On the opening of the homonym production in 3 October 2009 WALPURGISNACHT or STEPS OF THE COMMODORE by Venedikt Erofeev was published for the first time in Romanian, translated in Romanian by Maşa Dinescu.
Edited by Cluj-Napoca National Theatre in partnership with The Faculty of Theatre and Television, Babeş-Bolyai University, the play was published by the Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă publishing book in Cluj, in the Theatre collection, the series of "Extrem-contemporary dramaturgy", a collection initiated and coordinated by Anca Măniuţiu.
Short bio:
The writer Venedikt Vasilievici Erofeev was born on 26 October 1938 in the Soviet Union, in a small city in the region of Murmansk, across the arctic circle. He only knew his father, imprisoned in 1938, during the Satalin terror. în timpul Marii Terori staliniste, when he was 16, when his father was set free from the Gulag.
In 1956 he is expelled from the State University in Moscow, where he was a student at the Faculty of Letters for "immoral behaviour ", for his radical unconformism and his impossibility to act accordingly to the "soviet" norms. He survived by working underpaid and unqualified jobs and remained a marginal his entire life.
Moskova-Petuşki, the book that made him famous, is written in 1969 published for the frst time in 1973, in Israel, and then in the UK, France and USA. In the Soviet Union the book was published only in 1989, but before that the book was red in samizdat and the author was highly popular especially among the young. Moskova-Petuşki was published in Romanian in 2004 by Cartier Publishing House, translated by Emil Iordache.
Erofeev died of throat cancer on 11 May 1990. Just before his death he saw one more Walpurgisnacht or Steps Of The Commodore written in 1985.
Anca Măniuţiu
