The elektrichka, or suburban slow train, is the most vilified form of transport in Russia. It stops frequently at both idyllic-looking villages and towns laid to waste by industry. It also provides a space in which one can encounter the entire spectrum of society in motion. Mendicants, alcoholics, and crippled soldiers, whom both Soviet society and its new capitalist incarnation prefer to forget, roam its compartments and corridors. Venedikt Erofeev became a cult figure of contemporary Russian literature by telling the story of exactly such a marginal character--an alcoholic--traveling on the elektrichka from Moscow to Petushki, an obscure station some three hours away from the capital.

Moskva-Petushki (1977; translated as Moscow to the End of the Line, 1980), the work that brought Erofeev renown in Soviet underground literature in 1970, was subversive in its essence. Each and every element opposed the officially mandated standards of socialist realism. Its narrator-protagonist is neither...