Gurevich's poetic language is continually juxtaposed with the doctor's Soviet officialese and the endless profanities of Borenka and the nurse Tamarochka. Erofeev pits Gurevich, who improvises in iambic pentameter at every opportunity, against the hospital staff members, who attempt to suppress his verbal pyrotechnics and use force to punish him for his rebelliousness. As the doctor explains to Gurevich, "Confidentially speaking, in the recent past we have begun to hospitalize even those who, at first glance, don't have a single visible syndrome of psychic disturbance." The violence of Borenka also reinforces this prison-like atmosphere many such orderlies in mental hospitals had criminal records.Īs Naum Leiderman and Mark Lipovetsky point out, the central conflict of the play is linguistic (70). Ward 3 in Walpurgis Night, with its dictatorial doctors and his monstrous henchman Borenka "the Thug," recalls the Soviet practice of incarcerating dissidents in mental hospitals by fabricating diagnoses of illnesses. Erofeev moves the protagonist's struggle from the relatively private, interior world of Venichka's alcoholic hallucinations to the more public arena of a mental hospital that functions as a microcosm of Soviet culture and power structures. Its description of an alcoholic, half-Jewish poet, Lev Isakovich Gurevich, who is confined in a mental ward of a Soviet hospital, considerably enlarges the tragic dimensions of the poema. In many ways, the subject matter of Walpurgis Night is even more horrifying than that of Moscow to the End of the Line. Erofeev himself indicates the large-scale quality of the play, which according to his widow Galina was intended to be part of a trilogy, by calling it a "tragedy in five acts." In particular, Erofeev's only completed dramatic work, his 1985 tragedy Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander, represents a highly ambitious effort. Rare as these "flashes" may be, however, they merit considerably more attention than they have received. Instead there were only momentary flashes which signaled the death throes of an artistic talent" (426). "hile he actually survived for twenty years after this end," Epstein writes, "Erofeev never regained full creative consciousness. Mikhail Epstein, describing him as a self-mythologizer, remarks that killing off Venichka at the end of the work can be viewed as a kind of self-destruction. So great has the popularity of this 1969 poema been that many commentators view Erofeev as a one-work author. The legend of Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990) as Venichka the alcoholic holy fool is inseparable from his magnum opus Moscow to the End of the Line. Or "The Steps of the Commander" Translated by Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky Academic Electronic Journal in Slavic Studies.
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