Veniamin Erofeev biography. Venedikt Erofeev. In this circle he was not comfortable

“I am a superman, and nothing superhuman is alien to me…”.

Venichka Erofeev

Russian writer and alcoholic, best known for the story "Moscow-Petushki", written in early 1970. In the text of the story there are a lot of parodies of the stamps of that time, but there is no accusation ...

He was brought up in an orphanage. Graduated from school with a gold medal.

“Venichka always carried a green notebook with him, in which he wrote down observations and notes about the people around him. There was also an unfinished manuscript of the poem "Moscow-Petushki". Venichka did not part with this notebook and did not show it to anyone. Once Igor came to his brigade. Friends, as usual, drank, and Avdiev decided to steal the cherished manuscript from a friend. Waiting for Venichka to fall asleep, Igor took a notebook from under his pillow. Even in the train, he read it from cover to cover and returned to Moscow completely stunned. Taking a taxi, he rushed to Tikhonov, and friends read the manuscript all night, laughing and crying with delight. Venichka showed up in the morning, not himself from the loss that had befallen him. But from the faces of Igor and Vadim, he immediately realized that they had the secret notebook. “Thank God I found it. Let's slap a little," he sighed with relief ... "

Petrovets T.G., Stars scandalize, M. “Ripol-classic”, 2000, p. 210.

At one time, the writer wrote out for himself the British understanding of the novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky: "In the British Encyclopedic Dictionary: "Kak zakalyalas stal" - "the success story of a young cripple."

Erofeev V.V., From notebooks / From the bottom of the soul, M., Vagrius, 2003, p. 452.

“... a whole galaxy of “humble” writers arose, whose patriarch can rightfully be considered Venedikt Erofeev. His "weakness" - Venichka's angelic drunkenness - is the key to the transformation of the world. In the poem "Moscow-Petushki" alcohol performs the function of a "generator of unpredictability." Intoxication is a way to break free, to become - literally - not of this world. (Again, a curious parallel with Taoist texts: “A drunken person who falls from a wagon, even very sharply, will not break to death. His bones and joints are the same as those of other people, but the injuries are different, because his soul is integral. He sat down in cart unconsciously and fell unconsciously.") Vodka in Erofeev's poem is the midwife of a new reality, experiencing birth pangs in the hero's soul. Each sip rejuvenates the “hard”, ossified structures of the world, returning it to the ambiguity, proteicity, amorphism of that chaos pregnant with meanings, where things and phenomena exist only in potentiality. The main thing in the poem is an endless stream of truly free speech, freed from logic, from causal relationships, from responsibility for meaning. Venichka calls out of oblivion random, like unpredictable hiccups, coincidences: everything here rhymes with everything - prayers with newspaper headlines, names of drunks with the names of writers, poetic quotations with obscene language. In the poem there is not a single word spoken in simplicity. In each line, an unprecedented verbal matter conceived by vodka boils and swarms. The drunken hero plunges headlong into this speech protoplasm, foolishly confessing to the reader: “I, as a phenomenon, have a self-increasing logos.” Logos, that is, integral knowledge, which includes analysis and intuition, reason and feeling, “self-grows” with Venichka because he sows words, from which, like seeds, meanings sprout.

Genis A.A. , Ticket to China, St. Petersburg, "Amphora", 2001, p. 97-98.

Sample text: "I like it. I like that the people of my country have such empty and bulging eyes. This gives me a sense of legitimate pride. You can imagine what kind of eyes there are. Where everything is sold and everything is bought ... deeply hidden, lurking, predatory and frightened eyes ... Devaluation, unemployment, pauperism ... They look from under their brows, with unceasing care and torment - these are the eyes in the world of Chistogan ... But my people - what eyes! They are constantly protruding, but there is no tension in them. The complete absence of any meaning - but what power! (What spiritual power!) Those eyes won't sell. Nothing to sell and nothing to buy. Whatever happens to my country. In days of doubt, in days of painful reflection, in the time of any trials and calamities, these eyes will not blink. They are all God's dew ... "

Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow - Petushki.

“Vodka is the essence and root of Erofeev's creativity. As soon as we honestly read the poem "Moscow-Petushki", we will be convinced that vodka does not need to be justified - it justifies the author herself. Alcohol is the core on which Erofeev's plot is strung. His hero goes through all the stages of intoxication - from the first saving sip to the painful absence of the last one, from the store closed in the morning to the store closed in the evening, from a hangover revival to a sober death. In strict accordance with this path, the compositional canvas is also built. As we move to Petushki, elements of delirium and absurdity build up in the text. The world around swirls, reality closes on the painful consciousness of the hero. But this clinically accurate picture describes only the outer side of intoxication. There is another - deep, ideological, philosophical, let's face it - religious. His close friend, Vladimir Muravyov, wrote about Erofeev's religiosity, who persuaded him to accept Catholicism, convincing Venichka that only this denomination recognizes a sense of humor.
Muravyov writes: "Moscow-Petushki" - a deeply religious book [...] Venichka himself always had the feeling that a prosperous, ordinary life was a substitute for real life, he destroyed it, and his destruction partly had a religious connotation.

