Moscow-Petushki
novel by Venedikt Yerofeyev
Moscow-Petushki, also published in English as Moscow to the End of the Line, Moscow Stations, and Moscow Circles, is a postmodernist prose poem by Russian writer and satirist Venedikt Yerofeyev.
Written between 1969 and 1970 and passed around in samizdat, it was first published in 1973 in Israel and later, in 1977, in Paris.
It was published in the Soviet Union only in 1989, during the perestroika era of Soviet history, in the literary almanac Vest' (Весть) and in the magazine Abstinence and Culture (Трезвость и Культура, Trezvost i Kultura) in a slightly abridged form.
According to David Remnick, "Yerofeyev’s vodka-sodden classic is an account of one broken man’s attempt to get from here to there in an era of absolute societal rot. It’s the funniest thing in Russian since Ilf and Petrov".
Plot
The story is a first-person narrative by an alcoholic intellectual, Venya (or Venichka), as he travels by a suburban train on a 125 km (78 mi) journey from Moscow along the Gorkovsky suburban railway line to visit his beautiful beloved and his child in Petushki, a town that is described by the narrator in almost utopian terms.
At the start of the story, he has just been fired from his job as foreman of a telephone cable-laying crew for drawing charts of the amount of alcohol he and his colleagues were consuming before and during work hours. These graphs showed a weird correlation with personal characters. For example, for a Komsomol member, the graph is like the Kremlin Wall, that of a "shagged-out old creep" is like "a breeze on the river Kama", and Venya's chart simply shows his inability to draw a straight line because of the amount he has drunk.
Venichka spends the last of his money on liquor and food for the journey.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Moscow-Petushki” is novel by Venedikt Yerofeyev. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Moscow-Petushki, novel and Venedikt, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “novel by Venedikt Yerofeyev” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1215725. VIAF identifies the subject as 191797235. The Library of Congress control number is n2015037867. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1970, 1973 and 1977.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Moscow-Petushki”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Moscow-Petushki primary sources, Moscow-Petushki archive and Moscow-Petushki research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Moscow-Petushki” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.