Venedikt Erofeev kept notebooks almost all his life: "Moscow - Petushki" and his other works were born from them, and they became the main source of information about the writer's life and the formation of his style. Their publication - first in the form of small collections, and then in its entirety - began immediately after Erofeev's death. The books are filled with excerpts from what was read, replicas of friends and casual acquaintances, diary entries, phone numbers and debt lists, aphorisms, jokes and puns. Here Erofeev honed his style, and many of the entries were almost unchanged in his works; others, no worse, remained, carefully written in separate notebooks. In his notebooks, Venedikt Erofeev appears to be a sad philosopher and a lover of paradoxes, and reading them is no less interesting than "Moscow - Petushki".
Source: https://arzamas.academy/mag/537-vipiski
1. About a reason to drink
"On September 20 of this year to sprinkle the shooting of 26 Baku commissars."
The 1978 note may seem joking, but it is not the only case when Erofeev is going to celebrate some unexpected memorable date. Other records mention the 150th anniversary of the great flood of 1824 in St. Petersburg, the 70th anniversary of Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, the 90th anniversary of "lying at the bottom of the Yaik" Vasily Chapaev and even a kind of Pushkin's anniversary - the 150th anniversary of the day when Pushkin received a loan from Nicholas I to print the "History of Pugachev".
Such a love of the writer for unobvious anniversaries is explained by his passion for exact dates, his desire to correlate his own biography with historical events, and, probably, purely everyday necessity to find a reason for drinking. But the main reason lies in the aesthetic plane - it's no accident that all the memorable dates mentioned by Erofeo look frankly ironic.
In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union was overwhelmed by a wave of anniversaries associated with the events of the October Revolution and the Civil War, and the culmination was the celebration of the centenary of Lenin's birth (by the way, this is the date the members of the cable laying brigade in "Moscow - Petushki", when, under the leadership of Venichka, they solemnly swear "on the occasion of the upcoming century to end occupational accidents"). This is what Erofeev sadly writes about in his 1969-1970 notebook:
"Once started, it is already difficult to stop. 50 years of Soviet power establishment in Aktobe, 25 years of Lviv-Sandomir operation etc., etc. A muddy stream of dull, amazing anniversaries is spreading".
Offering to "sprinkle" another anniversary, Erofeev makes an attempt to parody the official Soviet language, making it senseless. And thus, maybe, to make his existence near it a little more acceptable.
2. The benefits of alcohol
"About the need for wine, i.e. a lot of things would have been saved, if, say, in April 17. Ilyich would have been such that he could not have gotten on the armored car. I.e. the task is to stop drinking drunk and make them".
Behind Erofeev's typical joking form there is a serious content. Alcohol as a natural limiter is one of the constant themes of his recordings. A drunk person is not able to do much, which means that he is less likely to commit some meanness. Historical sober Lenin is cruel and ruthless, Lenin from the Erofeo sketch causes laughter and, perhaps, even sympathy.
The idea about Lenin, who got so drunk that at the most responsible moment he couldn't climb on the armored car and give his historical speech, is like an anecdote. In a certain sense, it is an anecdote, whose purpose is to revive a frozen historical personality with the help of humor. Probably for this very purpose Erofeev writes in pages quotes from letters of Lenin and Krupskaya, choosing the funniest ones. For example, this one: "Still, I'm sorry that I'm not a man, I would've walked ten times more".
From these extracts for the two days of February 1988 formed "My Little Leninia" - the last completed work by Erofeev. Although it is often referred to as postmodernism, it is in fact more of an attempt to humanize the Soviet officialdom by means available to the writer. Hearing the word 'postmodernism,' Erofeev would probably be as squeamish as if he considered himself a Russian intellectual.
3. About mixing genres
"Not a laugh with tears, but a morning rust with a quiet sobbing in the pillow, a tragedy with a farce, music with superprosaism, and so that it was quiet and unremarkable. All genres are merged into one, from rondo to parody, I do not go for less.
Interestingly, Erofeev is united not even by opposites, but by extreme points: "Not laughter with tears, but morning rust with a quiet sobbing in the pillow...". This fragment expresses both his love for everything abnormal, beyond the usual, and his hatred for the "golden mean. The same is the quote from Ibsen's "Per Gynt", which Erofeev wrote in 1961:
The spiciness is dear to us people,
When normal people are fed, we are fed up.