Genis A.A. , good news. Venedikt Erofeev / Two: Investigations, M., "Eksmo"; "Horseshoe", 2002, p. 58.

Writer, playwright and essayist Venedikt Vasilyevich Erofeev was born on October 24, 1938 in the village of Niva-2 in the suburbs of Kandalaksha, Murmansk Region. The Chupa station of the Loukhsky district of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where the Erofeev family lived, is recorded as the place of his birth.

Venedikt was the youngest child in a family that had four more children besides him. In 1946, his father, who worked as the head of the railway station, was arrested and convicted on charges of anti-Soviet agitation. The family was left without a livelihood. The mother went to work with her sister in Moscow, and the younger children ended up in orphanage No. 3 in the city of Kirovsk. Venedikt was in an orphanage from 1947 to 1953.

In 1954, after his father was released, he returned to his family. In 1956 my father died.

In 1955, after graduating from school in Kirovsk with a gold medal, Venedikt Erofeev moved to Moscow, where he entered the philological faculty of Lomonosov Moscow University. For a year and a half, he studied well and received an increased scholarship, but due to numerous absences from military training, he was expelled.

For some time, Erofeev lived in the dormitory of Moscow State University on Stromynka, where in the mid-1950s he began his first essay, Notes of a Psychopath (1956-1958; the manuscript was considered lost, first published in 1995).

Until 1958, he also wrote poetry, and in 1962 he finished the story "The Good News", created under the influence of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (not completely preserved).

Repeatedly Venedikt Erofeev tried to continue his education. In 1961 he entered the Vladimir Pedagogical Institute. For very good academic performance, he received an increased scholarship, but a year later he was expelled. Also, Erofeev was expelled from the Orekhovo-Zuevsky and Kolomna Pedagogical Institutes.

And immediately drank: 5 cocktails according to the recipe of Venichka ErofeevIn honor of the 75th anniversary of the birth of Venedikt Erofeev, the author of the poem "Moscow - Petushki", the Weekend project invites you to remember - and recommends that you never try - the best cocktails invented by the hero of the work, Venichka.

The longest work of Erofeev was the service in the communication system. For ten years he was engaged in the installation of cable communication lines throughout the country; on these works around Moscow, in the area of the city of Zheleznodorozhny, Erofeev began, and two months later in the area of Lobnya-Sheremetyevo finished the poem "Moscow-Petushki" (1969), which brought him world fame. The text of the novel began to be distributed by samizdat within the Soviet Union, and then in translation, smuggled to the West. The poem was first published in 1973 in Jerusalem, and the first official publication in the original Russian appeared in Paris in 1977.

During the years of glasnost, the poem "Moscow-Petushki" began to be published in Russia, but in a greatly curtailed form - as part of a campaign against alcoholism. Only in 1995, 18 years after writing, the novel was completely, without cuts, officially published in Russia.

In 1972, "Petushki" was followed by "Dmitry Shostakovich", the draft manuscript of which was lost, and all attempts to restore it were unsuccessful. Articles about the Norwegian writers Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun are also considered lost.

In subsequent years, everything written by Erofeev was put on the table, in dozens of notebooks and thick notebooks. The only exception was an essay about the Russian religious philosopher and thinker Vasily Rozanov, published in the Veche magazine under the title "Vasily Rozanov Through the Eyes of an Eccentric".
Since 1978, Erofeev lived in the north of Moscow, where he wrote the tragedy "Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander" (published in Paris in 1985, at home - in 1989), a documentary collage "My little Leniniana" full of mournful and humorous reflections (published in Paris in 1988, in Russia in 1991), began the play "Fanny Kaplan" (not finished, published in 1991).

In the mid-1980s, Yerofeev developed throat cancer. After a long treatment and several operations, he lost his voice and was able to speak only with the help of an electronic sound machine.

Erofeev died in Moscow on May 11, 1990. He was buried at the Kuntsevo cemetery.

Since 1999, Erofeev Literary Festivals have been held annually in Kirovsk in conjunction with the Murmansk branch of the Union of Russian Writers.

On May 11, on the day of Erofeev's death, admirers of the writer's talent gather to lay flowers at the memorial plaque on the building of school No. 1, which he graduated from.

