The lecture is devoted to the philosophical themes in Venedict Yerofeev’s prose.
“At the Moscow University I began, firstly, reading Leibniz and, secondly, drinking”: many of Venedikt Yerofeev’s statements and quotations raise laughter, however, not the kind of laughter evoked by a funny joke, but rather a feeling of absurdity of sorts, where the tragic truth is almost grasped. Leibniz is the author of the philosophical concept of theodicy, or the vindication of god. How come evil exists in a universe, created by the all-merciful, the almighty, and the all-wise god? In Yerofeev’s universe the good also exists, of course, and the protagonist is permanently accompanied by angels—but the evil and the absurd are overwhelming his world. Everything that can be destroyed has been destroyed: the meanings, the values, the moral norms. Therefore, the author’s modernist nihilism can only be targeted at himself, hence his famous “and drank immediately”, followed by a celebratory hymn to tipsy hiccup, which is a scientific treatise at the same time, containing citations from the New Testament and Dostoyevsky, Kant’s categories, and irony towards Marx and Engels, and raising questions about the inevitable fate, free will, chance and necessity, and the Chaos that has stuffed the Cosmos.
“However, if a person doesn’t want to stomp on the universe for the hell of it, they should give both Canaan Balsam and Spirit of Geneva the bum’s rush. They should sit down and make themselves The Tear of a Komsomol Girl instead. The Tear even has a weird smell, I’ll tell you why later, but first I’ll explain what’s weird about it.
Somebody drinking vodka neat will keep a clear head and a sound memory, or, on the contrary, lose both of them. But as far as The Tear of a Komsomol Girl goes, it’s quite funny: you can drink 100 grams of the Tear, and your memory’s sound as a bell, but it’s as if you’ve no head at all. Yet if you drink another 100 grams, you’ll surprise even yourself: where did I get this fantastic clear head? And where the hell’s my memory gone?”
(Venedikt Yerofeev, Moscow – Petushki, 1969. Translated by Stephen Mulrine.)
