Since vodka is as commonplace in Russia as tea is in the United Kingdom, most passages where vodka features in Russian fiction are not particularly memorable, although Gogol’s passing references to the spirit are often amusing. Published last year, Andrei Gelasimov’s Thirst is a moving novel about a Russian soldier who, burned beyond recognition in Chechnya, rarely leaves his apartment and spends most of his time drinking alone. With a refrigerator overflowing with vodka bottles, he is about to embark on a three-month drinking binge when a knock on the door and subsequent events change his perception of life.
Vodka, by Boris Starling, is set in the early days of the Russian Federation. Although the narrative centres around the privatisation of a vodka distillery, the attempts by Slav and Chechen mafia to control the vodka market through violence and murder contribute to a convincing portrayal of post-Soviet Russia and the economic signficance of vodka.
Entitled “Vodka”, the eighth chapter of the third and final volume of Philip Pulman’s His Dark Materials is well worth reading. For excellent period context, vodka and samogon feature in the detective novels of R.N. Morris, William Ryan and Martin Cruz Smith, with each covering different periods of Russian history.
The extract below from Angel Pavement by J. B. Priestley contains the first appearance of vodka in English fiction.
Miss Lilian Matfield is a typist for a wood-veneer business in Angel Pavement, London, and has boarded a docked ship to do some secretarial work for James Golspie, a new and fraudulent employee of the company. Golspie offers a drink to Miss Matfield from a bottle he has already opened:
He pointed to the tall bottle. “It’ll warm you up. I’m going to have some. You join me.” He poured out two small glasses of the colourless liquor.
“Shall I? What is it?”
“Vodka. It’s the favourite tipple in these ships.”
Vodka! She picked up the glass and put her nose to it. She had never tasted vodka before, never remembered ever having seen it before, but of course it was richly associated with her memories of romantic fiction of various kinds, and was tremendously thrilling, the final completing thrill of the afternoon’s adventure. At once she could hear herself bringing the vodka into her account of the adventure at the Club. “And then, my dear,” it would run, “I was given some vodka. There I was, in the cabin, swilling vodka like mad. Marvellous!”
“Come along, Miss Matfield,” said Mr. Golspie, looking at her over his raised glass. “Down it goes. Happy days!” And he emptied his glass with one turn of the wrist.
“All right,” she cried, raising hers. “What do I say? Cheerio?” Boldly she drained her glass, too, in one gulp. For a second or so, nothing happened but a curious aniseedy taste as the liquor slipped over her palate, but then, suddenly, it was as if an incendiary bomb had burst in her throat and sent white fire racing down every channel of her body. She gasped, laughed, coughed, all at once.
“That’s the way, Miss Matfield. You put it down in great style. Try another. I’m going to have one. Just another for good luck.” He filled the glasses again.
She floated easily now on a warm tide. It was very pleasant. She took the glass, hesitated, then looked up at him. “I’m not going to be tight, am I? If you make me drunk I shan’t be able to type your letters, you know.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” he told her, grinning amiably and then patting her shoulder. “You couldn’t be soused on two glasses of this stuff, and you’ll be as sober as a judge by the time you get back to Angel Pavement. It’ll just make you feel warm and comfortable, and keep the cold out. Now then. Here she goes.”
“Happy days!” cried Miss Matfield, smiling at him, and once more there came the aniseedy taste, the incendiary bomb, the racing white fire, and the final warm tide.
“Now I like you, Miss Matfield,” he told her, with a full stare of approval.
“That was done in real style, like a good sport. You’ve got some character, not like most of these pink little ninnies of girls you see here. I noticed that right at the start. I said to myself, ‘That girl’s not only got looks but she’s got character too.’ I wish you were coming with us.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, it’s a real compliment. Though I don’t know that you’d like it. It’ll be perishingly cold, and by tomorrow she’ll be rolling like the devil all the way across the North Sea, and she’ll start rolling again when we get into the Baltic. I know her of old. How d’you feel now?”
“Marvellous!” And she did. She rose and gathered her things together.