The habitual no longer drinks us.
Only the extreme - thinness or inferiority,
Or youth or old age - capable of
Hit in the head, and the middle
Only to cause nausea is able to
Spice, unfamiliarity, obscenity - this is the element of Eropheus. It is needed to impress the reader, to bring him out of balance. Extremity "hits the head" like the famous Venichkin cocktails with their fantastic and unconnected ingredients - disinfectant to kill small insects, BF glue, brake fluid. Actually, all of Erofeev's works are in a sense such a cocktail - a mixture of different genres ("from rondo to parody"), language registers and stylistic layers.
4. About the commonness of grief
"You have a light bulb. And my heart is burned out, so I don't say anything."
In a crudely ironic form, as if it were a replica of an electric grumpy, Erofeev expresses something really important for himself. "The real passion of Veni was grief. He suggested writing this word with a capital letter like Tsvetaeva's: Grief," writes Olga Sedakova, recalling an episode in "Moscow - Roosters," in which Venichka compares herself with the heroine of Kramskoy's "Unfortunate Grief. There Venichka says that those "sorrow" and "fear" that ordinary people experience in exceptional moments of life, such as the death of loved ones, he feels all the time. For him, grief turns into everyday life, something familiar, but not losing its sharpness.
In this context, this record becomes clear. For Erofeev, "burned out" heart is the same everyday situation as for others - a burned out bulb. But if the bulb can be replaced, it's harder to do with the heart. The hopelessness of this situation is well expressed in the 1973 record on the same subject:
"Compare their gravity and hopelessness and my stupid. They have a salary tomorrow - and today there is nothing to eat. And I have the Leningrad blockade.
5. About my favorite firstborn.
"And Tikhonov would have messed up everything. He would have been Brutus in Athens and Pericles in Rome."
Vadim Tikhonov, "beloved first-born", to whom the writer devoted "Moscow - Cocks", became not only a character in Erofeev's main book, but also a permanent hero of notebooks. The distinctive feature of "Wadi" is its dense lack of education. Tikhonov really wasn't too erudite: he graduated from high school, was a bully, and memoirists often recall his illiteracy and bad manners. Tikhonov's uneducated and uneducated nature was obviously a constant reason for jokes among friends and, perhaps, the reason for the irrational love that Erofeev felt for him.
Erofeev notes in his notebooks that his friend confuses inventor Henry Ford with chemist Ernest Rutherford, composer Offenbach and philosopher Feierbach, actress Vera Maretskaya and ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, artist Rembrandt and politician Willy Brandt. Erofeev doesn't even miss a chance to tell about it to a Swiss researcher, the author of her dissertation on "Moscow - Cockerels". It is as if he contrasts Tikhonov's famous joking description of the intellectual who is able to distinguish Gogol from Hegel, Hegel from Bebel, Bebel from Babel and further on the list. On the contrary, Tikhonov does not know anything. In the quoted fragment, he mockingly resembles Chaadayev from the famous Pushkin poem, but if Chaadayev "in Rome would have been Brutus, in Athens Pericles," then Tikhonov would have confused everything here.
6. About suitable comparisons
"Igor Avdiyev, long as the life of akin Dzhabaev, bearded as a joke".
Erofeev's notebooks often mention his other friend, Igor Avdiev. He had an eccentric appearance: very tall, with a long thick beard. Erofeev himself was also tall. "...Igor had a meter ninety-seven, and Vienna had a meter eighty-seven (he usually said: meter eighty-eight)," his second wife Galina Nosova recalled. "Me and Avdiev are both long. But it is as long as a December night, and I am as a June day," writes Erofeev himself, using typical comparisons, conveying not only the similarity in their appearance, but also the difference: Erofeev had brown hair, Avdiev had black and blue.
These comparisons are based on a simple pun: long is often called a tall and, as a rule, a skinny person, but at the same time life can be long - for example, the Soviet poet Dzhambul Dzhabaev, who lived 99 years. To create the same effect, you can use not different meanings of the same word, but stable language expressions: a person can become bearded as a joke, long as a ruble, or high as a reward. This is how the Eropheus joke is born.
