Viktor Yerofeyev is one of the best-known contemporary Russian authors and one of the most prominent Kremlin critics. Viktor was born in Moscow in 1947 to a family of diplomats. His father Vladimir Yerofeyev was Stalin's French interpreter and translator during his lifetime and Soviet cultural attaché in Paris from 1955. After the family returned to the USSR, Viktor Jerofejew studied literature and linguistics at Moscow's Lomonosov University. After graduating, he did research at the Institute of World Literature from 1970 to 1973, where he wrote his dissertation on Fyodor Dostoevsky and French existentialism. Viktor Jerofejew has been literarily active since the mid-seventies. His first novel, The Moscow Beauty, made him famous worldwide and was translated into 27 languages. In 1979, he was expelled from the USSR Writers' Union because of his participation in the literary magazine Metropol. Since the expulsion was equivalent to a professional ban, he wrote for the drawer until his rehabilitation in 1988. Viktor Jerofejew is the editor of the first Russian edition of Nabokov's works and writes regularly for magazines such as the New York Times Book Review, the FAZ, Die Zeit and Die Welt. Yerofeyev has repeatedly spoken out as an astute critic of Russian politics, Putinism and authoritarianism, taking a literary stand with his novels and essays. Because his stance exposes him to great danger in his home country and because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the author has left Russia and settled in Germany with his family. From the summer semester of 2022, he will hold a visiting professorship for literature at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Viktor Yerofeyev has received several literary prizes, including the Nabokov Prize in 1992 and the Gogol Prize in 2018. Since 2013, he has been a recipient of the highest French award, the Legion of Honour.