Russian Beauty

Rating:
Summary: Victor Erofeev is the best.
Review: I concur with the point about Victor Erofeev being "the best of the Russian writers working now".

I must also underline serious hidden layer deeply built into Erofeev`s aesthetics , which is not seen from short-sighted uninformed perspective - I speak of Erofeev`s version of ancient Byzantine tradition of Negative Eschatology , which taught us not to seek God , as being impossible to grasp with limited senses , but circling out the sphere of His absence instead ...therefore , if reader see only pornography in Erofeev`s writings - it means that such person is a candidate for inclusion into author`s gallery of funny monsters ...

Rating:
Summary: Victor Erofeev is the best.
Review: I concur with the point about Victor Erofeev being "the best of the Russian writers working now".

I must also underline serious hidden layer deeply built into Erofeev`s aesthetics , which is not seen from short-sighted uninformed perspective - I speak of Erofeev`s version of ancient Byzantine tradition of Negative Eschatology , which taught us not to seek God , as being impossible to grasp with limited senses , but circling out the sphere of His absence instead ...therefore , if reader see only pornography in Erofeev`s writings - it means that such person is a candidate for inclusion into author`s gallery of funny monsters ...

Rating:
Summary: Bon vivant turned graphomaniac.
Review: Victor Erofeev is a son of Soviet diplomats stationed for a long time in Paris where he had access to the forbidden fruit of uncensored reading and the attributes of western lifestyle. When he appeared in Moscow in the early perestroika smelling of French cologne, clad in unseen-before jackets, a frondeur almost untouched by the Soviet ideology speaking of De Sade and Celine it was only a matter of time for him to become one of the cultural newsmakers.

But he was not satisfied with the role of occassionally scribbling libertine, famous for the much-publicized debauchery and condescending lecturing on previously unaccessible authors. He decided that he is a writer and he got lucky.

He took the Russian Beauty's manuscript to one of the French publishing houses where Nabokov's grandson Ivan looked through the pages and told his secretary to bury the schlock. But the bad taste got the second chance to triumph. An American writer's wife got Nabokov's job to escape from the housewife's frustrations. The lady took the pulp from the wastebasket, looked through it and liked what she saw. The book was published in the West when anything Russian was the current rage. Perestroika...Glasnost...Remember?

Westerners consider Victor Erofeev a genuine article, a voice from Russia. And the fact that the text is full of these -"I stood on all fours and he entered me from behind" passages instead of the usual brooding and soul-searching expected from a Russian book hinted on some commercial possibilities.

And here in Russia we adore the compatriots whose art is acknowledged by the Western cultural establishment. The domestic publications were guaranteed.

So now we have the writer. And I do not know any real person who reads Victor Erofeev. I've tried, some of my friends tried - we all came to conclusion it's 100% garbage.

This situation is best illustrated with this anecdote: When asked for his opinion on the Napoleonic War hero, the Hussar poet Denis Davydov, Alexander Pushkin said: - Poets think he is a great soldier while soldiers think he is a great poet.-