best of all: you will forget grief and cheaply. ”
If only vodka! The intelligent hero of the Valpurgi Night dies in a psychiatric hospital from a denaturate. The lyrical hero of “Moscow - Petushkov” offers cocktails: “Cathedral of the Trekh”, “Tears of the Komsomol member”, “Kiss Aunt Klava”. It enters the nail polish there, and the tooth elixir, and the remedy for sweating legs, and shampoo, and brake fluid. And still: "In the morning - a groan, in the evening - crying, at night - gnashing tooth ..."
Venichkin will die on the background of the shining sinister Kremlin from the hands of four KGB agents. Horror, flight, mania of persecution. And - an awl in the throat. Either this, or to the camps, in a psychiatric hospital, under the train. There was no alternative to honest. Yevtushenko wrote: "An honest drunkard still costs hundreds of teetotalers-rolleries."
Watch yourself Venichkina recipes. A little more controlled democracy - and will come in handy.