“Not too sober, though.”
When they went out on to the upper deck, she stopped and looked down the river. Daylight had dwindled to a faint silver above and an occasional cold gleam on the water, and at any other time she would probably have been depressed or half frightened by the leaden swell of the river itself, the uncertain lights beyond, and the melancholy hooting, but now it all seemed wonderfully mysterious and romantic. For a minute or so, she lost herself in it. She was quite happy and yet she felt close to tears. It was probably the vodka.
“Sort of hypnotises you, doesn’t it?” said Mr. Golspie gruffly, at her elbow.
“It does, doesn’t it?” she said softly. At that moment, she decided that she liked Mr. Golspie and that he was an unusual and fascinating man. She also felt that she herself was fascinating, really rather wonderful.
The widow of an alcoholic invites various local dignitaries to a lunch in honour of her late husband:
The lunch is certainly exceptional. Everything that the flora and fauna of the country can furnish is on the table, but the only thing supernatural about it, perhaps, is that on the table there is everything except… alcoholic beverages. Lyubov Petrovna has taken a vow never to have in her house cards or spirituous liquors – the two sources of her husband’s ruin. And the only bottles contain oil and vinegar, as though in mockery and chastisement of the guests who are to a man desperately fond of the bottle, and given to tippling.
“Please help yourselves, gentlemen!” the marshal’s widow presses them. “Only you must excuse me, I have no vodka… I have none in the house.”
The guests approach the table and hesitatingly attack the pie. But the progress with eating is slow. In the plying of forks, in the cutting up and munching, there is a certain sloth and apathy…
Evidently something is wanting.
“I feel as though I had lost something,” one of the justices of the peace whispers to the other. “I feel as I did when my wife ran away with the engineer… I can’t eat.”
Marfutkin, before beginning to eat, fumbles for a long time in his pocket and looks for his handkerchief.
“Oh, my handkerchief must be in my greatcoat,” he recalls in a loud voice, “and here I am looking for it,” and he goes into the vestibule where the fur coats are hanging up.
He returns from the vestibule with glistening eyes, and at once attacks the pie with relish.
“I say, it’s horrid munching away with a dry mouth, isn’t it?” he whispers to Father Yevmeny. “Go into the vestibule, Father. There’s a bottle there in my fur coat… Only mind you are careful; don’t make a clatter with the bottle.”
Father Yevmeny recollects that he has some direction to give to Luka, and trips off to the vestibule.
“Father, a couple of words in confidence,” says Dvornyagin, overtaking him.
“You should see the fur coat I’ve bought myself, gentlemen,” Hrumov boasts. “It’s worth a thousand, and I gave – you won’t believe it – two hundred and fifty! Not a farthing more.”
At any other time the guests would have greeted this information with indifference, but now they display surprise and incredulity.
In the end they all troop out into the vestibule to look at the fur coat, and go on looking at it until the doctor’s man Mikeshka carries five empty bottles out on the sly. When the steamed sturgeon is served, Marfutkin remembers that he has left his cigar case in his sledge and goes to the stable. That he may not be lonely on this expedition, he takes with him the deacon, who appropriately feels it necessary to have a look at his horse…
On the evening of the same day, Lyubov Petrovna is sitting in her study, writing a letter to an old friend in Petersburg:
“Today, as in past years,” she writes among other things, “I had a memorial service for my dear husband. All my neighbours came to the service. They are a simple, rough set, but what hearts! I gave them a splendid lunch, but of course, as in previous years, without a drop of alcoholic liquor. Ever since he died from excessive drinking I have vowed to establish temperance in this district and thereby to expiate his sins. I have begun the campaign for temperance at my own house. Father Yevmeny is delighted with my efforts, and helps me both in word and deed. Oh, ma chère, if you knew how fond my bears are of me! The president of the Zemstvo, Marfutkin, kissed my hand after lunch, held it a long while to his lips, and, wagging his head in an absurd way, burst into tears: so much feeling but no words! Father Yevmeny, that delightful little old man, sat down by me, and looking tearfully at me kept babbling something like a child. I did not understand what he said, but I know how to understand true feeling. The police captain, the handsome man of whom I wrote to you, went down on his knees to me, tried to read me some verses of his own composition (he is a poet), but… his feelings were too much for him, he lurched and fell over… that huge giant went into hysterics, you can imagine my delight! The day did not pass without a hitch, however. Poor Alalykin, the president of the judges’ assembly, a stout and apoplectic man, was overcome by illness and lay on the sofa in a state of unconsciousness for two hours. We had to pour water on him… I am thankful to Doctor Dvornyagin: he had brought a bottle of brandy from his dispensary and he moistened the patient’s temples, which quickly revived him, and he was able to be moved…”
PYOTR PETROVITCH STRIZHIN, the nephew of Madame Ivanov, the colonel’s widow – the man whose new goloshes were stolen last year – came home from a christening party at two o’clock in the morning. To avoid waking the household, he took off his things in the lobby, made his way on tiptoe to his room, holding his breath, and began getting ready for bed without lighting a candle.