The writer seems to have understood the simplicity of such puns himself. "We should get used to joking in Crocodile", - notes Erofeev in his 1966 record. However, some of his puns are based not only on primitive humor, but also on his characteristic desire to update his language and ability to accurately describe his appearance or character:
"It is the longest and the longest of all the liturgies of Basil the Great.
There is no doubt that this note also refers to Igor Avdiyev. While Erofeev usually portrays Tikhonov as ungracious, Avdiyev, as the hero of the writer's notebooks, is distinguished by his deep and very serious religiosity. Erofeev could write 'tall as a kalancha' or 'strict as a reprimand', but he chose another option. This may not have been the funniest pun, but a fairly accurate description.
7. About ambiguity
"Is it about *** [prostitutes] or not *** [prostitutes]? Diderot says, "The happiest person is the one who gives happiness to the greatest number of people."
The source of this aphorism is a tear-off calendar for 1976. A random collection of various quotations, anniversaries and useless information about everything in the world is an absolutely yerofeevish format. From this calendar Erofeo not only writes out his favorite aphorisms, but also learns about the upcoming 70th anniversary of Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, who is going to "sprinkle", that Alexander the Great, among other things, was the inventor of ice cream, and the total length of bookshelves storage Lenin Library is more than 400 kilometers. Erofeev's love of reading breakaway calendars probably began as a child. This is how the writer's sister Nina Frolova remembers it:
"We didn't have any special books, so we read everything that comes in handy; we had a small tear-off calendar, which is hung on the wall and tear off every day a leaf. The broom of this calendar - all 365 days - fully knew by heart even before school; for example, tell him: July 31 - he answers: Friday, sunrise, sunset, longitude of the day, holidays and everything written on the back.
8. About silence
"There is no need to hurry with the publication and promulgation of anything. Newton, who discovered the world gravity, introduced it to people 20 years later".
This recording was made in 1974; very soon the theme of creative silence will become extremely painful for Erofeev. Written in 1969, "Moscow - Cockerels" were published abroad in 1973 ("My prose - in the bottling since 1970 and since 1973," - joked the writer himself), in the same 1973 in Samizdat magazine "Veche" published his essay about the philosopher Vasily Rozanov - and his next text, the play" Walpurgis Night ", will appear only after 12 years. All this time Erofeev will suffer from creative dumbness and impossibility to create something equal to "Roosters" - his creative debut and opus magnum. Alexander Leontovich writes in his memoirs about Yerofeev:
"He was incredibly talented in general, and I think that he implemented well, if by one percent. My wife told him about the "Cocks": "You, like Tereshkova, flew once - that's all". He turned around - he was very offended, - but did not answer anything.
Erofeev only had to make bitter jokes, as he did in his 1978 notebook:
"Why don't you keep quiet for five years?" - they ask. I answer, as before the count answered: "I can't help but be silent!".
9. About the relationship with God
"I asked God only - "as an exception" to make this summer one and a half degrees cooler than usual. He promised me nothing firm.
The comic effect of this fragment is based on the omnipotence of the addressee and the insignificance of the request itself, emphasized by the insignificant number for which Erofeev asks to lower the temperature - "a degree and a half cooler than usual". In addition, the Lord cannot promise anything "firm", as if the request seems difficult to fulfill or fraught with too much burdensome trouble. Erofeev paints himself an annoying sniffing petitioner, and God - either a petty official, or a tired parent who can not decide whether to allow the child yet sweet. Erofeev loved this very form of complaints about the weather: the same form of "a degree and a half" he used later, but with the reverse sign:
"I asked God to make at least one and a half degrees warmer than usual. He did not promise me anything firm.
10. About the course of time
"Here you want to sleep so much with wine that you tell, for example, a joke about Chapaev, you say "cha", and "pa" no longer have time".
An example of Erofeev's favorite hyperbolic design. Here, in his characteristic manner, he refreshes rubbish language cliches like "in an instant" or "and you won't be able to blink an eye". You can say "and it's already dark before you can blink your eye," or you can say that:
"And how quickly the darkness comes this November. I swung - it was still light, and how ****** [drank] - complete darkness.
Instead of using cliches, the writer creates an independent story in his place. The onset of darkness is as fast as the movement of the hand from the table to the throat. The simultaneity of the two events - the stack tip over and the darkness coming - creates the illusion of their connection, as if one was caused by the other, and also speaks about their similarities: the feeling of the sudden November evening is really something like a heavy intoxication.
