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Viktor Vladimirovich Yerofeyev | |
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| Born | (1947-09-19)September 19, 1947 (age 77) Moscow,Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
Viktor Vladimirovich Yerofeyev (Russian:Ви́ктор Влади́мирович Ерофе́ев, also transliterated asErofeyev; born 19 September 1947 inMoscow) is aRussianwriter. After theRussian invasion of Ukraine he fled to Germany.
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As son of a high-rankingSoviet diplomatVladimir Yerofeyev, he spent some of his childhood inParis, which accounts for why much of his work has been translated from Russian into French, while comparatively little has been translated into English. His father, who was the interpreter forStalin in the late 1940s, wrote a book of memories; his brother is a curator at theTretyakov Gallery.
Erofeyev graduated fromMoscow State University in 1970, where he studied literature and languages. He then did post-graduate work at the Institute for World Literature inMoscow, where he completed his post-graduate work in 1973 and received hiskandidat degree in 1975 for his thesis onFyodor Dostoyevsky and Frenchexistentialism. Erofeyev's work often contains pastiches of Dostoyevsky's work and themes.
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Erofeyev became a literary critic, publishing works onLev Shestov and theMarquis de Sade. He later organised his own literary magazine,Metropol', in which many of the big names of Soviet literature participated, includingVasily Aksyonov,Andrei Bitov,Bella Akhmadulina, and others. The magazine was put into circulation viasamizdat, i.e., avoiding Soviet censorship. As a result, Erofeyev was expelled from theUnion of Soviet Writers and was banned from being published until 1988, whenMikhail Gorbachev came to power.
He resided inMoscow until 2022 and frequently appeared on Russian television, where he had his own program on the TV channel «Kultura» ("culture"); he was also a regular guest on Radio Liberty, Moscow.
Following theRussian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he and his family fled Russia to settle in Germany.[1]
Alfred Schnittke's operaLife with an Idiot is based on Erofeyev‘s 1980 story of the same name, which he made into a libretto for the composer.
The 2012 Finnish documentary movie "Russian Libertine" is centered on Victor Erofeyev and his view of the protests leading up to the2012 Russian Presidential election.
In October 2013, Victor Erofeyev received theChevalier of Legion of Honour title from the French Government.[2]
Erofeyev regularly contributes toThe Times Literary Supplement,The New Yorker,The New York Review of Books, andThe International Herald Tribune. In Germany, he is published by theFrankfurter Allgemeine[3] andDie Welt.