Strizhin leads a sober and regular life. He has a sanctimonious expression of face, he reads nothing but religious and edifying books, but at the christening party, in his delight that Lyubov Spiridonovna had passed through her confinement successfully, he had permitted himself to drink four glasses of vodka and a glass of wine, the taste of which suggested something midway between vinegar and castor oil. Spirituous liquors are like seawater and glory: the more you imbibe of them, the greater your thirst. And now as he undressed, Strizhin was aware of an overwhelming craving for drink.
“I believe Dashenka has some vodka in the cupboard in the right-hand corner,” he thought. “If I drink one wine-glassful, she won’t notice it.”
After some hesitation, overcoming his fears, Strizhin went to the cupboard. Cautiously opening the door he felt in the right-hand corner for a bottle and poured out a wine-glassful, put the bottle back in its place, then, making the sign of the cross, drank it off. And immediately something like a miracle took place. Strizhin was flung back from the cupboard to the chest with fearful force like a bomb. There were flashes before his eyes, he felt as though he could not breathe, and all over his body he had a sensation as though he had fallen into a marsh full of leeches. It seemed to him as though, instead of vodka, he had swallowed dynamite, which blew up his body, the house, and the whole street… His head, his arms, his legs – all seemed to be torn off and to be flying away somewhere to the devil, into space.
For some three minutes he lay on the chest, not moving and scarcely breathing, then he got up and asked himself: “Where am I?”
The first thing of which he was clearly conscious on coming to himself was the pronounced smell of paraffin.
“Holy saints,” he thought in horror, “it’s paraffin I have drunk instead of vodka.”
The thought that he had poisoned himself threw him into a cold shiver, then into a fever. That it was really poison that he had taken was proved not only by the smell in the room but also by the burning taste in his mouth, the flashes before his eyes, the ringing in his head, and the colicky pain in his stomach. Feeling the approach of death and not buoying himself up with false hopes, he wanted to say goodbye to those nearest to him, and made his way to Dashenka’s bedroom (being a widower, he had his sister-in-law called Dashenka, an old maid, living in the flat to keep house for him).
“Dashenka,” he said in a tearful voice as he went into the bedroom, “dear Dashenka!”
Something grumbled in the darkness and uttered a deep sigh. “Dashenka.”
“Eh? What?” A woman’s voice articulated rapidly. “Is that you, Pyotr Petrovitch? Are you back already? Well, what is it? What has the baby been christened? Who was godmother?”
“The godmother was Natalya Andreyevna Velikosvyetsky, and the godfather Pavel Ivanitch Bezsonnitsin… I… I believe, Dashenka, I am dying. And the baby has been christened Olimpiada, in honour of their kind patroness… I… I have just drunk paraffin, Dashenka!”
“What next! You don’t say they gave you paraffin there?”
“I must own I wanted to get a drink of vodka without asking you, and… and the Lord chastised me: by accident in the dark I took paraffin… What am I to do?”
