ABSTRACT
Speaking about the cultural and literary sources of the so-called Russian alternative prose, Viktor Erofeev (b. 1947) acknowledges that it “has learnt from a strange mixture of teachers” (Erofeev 1995, xiii). The incomplete list of sources includes Marquis de Sade, Decadents, Surrealists, mystics, pop-art and Nabokov. For Erofeev — a renowned mouthpiece of alternative prose and one of Russia's leading literary critics — “learning” results from very careful study, almost X-ray examination and scrutiny. His collected works (1994–1996) comprise scholarly articles on Rozanov, Shestov, Dostoevskii, Nabokov, Sologub, Belyi and Chekhov, among others. Apart from this, he wrote introductory articles to the selected works of Shestov, Rozanov, Nabokov and The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing.