On October 24, 2001, the Khibiny Literary Museum of Venedikt Erofeev was opened in the Central Library named after A.M. Gorky of the city of Kirovsk. The museum exposition "Kirovsk-Moscow-Petushki" includes thematic sections "Venedict Erofeev in the Khibiny", "Years of study", "On the Vladimir land", "Moscow-Petushki" - an encyclopedia of Russian life in the 1960s", "Friends of Erofeev "," Departure to immortality "," Works of Venedikt Erofeev in the theaters of the world ".

The museum of Venedikt Erofeev contains his personal belongings, industrial furniture, foreign publications, autographs and the most rare photographs.
Venedikt Erofeev was married twice. His first wife was Valentina Zimakova, in 1966 their son Venedikt was born. Erofeev entered into a marriage with his second wife Galina Nosova in 1974.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

The author of the second Russian prose poem after Dead Souls, Venichka Erofeev, can be considered an impeccable dandy of the era of stagnation. The stylish wit walked across the expanses of the vast homeland like a master. Despite the harsh criminal code, he did not bother with such things as a permanent residence permit or military registration.

The headaches of dissident human rights activists did not bother him; the head of this blue-eyed brunette, who at times broke women's hearts, suffered only from excruciating hangover pains.

Alcoholic dope enveloped his person from an early age. In 1946, the father of eight-year-old Venedikt was arrested for "anti-Soviet propaganda", and Venya was assigned to an orphanage in the city of Kirovsk. Despite his youth, the spanish friends quickly taught the boy bad things (and, according to his mother, he began to write at the age of five). It would be too much to call Erofeev an alcoholic child, but the guy knew firsthand how to pawn by the collar. After the return of her father and the family's settlement in the railway barracks, Venichka's social circle changed little.

Venichka drank black, selflessly. All the sophisticated recipes given in the poem "Moscow - Petushki" are not idle fiction, but experimental finds tested on our own experience. He made drunkenness the norm of life and refuted the thesis about the inevitability of drunken degradation, while maintaining an enviable intellect all his life. What he uttered was listened to with curiosity, even when the writer, who suffered from throat cancer, gnashed through the laryngophone.

Drunkenness was a cult for Erofeev, to which the officially unrecognized, but at the same time beloved alcoholic Venichka served until his last day, and which brought him to the grave.

Genius against drinking

1955 Erofeev enters the philological faculty of Moscow State University. After a year and a half of general drunkenness, he is expelled from the course - for poor progress.

1957-1959 Venichka demonstrates the wonders of multiprofessionalism, working as a food store loader, a bricklayer at a construction site, a stoker, a police officer on duty (!) etc. It starts pouring everything that burns into itself. With such a pace of work and rest, he has no time for writing.

1960-1965 Enters the philological faculty of two pedagogical institutes at once - in Vladimir and Kolomna. He was expelled from both "for the moral decay of the students." Composes the story "Good News". He drinks "better" - he does not poison himself with self-palm.

1966 After the birth of his son, Erofeev divorces his wife. Drinks bitter, taking breaks for the days of visiting a child in the village of Myshlino.

1970 The year of the creation of the poem "Moscow - Petushki" coincides with the peak of vagrancy and service to Bacchus.

1974 The text of the novel is published in samizdat. Venedikt is partly socialized by marrying Galina Nosova, registering for the military and acquiring a “certain place of residence”. He drinks everything - red, white, a portmanteau, cologne. Doesn't write anything.

1990 Writes the play "Walpurgis Night, or the Commander's Steps", the characters of which, patients of a psychiatric hospital, commit mass suicide while drinking methyl alcohol. In May, Erofeev, already recognized as a genius, who forced the publication of Petushki, dies - not from cirrhosis of the liver, but from throat cancer.

Venedikt Vasilyevich Erofeev(October 24, 1938 - May 11, 1990) - Russian writer, author of the prose poem "Moscow - Petushki".

Born in Zapolyarny, Murmansk region. He grew up in the city of Kirovsk, in the north of the Kola Peninsula. In 1946, his father was arrested for "spreading anti-Soviet propaganda" under the infamous Article 58. The mother was unable to take care of the three children alone, and the two boys lived in the orphanage until 1954, when their father returned home. For the first time in his life, Venedikt Erofeev crossed the Arctic Circle (from north to south, of course), when, after graduating from school with a gold medal, at the age of 17, he went to the capital to enter Moscow University.

