Venedikt Erofeyev

"Venedikt Vasilyevich Erofeev" ( _ru. Венедикт Васильевич Ерофеев), (October 24, 1938—May 11, 1990), was a Russian writer.

Biography

Erofeev was born in the small settlement Poyakonda in Murmansk Oblast. His father was imprisoned during Stalin's purges but survived after 16 years in the gulags. Most of his childhood Erofeev spent in Kirovsk, Murmansk Oblast. He managed to enter the philology department of the Moscow State University but was expelled from the University after a year and a half because he did not attend compulsory military training. Later he studied in several more institutes in different towns including Kolomna and Vladimir but he has never managed to graduate from any, usually being expelled due to his "amoral behaviour" (freethinking). Between 1958 and 1975 Erofeev lived without propiska in towns in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, also spending some time in Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan, doing different low-qualified and underpaid jobs. He started writing at the age of 17; in the 1960s he unsuccessfully submitted several articles on Ibsen and Hamsun to literary magazines.

Literary heritage

Erofeev is best known for his 1969 poem in prose "Moscow-Petushki" (several English translations exist, including "Moscow to the End of the Line" and "Moscow Stations"). It is an account of a journey from Moscow to Petushki (Vladimir Oblast) by train, a journey soaked in alcohol and littered with encounters with some famous and some not so famous figures. During the trip, the hero recounts some of the fantastic escapades he participated in, including declaring war on Norway, and charting the drinking habits of his colleagues when leader of a cable laying crew. The poem was published for the first time in 1973 in Jerusalem immediately making Erofeev famous throughout the world. It was not published in the Soviet Union until 1989.

Of note is his smaller 1988 work, "My Petite Leniniana" ("My Little Leniniana", Моя маленькая лениниана, Moya malenkaya Leniniana), which is basically a collection of quotations from Lenin's works and letters, which show Vladimir Ilyich from a rather ugly side. Sufficient to mention that Erofeev's "Leniniana" made widely known Lenin's remark (in his letter to Maksim Gorky, 1919) that "intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, but the shit of the nation".

Erofeev also claimed to have written in 1972 the novel "Shostakovich" about the famous Russian composer, but the manuscript was stolen in a train. The novel has never been found.

Erofeev died of throat cancer. Before his death he finished a play called "Walpurgisnacht or Steps of the Commodore" ("Вальпургиева ночь или Шаги командора") and was working on another play about Fanny Kaplan.