Dashenka, hearing that the cupboard had been opened without her permission, grew more wide-awake… She quickly lighted a candle, jumped out of bed, and in her nightgown, a freckled, bony figure in curl-papers, padded with bare feet to the cupboard.
“Who said you could?” she asked sternly, as she scrutinized the inside of the cupboard. “Was the vodka put there for you?”
“I… I haven’t drunk vodka but paraffin, Dashenka…” muttered Strizhin, mopping the cold sweat on his brow.
“And what did you want to touch the paraffin for? That’s nothing to do with you, is it? Is it put there for you? Or do you suppose paraffin costs nothing? Eh? Do you know what paraffin is now? Do you know?”
“Dear Dashenka,” moaned Strizhin, “it’s a question of life and death, and you talk about money!”
“He’s drunk himself tipsy and now he pokes his nose into the cupboard!” cried Dashenka, angrily slamming the cupboard door. “Oh, the monsters, the tormentors! I’m a martyr, a miserable woman, no peace day or night! Vipers, basilisks, accursed Herods, may you suffer the same in the world to come! I am going tomorrow! I am a maiden lady and I won’t allow you to stand before me in your under-clothes! How dare you look at me when I am not dressed!”
And she went on and on… Knowing that when Dashenka was enraged there was no moving her with prayers or vows or even by firing a cannon, Strizhin waved his hand in despair, dressed, and made up his mind to go to the doctor. But a doctor is only readily found when he is not wanted. After running through three streets and ringing five times at Dr. Tchepharyants’, and seven times at Dr. Bultyhin’s, Strizhin raced off to a chemist’s shop, thinking possibly the chemist could help him. There, after a long interval, a little dark and curly-headed chemist came out to him in his dressing gown, with drowsy eyes, and such a wise and serious face that it was positively terrifying.
“What do you want?” he asked in a tone in which only very wise and dignified chemists of Jewish persuasion can speak.
“For God’s sake… I entreat you…” said Strizhin breathlessly, “give me something. I have just accidentally drunk paraffin, I am dying!”
“I beg you not to excite yourself and to answer the questions I am about to put to you. The very fact that you are excited prevents me from understanding you. You have drunk paraffin. Yes?”
“Yes, paraffin! Please save me!”
The chemist went coolly and gravely to the desk, opened a book, became absorbed in reading it. After reading a couple of pages he shrugged one shoulder and then the other, made a contemptuous grimace and, after thinking for a minute, went into the adjoining room. The clock struck four, and when it pointed to ten minutes past the chemist came back with another book and again plunged into reading.
“H’m,” he said as though puzzled, “the very fact that you feel unwell shows you ought to apply to a doctor, not a chemist.”
“But I have been to the doctors already. I could not wake them up.”
“H’m… you don’t regard us chemists as human beings, and disturb our rest even at four o’clock at night, though every dog, every cat, can rest in peace… You don’t try to understand anything, and to your thinking we are not people and our nerves are like cords.”
Strizhin listened to the chemist, heaved a sigh, and went home.
“So I am fated to die,” he thought.
And in his mouth was a burning and a taste of paraffin, there were twinges in his stomach, and a sound of boom, boom, boom in his ears. Every moment it seemed to him that his end was near, that his heart was no longer beating.
Returning home he made haste to write: “Let no one be blamed for my death,” then he said his prayers, lay down and pulled the bedclothes over his head. He lay awake till morning expecting death, and all the time he kept fancying how his grave would be covered with fresh green grass and how the birds would twitter over it… And in the morning he was sitting on his bed, saying with a smile to Dashenka: “One who leads a steady and regular life, dear sister, is unaffected by any poison. Take me, for example. I have been on the verge of death. I was dying and in agony, yet now I am all right. There is only a burning in my mouth and a soreness in my throat, but I am all right all over, thank God… And why? It’s because of my regular life.”