He studied at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (1955-1957), but was expelled after the first three semesters - for "very unstable and uncontrollable" behavior and for absenteeism from military training. However, not wanting to leave the Moscow region, he moved to other universities in order to maintain his status as a student, he studied at the Orekhovo-Zuevsky (1959-1960), Vladimir (1961-1962) and Kolomensky (1962-1963) Pedagogical Institutes , but was expelled from everywhere.

Screenwriter Oleg Osetinsky, interviewing Erofeev for a film about him, asked: “Many people wonder why you, having written such a book as “Moscow - Petushki”, did not visit, for example, Siberia?” Erofeev replied: “I myself am still surprised that I was spared this. Apparently, I was never summoned to the KGB, simply because there was nowhere to summon me. I didn't have a permanent residence. And one of my friends, who held a fairly high post, was nevertheless summoned in the year 73-74 and asked: “What is Erofeev doing now?” And he replied: “How? Just, as always, drinking and drinking all day long. They were so surprised by his answer that they did not touch him or me again. Like, the man finally got down to business ".

Erofeev’s misunderstanding and annoyance were caused by poets who do not recognize, or even simply “spit on” their famous predecessors: Pushkin, and Lermontov, and Tsvetaeva, and many others. “What Russian does not cry from their lines?- Erofeev was indignant. - After all, they should be grateful to those from whom they came out! He bowed before Tsvetaeva: "What would they all do without her?" Once, speaking about the poems of one poetess, he said: “After Marina lathered the noose, women in poetry have nothing more to do in general”. Having said this, he nevertheless named several worthy, in his opinion, names.

Erofeev considered Saltykov-Shchedrin, the early Dostoevsky, Gogol and some others to be his literary teachers. About Gogol, for example, he said: “If it weren’t for Nikolai Vasilievich, I wouldn’t exist as a writer either, and I’m not ashamed to admit it”. He did not like to discuss modern domestic prose - he recognized few people in it, and from those few he especially singled out Vasil Bykov and Ales Adamovich. Bowed before Vasily Grossman - said: “In front of Grossman, I would kneel and kiss his hand”.

In the mid 1980s. Erofeev developed throat cancer. After a long treatment and several surgeries, Yerofeev lost his voice and was able to speak only with the help of an electronic sound apparatus. Erofeev died in Moscow on May 11, 1990. “If you asked me: how do you feel about life in general, I roughly answered: negligently”© V. Erofeev

Literary creativity

According to his mother, he began to write at the age of five. Notes of a Psychopath (1956-1958), begun at the age of 17, are considered the first noteworthy work. The deep erudition of the still very young Erofeev is very clearly visible in his youthful poem Le Havre, which was accidentally preserved. In 1962, the "Good News" was written, which "experts" in the capital regarded as a nonsensical attempt to give "Gospel of Russian Existentialism" And "Nietzsche turned inside out".

In the early 60s, several articles were written about fellow Norwegians (one about Hamsun, one about Björnson, two about Ibsen's late dramas) - all were rejected by the editors of the "Scientific Notes of the Vladimir State Pedagogical Institute" as "methodologically appalling". In the autumn of 1969, by his own definition, “I finally got to my own style of writing” and in the winter of 1970 "unceremoniously" created "Moscow - Petushki" (from January 19 to March 6, 1970). In 1972, "Petushki" was followed by "Dmitry Shostakovich", the draft manuscript of which (according to Erofeev) "was stolen in the train, along with a shopping bag, where there were two bottles of chatter", and all attempts to restore it were unsuccessful.

In subsequent years, everything written was put on the table, in dozens of notebooks and thick notebooks. (Except for an essay about Vasily Rozanov written under pressure from the Veche magazine and some trifles.) In the spring of 1985, a tragedy appeared in five acts, Walpurgis Night, or the Commander's Steps. The disease that began in the summer of the same year practically put an end to the implementation of the plan of two other tragedies.

According to various recollections, Erofeev had a phenomenal memory and precise erudition (describing Erofeev's "games of erudition", Lydia Lyubchikova recalls that the author liked to refer to little-known historical figures, accurately dating the quoted text), - therefore he wrote easily and quickly when inspiration rolled up. Then he could be silent for a long time. In one of the interviews, Erofeev was asked if he could have done more under more favorable circumstances? To which he replied: “And here nothing depends on anything. I've had a very tolerable life, so what? I was silent. No one - neither the censor, nor money, nor hunger - are able to dictate a single line they please, unless, of course, you agree to write prose, not dictation..

"In its literary essence," Moscow - Petushki "is a fantasy novel in its utopian variety"(Peter Vail, Alexander Genis).

"Moscow - Petushki" - menippea, travel notes, mystery, life, legend, fantasy novel"(L. Berakha, author of works on Yerofeev's novel).

