Venedikt Yerofeyev and Anna Akhmatova: Two Unorthodox Russian Litterateurs Who Stamped Perennial Marks on Inquisitive Readers’ Mindscapes

 

Anti-establishment writing questions and challenges the power of established structures, such as government, corporations, and dominant social norms. It often highlights perceived injustices, inequalities, and corruption within the existing social, political, and economic systems. This article is based on two unorthodox Russian litterateurs who did not go with the flow and who stood their ground under inconvenient and adverse circumstances but still they were able to stamp perennial marks on the map of world literature.

Some might say that Russian author Venedikt Yerofeyev (1938 – 1990), who was an outcast and a dissident and died of throat cancer at the early age of 51, is hardly a role model. Yerofeyev himself, always ready for self-effacement, couldn’t agree more. But let’s get real – can we name a single great author without a dark side?

Famous primarily for his “poem-in-prose” - Moscow to The End of The Line - Yerofeyev also left reams of notes that were humorous and paradoxical, but deeply sad at the same time. We looked through them and deliver the best advice and wisdom from this Soviet underground writer.
“Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn’t get a chance to start feeling proud; so that man is sad and perplexed,” is a phrase you meet in the first page of Moscow to The End of The Line.

This sounds funnier in context: A Lyrical Hero, (based on Venedikt Yerofeyev), wakes up with a terrible hangover and slowly goes to the shop to buy some liquor. That’s what Yerofeyev is about: mixing the sacred and the profane, alcoholic dreams with philosophical, biblical wisdom.

For a while, Yerofeyev worked as a foreman in a brigade of four workers, but he was fired because they did nothing but drink, just like many others did in order to escape insensible labor.

Here’s how Yerofeyev describes his feelings after being sacked: “I’ll remain below, and from below I spit on their social ladder. Right, spit on every rung of it. In order to climb it, it’s necessary to be forged steel-assed from head to toe. And this I’m not.”

Perhaps your boss wouldn’t like that one – so be careful. Or just read him/her some Yerofeyev, and go get drunk together.

“Every item you see must be able to become a theme for you,” Yerofeyev wrote in his notes published under the title A Useless Fossil. He followed this pattern: everything from the New Testament to the Russian classics, and all the way to the bureaucratic Soviet newspapers and obscene language of the streets was inspirational to him. Moscow to The End of The Line mixes styles in an unpredictable way.

The other Yerofeyev quotation on the sacred art of writing goes like this: “One should write as bad as possible so that it would be disgusting to read.” This one is ironic, but some people detest Yerofeyev for his ‘alcoholic’ prose.

Yerofeyev rose and fell many times. A guy from a small town above the Arctic Circle, he enrolled in Moscow State University after being awarded a gold medal at middle school – but then he was expelled for laziness and doing nothing. “I was lying in my bed in the morning deciding whether I should go to a lecture… then thought: “Fuck it” and didn’t go anywhere,” he described his feelings.

After that, he took one low-level job after another, just to earn his bread, and was indifferent to success. Yerofeyev’s notes prove he didn’t care whatsoever and was obsessed with art only: “One should lead the life of a star. Sometimes shining, sometimes falling.”

As for the critics, he wrote: “Why should I be nice? Even our new Soviet constitution has no such article – to be nice.”

In Moscow to The End of The Line, his lyrical hero, despite pitying his life, at one point says: “Living is not at all boring… If we’ve already lived through thirty years, it’s necessary to try to live through another thirty. ‘Man is mortal.’ That’s my opinion. But… ‘Life is beautiful’ – that’s also my opinion.”

Venedikt Yerofeyev was married twice, to Valentina Vasilevna Zimakova and Galina Pavlovna Nosova. In 1966 Yerofeyev's wife, Valentina Zimakova gave birth to a son - Venedikt Venediktovich Yerofeyev. Galina Nosova died three years after Yerofeyev - having thrown herself off the balcony of her 13th floor apartment in Moscow.

In 1985 Yerofeyev was diagnosed with throat cancer. Doctors operated on him, after which he could only speak using an electro-larynx. A film was made about Moskva-Petushki in the last years of Yerofeyev's life and he can be seen speaking with the help of this apparatus. Yerofeyev died five years after he was first diagnosed with the disease, on 11 May 1990, at the Russian Oncological Center in Moscow. He is buried in Kuntsevsky Cemetery.

Venedikt Yerofeyev by remaining a maverick author throughout his life succeeded to have himself recognized worldwide as an iconoclastic Russian vanguard. Through his own carefree and indifferent approach to life, Venedikt Yerofeyev actually told us something that we all have been questing for—the meaning of life.  He once asked an evocative question while giving an interview to Havana Post “There are so many great things in life. Why should we dwell only on negativity?” In his book The Steps of The Commander, Venedikt Yerofeyev wrote these poignant words “Take the time to enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize those were the big things”.