“No, it’s because it’s inferior paraffin!” sighed Dashenka, thinking of the household expenses and gazing into space. “The man at the shop could not have given me the best quality, but that at three farthings. I am a martyr, I am a miserable woman. You monsters! May you suffer the same, in the world to come, accursed Herods…”
And she went on and on…
Everywhere among the Russian people, a certain sympathy is felt for a drunken man; in prison he was positively treated with respect. There were certain aristocratic customs connected with prison revelry. The carousing convict always hired music. There was a little Pole in prison, a runaway soldier, a nasty little fellow who played the fiddle and had an instrument – his one possession in the world. He had no sort of trade, and his only way of earning money was by playing lively dances for convicts who were having a spree.
His duty was to follow his drunken employer from room to room and to play the fiddle with all his might. Often his face betrayed boredom and dejection. But the shout of ‘Play on, you’re paid to do it!’ made him go on scraping away. The convict can always feel confident when he begins drinking that, if he gets too drunk, he will certainly be looked after, will be put in bed in time and hidden away if the authorities turn up, and all this will be quite disinterested. The sergeant and the veteran guards, who lived in the prison to keep discipline, could have their minds at rest too: the drunken convict could not create any disorder. All the prisoners in the room looked after him, and if he were noisy or unmanageable they would quickly restrain him and even tie him up. And so the inferior prison officials winked at drunkenness and were unwilling to notice it. They knew very well that if vodka were not allowed it would make things worse. But how was vodka obtained?
It was bought in the prison itself from the so-called ‘publicans’. There were several of them, and they carried on their trade continuously and successfully, though the number of those who drank and ‘made merry’ was small, for merry-making costs money and the convicts’ money is hard to earn. The publicans’ operations were begun, managed and carried on in a very original way. Suppose a convict knows no trade and is not willing to exert himself (there were men like this), but is keen on getting money and of an impatient disposition, in a hurry to make his pile. If he has a little money to start with, he makes up his mind to trade in vodka: it’s a bold and risky enterprise involving considerable danger. He may have to pay for it with a flogging, and lose his stock and his capital all at once.
But the publican takes the risk. He begins with a small sum, and so at first he smuggles the vodka into the prison himself, and, of course, disposes of it to great advantage. He repeats the experiment a second and a third time, and if he does not get caught he quickly sells his stock and only then builds up a real trade on a large scale: he becomes an entrepreneur, a capitalist, employs agents and assistants, runs far less risk and makes more and more money. His subordinates risk themselves for him.
There are always in the prison lots of men who have wasted all they have on cards or drink, wretched ragged creatures who have no trade but have a certain pluck and daring. The only asset such a man has left is his back; it may still be of some use to him and so the spendthrift profligate decides to turn it to profit. He goes to the publican and offers his services for smuggling vodka; a well-to-do publican has several such working for him. Somewhere outside the prison there is some person – a soldier, a workman, sometimes even a woman – who for a comparatively large commission buys vodka at a tavern with the publican’s money and conceals it in some out-of-the-way place where the convicts go to work. Almost always the intermediary tests the quality of the vodka to begin with, and ruthlessly fills up the measure with water; the publican may take it or leave it – a convict is not in a position to make his own terms. He must be thankful that he has got the vodka, however poor the quality, and has not lost his money altogether.
The publican introduces his agents to the intermediary before-hand, and then they go to the latter carrying with them the guts of a bullock, which have been washed and then filled with water to keep them supple and fit to hold vodka. When he has filled the guts with vodka the convict winds them round himself where they will be least conspicuous. I need not say that this calls forth all the ingenuity, all the thievish cunning of the smuggler. His honour is to some extent involved: he has to deceive both the guards and the sentries. He does deceive them: the guard, often a raw recruit, is never a match for a clever thief. Of course the guard is the subject of special study beforehand; besides, the time and place where he is working is all carefully considered, too, by the smuggler. The convict may be building a stove; he climbs on to the stove; who can tell what he is doing there? A guard cannot be expected to climb after him. On his way to the prison he takes some money in his hand, fifteen or twenty silver kopeks, in case of need, and waits for the corporal at the gate. The corporal examines every convict returning from work, and feels him over before opening the prison door to him. The man smuggling in vodka usually reckons on the corporal’s scrupling to handle him too minutely in some parts. But sometimes the wily corporal does not stand on ceremony and discovers the vodka. Then there is only one thing left to do: the smuggler, unseen by the guard, silently slips into the corporal’s hand the coin he has been keeping concealed in his own. It sometimes happens that, thanks to this manoeuvre, he gets successfully into the prison with the vodka.