Erofeev's "Moscow - Petushki" is usually regarded as the first Russian postmodernist work. Actually, the whole poem is nothing more than an uninterrupted “sleep motif”, during which the lyrical hero is in a constant borderline altered state of consciousness between this and otherworldly reality. And the whole journey of Venichka takes place in such a surreal space, caused outwardly by alcohol intoxication. But it is similar to a dream, since it is in this vein that the hero himself perceives it: "... through dreams in Kupavna ...". In addition, the absence of clear boundaries between different states leads to the absence of the entire category of time in general. And this allows the author to constantly use the space-time windows that are being formed, through which more and more new characters penetrate and, on the contrary, the Moscow Kremlin, which Venichka is looking for, disappears.

Various names, quotes, concepts and objects with their properties, composition and relationships create a multidimensional space of "Moscow - Petushkov". The inventory lists that fill the poem are akin to Michel Foucault's "infinite registers", describing the world in its episteme of the preclassical period. There is no need to go far for examples of an inventory list - the very first chapter opens with a whole set of enumerations and repetitions: “How many times already (a thousand times), drunk or with a hangover, I walked through Moscow from north to south, from west to east, from end to end and anyhow - and I never saw the Kremlin”. Moreover, in this sentence, there is, as it were, an increase in the degree of detail of the enumerations: from zero in the clarification “a thousand times” to the minimum two members of the alternative for enumeration “drinking or with a hangover” and, finally, to a detailed enumeration of directions. Infinitely expanding, acquiring space and "thingness", Moscow - it goes beyond the real with a fabulously epic "from end to end" and asserts itself in its ghostliness with the elusiveness of the Kremlin (illusoryness, quoting Bulgakov's Moscow).

Features of the style of "Moscow - Petushkov" first of all refer us to the style of N.V. Gogol (which is complemented by a plot similarity with "Dead Souls" and a direct hint from the author - the subtitle "poem"). Nabokov, in his essay on Gogol, constantly noted “an amazing phenomenon: verbal turns create living people”. As one example illustrating how this is done: “the day was not so clear, not so gloomy, but some kind of light gray color, which happens only on the old uniforms of garrison soldiers, this, however, a peaceful army, but partly drunk on Sundays”- compare this army that suddenly appeared with the phantom border guards of V. Erofeev: “What boundaries can there be if everyone drinks the same way and does not speak Russian! There, perhaps, they would be glad to put a border guard somewhere, but there is simply nowhere to put it. So the border guards hang around there without any business, yearn and ask for a light ... "

And a particularly impressive parade of phantoms appears in the last chapters of "Moscow - Petushki": Satan, the Sphinx, the princess, the valet Pyotr (perhaps the lackey Chichikov Petrushka is one of his "ancestors"), Erinnia, the Pontic king Mithridates, etc.

- (1938 90) Russian writer. In the story Moscow Petushki (1970; published in 1988 89), the tragedy of Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander (1989), the essay Vasily Rozanov through the eyes of an eccentric (1973, published in 1989), gravitating towards the traditions of surrealism and ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Erofeev, Venedikt Vasilievich- EROFEEV Venedikt Vasilievich (1938 1990), Russian writer. In the story “Moscow Petushki” (1970; widely distributed in samizdat; published in Russia in 1988 89), the tragedy “Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander” (1989), the essay “Vasily ... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

- (1938 1990), Russian writer. In the story “Moscow Petushki” (1970; published in the USSR in 1988 89), the tragedy “Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander” (1989), the essay “Vasily Rozanov through the eyes of an eccentric” (1973, published in 1989), gravitating towards traditions … … encyclopedic Dictionary

- (1938, station Chupa, Murmansk region 1990, Moscow), writer. In 1955 he entered the philological faculty of Moscow State University, lived in a hostel on Stromynka Street; leaving the university in 1956, wandered around the country. In the late 1950s found a haven in Moscow; ... ... Moscow (encyclopedia)

Genus. October 24, 1938, in the Murmansk region, mind. May 11, 1990 Writer, author of the books Notes of a Psychopath (1956 1958), Good News (1962), Moscow Petushki (1970, published 1988 1989). Dr. works: ... ... Big biographical encyclopedia

Date of birth: October 24, 1938 (19381024) Place of birth: pos. Niva 2 of the Kandalaksha City Council of the Murmansk Region, RSFSR, USSR Date of death: May 11, 19 ... Wikipedia

Venedikt Vasilyevich Erofeev Date of birth: October 24, 1938 (19381024) Place of birth: pos. Niva 2 of the Kandalaksha City Council of the Murmansk Region, RSFSR, USSR Date of death: May 11, 19 ... Wikipedia