Writer and literary critic Victor Erofeyev was born in Moscow in 1947. He won the Nabokov Award in 1992. In 2006 he was made a member of the French Orders of Arts and Letters and in 2013 – member of Legion d”Honneur. Erofeyev edited the ground-creaking anthology THE PENGUINE BOOK OF NEW RUSSIAN WRITING. He is the acclaimed author of Life with an Idiot (1980), Russian Beauty (1982), Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul (1999), Good Stalin (2004) and many other brilliant books. For many years he was hosting a TV show Apocrypha at Russian channel “Cultura”.

GOOD STALIN (Excerpt from the novel)

1
In the final analysis, I killed my father. The solitary golden arrow on the dark-blue dial on the tower of Moscow University, in the Lenin Hills, showed minus forty degrees Celsius. The cars weren’t starting. The birds were too scare to fly. The birds were too scared to fly. The city had frozen like aspic with a human filling. I the morning, when I glanced at my reflection in the oval mirror in the bathroom, I noticed that the hair on my temples had turned gray overnight. I was thirty-one years old. It was the coldest January of my life.
In fact, my father is still going strong, and only recently gave up playing tennis on the weekend. Even now, although he has aged greatly, he still mows the lawn at the dacha with the electric lawn mower, between the hydrangeas and the rose bushes, among the gooseberry thickets he has loved since he was a child. He still drives, stubbornly refusing to wear glasses - a habit which drives my mother crazy and spells trouble for pedestri- ans. Retiring to his study on the second floor of the dacha, he sits by the window which is scraped by the branches of a tall oak tree, and sluggishly rubs his strong-willed chin and types something on the typewriter (perhaps he’s writing his memories), but all this is mere detail. The murder I committed was not physical but political – and in my country, that was as true a death as any.

Translated from Russian by Ann Rush