Pub Quote: Anthony Burgess in Leningrad 1961

Russian Pub Quote

In June 1961, British author Anthony Burgess and his alcoholic Welsh wife Lynne sailed from Tilbury Docks to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) on a trip that fundamentally reshaped his literary legacy. Funded by an advance from his publisher William Heinemann to write a travel book, the journey instead provided the direct creative spark for his most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, and two other major works. This ended up being quite a drink-focused trip, culminating in a night at the Metropol Restoran.

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The scene at the Metropol was an extravagant display of the Russian gift for drunkenness. Liquor was served only in hundred-gram flasks and accompanied by shprotti or sprats which enhanced thirst. Stout women with Petrushka headdresses came round with pledgets of cotton wool soaked in ammonia which they thrust up the nostrils of the snoring drunks. When these did not work they thrust them into eyes whose lids they jerked up with thick thumb and fingers. Awakening blinded, the drunks yelled and were kicked out of the restaurant by Neapolitan-looking waiters in tennis shoes.

At the table where Lynne and I sat sat a young man and an older woman whom he had been trying to impress with a feast – fried eggs served on long-stemmed ornamental green glass stands, shprotti, black bread overtoasted, sturgeon boiled, a multitude of little wrapped sweetmeats, two bottles of Georgian malaga, three or four hundred-gram flasks of vodka. For this feast he could not entirely pay. He began to be dragged and kicked out, while his heartless companion laughed. I offered money, but this was not part of the game. The young man had offered the wrong ploy and accepted his checkmate. No cheating. Fair play.

Anthony Burgess You’ve Had Your Time 1990

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