Viktor Vladimirovich Erofeyev

Viktor Vladimirovich Erofeyev (1947) is a Russian writer based in Moscow. As a 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. Victor 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. 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; he also has a program on Radio Liberty, Moscow. 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) and In the Labyrinth of Accursed Questions (a collection of essays). Victor Erofeyev also regularly contributes to The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The International Herald Tribune.