Venedikt Yerofeyev
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Venedikt Vasilyevich Yerofeyev (another
spellings: Erofeev, Erofeyev; Russian: Венедикт
Васильевич Ерофеев; 24 October 1938 — 11 May
1990), was a Russian writer.
Biography
Yerofeyev was born in the small settlement
Niva-2, suburb of Kandalaksha, Murmansk Oblast.
His father was imprisoned during Stalin's purges
but survived after 16 years in the gulags. Most
of his childhood Yerofeyev 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 Yerofeyev
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; for
a time he lived and worked in the Muromtsev
Dacha in Moscow. 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
Yerofeyev 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. 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. Referred to by
David Remnick as "the comic high-water mark of
the Brezhnev era", the poem was published for
the first time in 1973 in Jerusalem immediately
making Yerofeyev famous throughout the world. It
was not published in the Soviet Union until
1989.
Of
note is his smaller 1988 work, My Little
Leniniana (Моя маленькая лениниана, Moya
malenkaya Leniniana), which is a collection of
Lenin's quotations works and letters, which
shows the unpleasant parts of the character of
the "leader of the proletariat".
Yerofeyev also claimed to have written in 1972 a
novel Shostakovich about the famous Russian
composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but the manuscript
was stolen in a train. The novel has never been
found.
Yerofeyev 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.
