Der Grosse Gopnik

Viktor Jerofeyev's epic novel is a brilliant rogue piece that tells the story of Putin's rise, who as a great Gopnik embodies what should not be possible: a tough guy, a ruffian, a lout, who not only makes it to the highest centers of power but also manages to stay there. This could only have been imagined by someone! But who? Someone who is considered talentless by his mother and whose father loses his position as a high-ranking diplomat due to the publication of a critical text, an author who will never be as radical as his sister O., who holds a mirror to post-Soviet Russia through pornography, and who nevertheless gets expelled from the writers' association more than once and now lives in exile in Germany.

Thus, Jerofeyev tells the story of today's Russia from the perspective of the writer – who is free to move through time and space, to let characters enter and exit, to invent things, and to expose experiences, hearsay, and observations as nonsense. Jerofeyev dares to provide a literary explanation for what is happening today: The great Gopnik is a rapid and ironic, sometimes even cynical movement through time and space, where Stalin, Putin, the writer's parents, his fellow writers, and his wives find themselves at a table for dinner to pose the one unsolvable question: How could it come to this?.