But sometimes this method does not answer, and then he has to pay with his last asset, his back. It is reported to the major, the asset is flogged, and cruelly flogged; the vodka is confiscated and the agent takes it all on himself without giving away his employer, and, be it noted, not because he scorns to tell tales, but simply because it does not pay him to do so. He would be flogged anyway; his only consolation would be that the other man would be flogged too. But he will need his employer again, though in accordance with custom and previous agreement the smuggler gets nothing from his employer to compensate him for the flogging. As for telling tales in general, it is very common. In prison the man who turns traitor is not exposed to humiliation; indignation against him is unthinkable. He is not shunned, the others make friends with him; in fact, if you were to try and point out the loathsomeness of treachery, you would not be understood. The convict with whom I had broken off all relations, a mean and depraved creature who had been a gentleman, was friendly with the major’s orderly, Fedka, and served him as a spy, while the latter reported all he heard about the convicts to the major. Every one of us knew this, yet no one ever dreamed of punishing the scoundrel or even reproaching him for it.
But I am wandering from my subject. It happens, of course, that vodka is smuggled in successfully. Then the publican takes the guts, pays for them, and begins to count the cost. It turns out when he reckons it that the stuff has cost him a great deal, and so to increase his profit he dilutes the vodka once more, adding almost an equal bulk of water, and then he is ready for his customers. On the first holiday, sometimes even on a working day, the customer turns up: this is a convict who has been working like an ox for some months, and has saved up his money in order to spend it all on drink on some day fixed beforehand. Long before it arrives, this day has been the object of the poor toiler’s dreams at night and happy day-dreams over his work, and its fascination has kept up his spirits through the weary routine of prison life. At last the happy day dawns in the east; his money has been saved, not taken away, not stolen, and he brings it to the publican. To begin with, the latter gives him the vodka as pure as possible, that is, only twice diluted; but as the bottle gets emptier he invariably fills it up again with water. A cup of vodka costs five or six times as much as in a tavern. You can imagine how many cups of such vodka must be drunk, and what they will have cost before the point of intoxication is reached. But from having lost the habit of drinking, and having abstained from it so long, the convict readily gets drunk and he usually goes on drinking till he has spent all his money. Then he brings out all his new clothes; the publican is a pawnbroker as well. He first gets hold of the newly acquired personal possessions, then the old things and finally the prison clothes. When he has drunk up everything to the last rag, the drunken convict lies down to sleep, and next day, waking up with the inevitable splitting headache, he vainly entreats the publican to give him just a sip of vodka as a pick-me-up. Mournfully he endures his sad plight and the same day sets to work again, and works again for several months unceasingly, dreaming of the happy day of debauch lost and gone forever, and by degrees beginning to take heart again and look forward to another similar day, still far away, but sure to come sometime in its turn.
As for the publican, after making a huge sum of money – some dozens of roubles – he gets the vodka ready for the last time, adding no water to it, for he means it for himself – he has done enough of trading, it is time for him to enjoy himself too! Then begins an orgy of drinking, eating and music. With such means at his disposal he even softens the hearts of the inferior prison officials. The debauch sometimes lasts several days. All the vodka he has prepared is soon drunk, of course; then the prodigal resorts to the other publicans, who are on the lookout for him, and drinks until he has spent every farthing! However carefully the convicts guard their drunken fellow, he is sometimes seen by a higher official, by the major or the officer on duty. He is taken to the guard-house, stripped of his money if he has it on him and finally flogged. He shakes himself, goes back into the prison, and a few days later takes up his trade in vodka again.
Russian peasants 1823