Viktor Yerofeyev

Russian writer (born 1947)

Viktor Vladimirovich Yerofeyev (Ви́ктор Влади́мирович Ерофе́ев, also transliterated as Erofeyev; born 19 September 1947 in Moscow) is a Russian writer. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine he fled to Germany.

As son of a high ranking Soviet diplomat Vladimir Yerofeyev, 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 been translated into English. His father, who was the interpreter for Stalin in the late 1940s, wrote a book of memories; his brother is a curator at the Tretyakov Gallery. 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 Fyodor Dostoyevsky and French existentialism. Erofeyev's work often contains pastiches of Dostoyevsky's work and themes.

Erofeyev 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 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He resided in Moscow 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 the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he and his family fled Russia to settle in Germany.

Alfred Schnittke's opera Life 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 the 2012 Russian Presidential election. In October 2013, Victor Erofeyev received the Chevalier of Legion of Honour title from the French Government.

Erofeyev regularly contributes to The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The International Herald Tribune. In Germany, he is published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Die Welt.