The Drunken Carousel Journey

B. Kowalski

The Drunken Carousel Journey  


"All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station"

Adapted & Directed by Emil Varda
Vienya – Elliott Morse
Megeara – Rivers Duggan
Tilphousia – Mia Vallet
Yurodivy – E.V.

East Village Playhouse in Manhattan, NYC, May-June 2018

Photos by Ewa Kowalska, 2018.

At first glance, it seems that Emil Varda's production  focuses on the character Vienya's seeking love after returning to life. The Erinyes, or Furies, who bring him back to life, guard the entrance to Hades, but they do not let him into the underworld of ghosts. Instead they strip him of his coffin suit, give him back the everyday clothes in which he roamed around Moscow, and then order him to return to the drunken carousel of his journey. 

These are modern Furies, not goddesses from Greek mythology – although they are just as angry. And, unlike the ancients, these Furies are much more sophisticated in virulence. They mock Vienya, who is in love again, deriding his attempt to wander from the Kremlin to Petushki. Vienya thinks that if he is restored to life, he can repeat his life like the character from V. Yerofeyev's book, Moscow-Petushki; that his irrevocable present is a journey by train to his beloved in Petushki near Moscow; that it is still drunkenness Monday to Friday and hangover on weekends; that it is still meticulous shopping for alcohol and gifts, and that he will not see the Kremlin again. It seems to him that he will again be experiencing the longings and inspirations of the same person that he was in the pages of the poem. 

The Erinyes, who do not stop tormenting the poor man even for a moment, condemn him in this second life to torments he has never known before. Vienya would like to be Odysseus again traveling to Ithaca, but Ithaca is gone. Previously, dreams of Petushki were his present, but Vienya’s new anguish is the lack of a present: the Furies condemn him to exist only in the past and in the future. These modern Erinyes do not torment people in order to kill them, as they did in ancient Greek mythology, but to remind the character of an unfulfilled past and future. Instead of being a poet-Odysseus who knows his end, Vienya is an actor-Sisyphus, whose senseless existence results from the future beginning and the end of the road (or vice versa) rather than from the absurdly-played present. 

In the literary life, Vienya mocked political gods – he bragged that he did not see the Kremlin in Moscow, he mocked the Komsomol, the youth political organization, mocked the communist labor system in the Soviet Union. That was his present. For this insolence, for a poetic escape as in Guillaume Apollinaire's “Alcoholes” or in the  T.S. Eliot’s annexes to the poem, the Erinyes remind Vienya that "Joyces are not needed here” – as it was written from the Stalinist Kremlin to another tormented poet, Bruno Schulz. 

This time, Vienya is a character from the stage where all roads lead to the Kurski Station. He is bizarrely resistant to alcohol, as if he did not consist of matter, stomach and liver. He still thinks he has a heart, but in this stage version he has not been given one. In his repetitive stage-life Vienya seems to be not material, but spiritual, as if he was a sore Russian soul. Certainly he is not as carnal as Vienia/Odysseus in the Yerofeyev book.    The similarity of Vienya's character to Sisyphus is suggested by Emil Varda in the first appearance of this character on stage. We don’t know who this black-dressed man is or where he comes from. Only after the last stage of the performance, a justified supposition is revealed that the beginning showed the continuation of events that took place an hour later at the end of the performance. This Sisyphus-like circular cycle of Vienya’s torment does not begin or end. When he appears in front of the Erinyes, who undress and wash him, he probably comes with the hope that he succeeded this time and that he will not be sent back to the Kremlin, to Kurski Station and on a pilgrimage to Pietushki. At the end of the performance he can hope this is finally death, but he still does not know that this is a vain hope.  

Varda’s Sisyphus pushes up the Yerofeyev’s stone of love, but brings illusion to the top. This Sisyphus is pushing the stone of good, but brings a boulder of politics. He also pushes a stone of unrequited art, and at the top it turns out that it was unfulfilled drunkenness. The shadow from Yerofeyev's novel had a much easier existence – after all, he got to die. As many times as he would like to die, the character in Varda’s theater goes to the Erinyes who defend the entrance to Hades. But you can only die in the present. In the future and in the past, existence has no finale. Vienya from All Roads Leads to the Kurski Station is deprived of the attributes of the solidly dead Vienya from MoscowPetushki. In addition, the past of the spirit is a matter that the contemporary viewer does not remember or have never heard of – Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, Beria, Stalin, the Parisian cancan, Gogol's novels. The future begins with Putin and Trump and stretches into an immensity of quasi-divine indisputability and the only right. 

In Varda’s version, Vienya does not have anything tangible for now, in a concrete, present moment: the person of his beloved woman in Pietushki is a hallucination made by Furies, all the bottles in his suitcases are empty, so he isn’t drunk even for a second – because alcohol can be tippled neither in the future nor in the past, you have to drink it now. Sober Vienya, the alcoholic, arouses the pity of the viewer, because it is a terrible torment – to desire vodka and not be able to get drunk, or to come back to life and be only a ghost. 

The Vienya from the book did not experience either Gulag or Guantanamo. As a stage character, he is the result of politics tormented by politically furious Furies: Tisiphone, the revolutionist, yells in his ears hysterically and lustfully – We need Stalin, we want Stalin, let it be even Putin; both of the Furies, against his will, outfit the poor man as the knight of the universal revolution; Megaera turns him into a terrible monument of the politically correct muse of the Soviet cinema. These are not the roles that Vienya presented by Yerofeyev agreed to. But this is Vienya shown in the theater of Varda. In the book, even though he was constantly intoxicated, he saw the Furies for only a fleeting moment; in the theatre, he has them by his side incessantly, they are indestructible, impossible to “shut off". He must be unhappily politicized, tormented by politics, he has to exist in global gulags and Guantanamos of politics, which he does not want and does not understand, but from which he cannot escape, either through drunken oblivion or into poetry and love, not to mention the final escape of death.

                                                                                                                              May 2018

Transl. from Polish: B.Kowalski

with a kind help from Cait Johnson