About the Author

Victor Erofeev is a well known writer and dissident who was described in a recent documentary about his life as "the Russian libertine". The author of a number of novels, his work has been translated into several languages and has received both critical and popular acclaim.Born in 1947 into the family of a prominent Soviet diplomat, Erofeev spent some of his childhood abroad in Paris. He graduated in philology from Moscow State University, and in 1979 became the editor of the underground magazine Metropol, which brought together prohibited works by Soviet writers such as Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Bitov and Vasily Aksenov. As a result, he was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union and his writing was banned until state censorship was relaxed under Gorbachev. Since the fall of the Soviet Union he has been a key public figure in Russia. In 1992 he was awarded the Nabokov Award, and was made a member of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2006. Erofeev was also editor of the groundbreaking anthology, The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing.

Reviews

"Apparently honest to a fault, Khoroshii Stalin is also a deliberate tease, as much a mockery of the reader as the earlier stories: are we faced with a fiction that reads like an autobiography, or an autobiography disguised as a novel?" Oliver Ready, Times Literary Supplement
"Practically all of Хороший Сталин (Good Stalin) is a wonderful read. Yes, one wishes for a closer consideration of this widespread and unchallenged subservience to Stalin (Erofeyev only goes so far as too offer more general observations about the Russian character), but it's such a winning read that one can readily excuse what shallows there are. Highly recommended." The complete review