I’ve been reading it in tandem with the superb biography (by Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky) Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The outsider see this post of Lizok’s), which I’ll be reporting on as soon as I’ve finished it - my wife, who’s used to seeing me shuttle between two books, felt compelled to ask why I had four in front of me, and I had to explain about the bio, the reading copy, and the annotated edition (the fourth, of course, was my faithful, beat-up Oxford dictionary). I was so enthralled with the book that I wound up buying two other copies, an annotated edition (a hundred pages of text, almost 450 of commentary) and a large, gorgeously illustrated one I simply couldn’t resist. I bought it at the instigation of a Russian woman I flew to Prague to hang out with and thought for a while I loved (I owe her a great deal - she also pointed me in the direction of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Sasha Sokolov, and in general got me back into Russian literature). When I first bought and read it, in March 1998, I carried it with me on my travels around New York (north to south, east to west, from end to end) and it never got damaged - it’s well-made, for all its cheap appearance and occasional misprints. My reading copy is one of the smallest books I have it’s no larger than my hand and fits easily into a pocket.
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