I recommend this to anyone. If you think that the ex-Soviet Union was dead culturally, cut off from the wells of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, read this; you will find in it the writings of those who did not give up, who lived and loved in awful conditions, and who withstood in dignity the trials that destiny doled out to them.

If you are an afficianado or curious about Russian dissidence during the Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov years (those before Perestroika), buy this book. You will be amazed at the absurdist earthy humor of these writers (especially that of Prigov).

Many selections deal with the perennial human dilemnas that stem from choice (Dovlatov, Popov), conflicts between urban and rural life (Gorenshtein, Astafiev), and contradictory wordviews (Prigov).

Also check out anything by Victor Erofeev, who is the compiler of this anthology (which created a big stir in the Kremlin in the early 80's).

To these brave writers, we should resound in unanimous praise.

samst117@pitt.edu

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.-

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 ...