4 ideas
Venichka, who has never seen the Kremlin despite wandering Moscow for years, boards a morning train to Petushki, where his beloved and his three-year-old son await, drinking steadily through each station stop. He falls asleep and misses his station, and the train carries him back to Moscow, which he mistakes for Petushki. There four strangers chase him to a stairwell and stab an awl into his throat, and he narrates his own death.
Petushki is imagined as a place where the jasmine never stops blooming and the birds never stop singing, a private utopia that justifies the whole miserable journey. The pull of the promised destination drives the traveler forward while his method of travelling, drink by drink, guarantees he will never arrive. Longing for redemption and the habit that sabotages it run on the same fuel.
Venichka gives exact recipes for absurd cocktails such as 'Spirit of Geneva' and 'Tear of a Komsomol Girl,' and he charts his coworkers' drinking with the solemnity of a planning bureau. He treats the drinking with scholarly and liturgical seriousness. This turns shameful dependency into a private order and style of its own, and it parodies official Soviet rhetoric by pointing its grandeur at a degraded object.
The drunk who refuses to be useful, 'rise' or produce stands outside Soviet goals of progress and productivity, and from that position he can see them as ridiculous. His humility, tenderness and religious longing mark him as a holy fool whose apparent failure is a form of spiritual resistance. The book defends weakness and 'uselessness' as more honest than the confident heroism the state demanded.