Venedikt Yerofeev

I had designs, not intentions

And when intentions appeared, the designs promptly disappeared

There wasn’t much we regarded as sacred, but there were plenty of things we didn’t actually spit on, whereas they don’t give a shit for anything

You see? No wonder they were miserable, no wonder they wrote about the peasants, and tried to save them, and no wonder they started drinking out of sheer desperation. The Social Democrats wrote and drank, they drank while they wrote. But the peasants couldn’t read and drink both, they just drank! So Uspensky ups and hangs himself, Pomyalovsky lies down under a bar counter and snuffs it, and Garshin flings himself off a bridge, pig-drunk

Black Moustache visibly slumped, crestfallen. His entire theory, his whole elegant system, constructed out of impassioned and brilliantly stretched points, had been publicly demolished. ‘Give him a hand, Yerofeev,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Spit out an allegory or something

drink, and buy rounds for the students, and sings them “The Flea”. And you’re asking, “Why does Privy Councillor Goethe need to do that?” Right, I’ll tell you — why does he make Young Werther put a bullet in

What d’you mean pissed? Why is he pissed? A man goes to see his woman because he’s sad, right? And you can’t go and see your woman without a drink first! If you do, that means she’s bad news! And even if she is bad news, you’ve still got to have a drink. Actually, the worse she is, the more pissed you need to get

Frankly, I didn’t want that much out of Italy. There were three things I fancied a look at: Vesuvius, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. But they told me Vesuvius had gone out ages ago, and sent me to Herculaneum. And at Herculaneum they said: “What d’you want with Herculaneum, you prat? You’d be better going to Pompeii.” So I turn up in Pompeii, and they tell me: “What the hell d’you want with Pompeii? Piss off back to Herculaneum

You’d be better asking them some serious social questions, on really burning issues

‘Later, of course, I learned from the papers that they weren’t who I thought at all — they were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but well, really, what’s the difference? Anyway, I went down to Notre Dame, and rented myself a garret. Garrets, mezzanines, wings, entresols, attics — I always get them mixed up, never know which is which. In a word, I rented somewhere to sleep, write, and smoke the odd pipe. So I smoked twelve pipes, and fired off my essay to the Revue de Paris — under the French title: “Chic et éclat — immer élégant