Shchedrin on Drunkenness

There's certainly no shortage of literature on drunkenness, perhaps never surpassing Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. But Schedrin's The Golovlyov Family offers a brief summary which, for concision in horror, is hard to beat:

At nine o'clock, when the lights were put out in the office and men went home to their lairs, he put on the table the bottle of vodka and a slice of bread thickly covered with salt. He did not begin on the vodka at once but gradually stole up to it as it were. Everything around him was dead asleep; only mice scratched behind the wall-paper that had come unstuck, and the clock in the office ticked insistently. Taking off his dressing-gown, with nothing but his shirt on he scurried up and down the heated room; sometimes he stopped, came up to the table fumbling for the bottle, and then began walking again. He drank the first glass making traditional drinkers' jokes and voluptuously sipping the burning liquid; but gradually his tongue began babbling something incoherent, his heart bet faster, and his head was on fire. His dulled mind struggled to create images, his deadened memory strove to break through into the realm of the past; but the images were senseless and disconnected, and the past did not respond with a single recollection, sweet or bitter, as though a thick wall had risen once for all between that which had be and was now. All there was before him was the present in the shape of a tightly locked prison in which the idea of space and time disappeared without a trace. ...

--Shchedrin, The Golovlyov Family 57-8 (NYRB ed. 2001)

This is just a sample; there's more.