http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/ju ... ugh-review
There is the sense, though, of an emotional, rather than intellectual resolution: this is the seesaw of feelings, from euphoria to desperation and back, which one encounters in some of Chekhov's stories, rather than the emergence of a logically pursued argument. Focused on himself, Bullough's story is not, in the end, very reflective. If it were, it might ask whether the current British interest in the drunken, decaying culture of Russia has anything to do with the malaise of another post-imperial country beset by delusions of grandeur: a place whose national church is in disarray, where social unity has been sacrificed to the profit motive, and where binge-drinking is a recognised social ill.
