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Writing in Russia

Public Inaugural Lecture by Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor Victor Erofeyev on May 20, 2015, at Freie Universität Berlin

№ 120/2015 from May 04, 2015

The Russian writer Victor Erofeyev will be holding his inaugural lecture at Freie Universität Berlin on May 20. His reflections will focus on the question of what it means to be a writer in Russia. Victor Erofeyev is the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin during the current summer semester. He is teaching a seminar called "Writing as the Inhuman Revolution." The inaugural lecture is public, and admission is free.

Victor Erofeyev was born in 1947 in Moscow. He is one of the most well-known contemporary Russian writers and a critical observer of contemporary Russia. He studied literature and linguistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University and did graduate work at the Institute for World Literature in Moscow, completing his doctorate there in 1975.

He mainly became known internationally through his debut novel, The Moscow Beauty (1990), which was translated into 27 languages. Since then, Erofeyev has published several acclaimed novels, essays, short stories, and travel reports, including the novel The Last Judgement (1997) and The Good Stalin (2004). From 2001 to 2011 Erofeyev was a professor of literature at the International University in Moscow. He writes regular columns and essays for highly regarded newspapers such as Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, and the New York Times.

The Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship was set up in 1998 at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature by the S. Fischer Verlag, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Freie Universität Berlin, and the Lecture Forum of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Each semester an internationally acclaimed writer from abroad teaches a course at Freie Universität Berlin as a Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor.

Time and Location

  • Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 6:15 p.m.
  • Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Alle 45, Room KL 32/202, 14195 Berlin; subway station: Dahlem-Dorf or Thielplatz (U3).

Further Information

Prof. Dr. Claudia Olk, Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin, Tel.: +49 30 838-564 18, Email: claudia.olk@fu-berlin.de