On the other hand, a solitary icon hung in Anna Akhmatova’s Leningrad apartment, the story goes—a portrait of her younger self sketched in Paris, decades earlier, by Amedeo Modigliani. In more than a dozen studies, the starving artist had drawn her as if she were a sensual figure in ancient hieroglyphs. The other portraits had vanished, lost during the tempestuous year of the Russian Revolution. Other than the barest of furniture, little else adorned her flat. She was there, alone, when the bombs began to fall.

More than 1 million Soviet citizens had been evacuated from the city on the Neva. The Nazi blitzkrieg had reached the gates. Anna Akhmatova (1889 to 1966) had not yet been offered a place in the exodus. Nor was she permitted to take refuge in the city’s subterranean bomb shelters. Effectively, she was a member of the byvshiye lyudi, a former person. She belonged to the time before the Bolshevik coup d’état and, as such, was discardable. Many of her kind, including her ex-husband, the poet Nikolay Gumilyov, had been executed. Others had died during Chekist (the Communist secret police) torture sessions, drowned in scuttled ships, or wound up getting shot in the back of the neck in floodlit woods. Others had disappeared into the Gulag. Akhmatova remained, though denounced and largely forbidden from writing poetry. To associate with her was to attract the attention of the state. She had gone from being a cultural pharaoh to a pariah.

At great risk and with great courage, a friend, the critic Boris Tomashevsky, came to save the poet from Nazi bombardment. As he shepherded Akhmatova to the relative safety of his home, the air-raid sirens shrieked. The couple darted into the nearest building and down a flight of stairs into its derelict basement. There, they hid in the gloom of the makeshift bomb shelter, as bedlam sounded above them. Gradually, Anna’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and she noticed fading but dazzling paintings on the walls. She had inadvertently returned to her youth. This was the Stray Dog Café, the epicenter of the Russian Silver Age of poetry. With death and destruction all around, she was one of its last survivors.

Anyone writing about the past can sometimes feel that it’s just another battlefield of the politics of the present—territory to exploit. There is objective truth, of course. The bombs did fall. The murdered were murdered. And the Siege of Leningrad was the costliest in human history. Yet history is not simply what happened but rather a series of stories about what happened. Reading of Akhmatova and the Stray Dog Café, deviations are inevitable. We’re justified in trusting the broad details, but one account says that she was hit on the head by falling masonry on her return to the Stray Dog; another says that she was not yet alone but lived with her common-law husband Nikolay Punin and her son, Lev. Figures appear and disappear from the historical narrative. Akhmatova’s persecution was, and would be, horrific—she became a symbol of suffering at the hands of ideological politics—but she got a reprieve at this point, selected to write a rousing address to Leningrad’s citizenry and flown out of the city as a prominent cultural figure, worth preserving. So she did not starve to death among the 100,000 residents who perished each month in Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42.

There are many reasons for these ambiguities: the fog of war; mistranslations; Soviet airbrushing and occidental ignorance; poetic mythmaking; political inflation and deflation of the truth. Part of it has to do with us. In our consumerist age, we’re often granted what we want, not what we need, and this extends to our relationship with the past. We feign time travel to rectify social ills and resurrect forgotten figures, projecting twenty-first-century perspectives and mores onto historical epochs that didn’t possess them. It results in a kind of shadow puppetry, with historical figures becoming ciphers for our wishes and prejudices.

A silver generation to Pushkin’s gold, the Stray Dog Café’s founders had intended to find a garret location, as a beacon above Saint Petersburg. They settled for the wine cellar of the Dashkov mansion. The name, and coat of arms, came during their search, when Count Aleksey Tolstoy remarked to his fellow itinerants, “Don’t we look like a pack of stray dogs seeking shelter?” The title was confirmed when they came fortuitously upon a homeless man selling a puppy, which they bought as a mascot for their “society of intimate theater.” They opened on New Year’s Eve, 1911. More of a cabaret than a café, it was both sophisticated and raucous. Entrants were vetted at the door and placed into the categories of artists (who entered free) or “pharmacists,” who were charged three rubles to get in, under the assumption that they were philistines and voyeurs who could afford it.

Truths remain, as they have always been and must be—uneasy, difficult, questioning. Standing in a Leningrad line for the prisons, to try to contact her imprisoned son, Anna Akhmatova was approached by another mother, who asked her who could possibly articulate this grotesque, brutal world. As recounted in her epic Requiem, Anna Akhmatova replied, “I can make it.” Everything depends on those with the bravery to step forward, against the invisible tide, and say that they can carry the truth.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different
English newspapers 
and magazines.