Viktor Yerofeyev

Victor Vladimirovich Erofeyev (Russian: Ви́ктор Влади́мирович Ерофе́ев) (born September 19, 1947) is a Jewish writer. As son of a high-ranking Soviet diplomat Vladimir Erofeyev, he spent some of his childhood in Paris, which accounts for why much of his work has been translated from Russian into French, while comparatively little has reached English.

Erofeyev graduated from Moscow State University in 1970, where he studied literature and languages. He then did post-graduate work at the Institute for World Literature in Moscow, where he completed his post-graduate work in 1973 and received his kandidat degree in 1975 for his thesis on Dostoyevsky and French existentialism. Erofeyev's work often contains pastiches of Dostoyevsky's work and themes.

He became a literary critic, publishing works on Lev Shestov and the Marquis de Sade. He later organised his own literary magazine, Metropol, in which many of the big names of Soviet literature participated, including Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Bitov, Bella Akhmadulina, and others. The magazine was put into circulation via samizdat, i.e., avoiding Soviet censorship. As a result, Erofeyev was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and was banned from being published until 1988, when Gorbachev came to power.

Victor Erofeyev currently resides in Moscow and frequently appears on Russian television, where he has his own program on the channel «Kultura» ("culture"); he also has a program on Radio Liberty, Moscow. Alfred Schnittke's opera Life with an Idiot is based on his story with the same name, which he made into a libretto for the composer.

Major works

Russian Beauty
The Good Stalin
The Last Judgement
Five Rivers of Life
Encyclopaedia of the Russian Soul
Men and God X
Life with an Idiot (a collection of short stories)
In the Labyrinth of Accursed Questions (a collection of essays)

Erofeyev also regularly contributes to The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The International Herald Tribune.

Article

Viktor Jerofejew, "Putins Russland hat ein Image-Problem" (Die Welt, 13 February 2007)

Bibliography

Andrew Reynolds, "East is East...? Victor Erofeyev and the Poetics/Politics of Idiocy." Reynolds is the translator of Life with an Idiot, first published by Penguin in English in 2004. ISBN 0-14-023621-X.