Victor Erofeyev
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Victor Erofeyev (Russian: Виктор Ерофеев; born 1947) is a highly controversial Russian author, the son of a high-ranking Soviet diplomat (who worked closely with Stalin). 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 philology. He then moved to 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. Consequently Erofeyev's work often contains pastiches of Dostoyevsky's work and themes.
He became a literary critic, publishing works on Shestov and the Marquis de Sade. He later organised his own literary magazine, Metropol, which was so controversial that Erofeyev was banned from Soviet print until 1988, when Gorbachev came to power. When he was accepted into the Writer's Union he was immediately expelled from it.
Victor Erofeyev currently resides in Moscow and frequently appears on Russian television. He provided a libretto for Alfred Schnittke's Life with an Idiot.
[edit] 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.
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[edit] Bibliography
Andrew Reynolds's essay entitled 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.
