Venedikt Erofeev was a Russian writer.

He was born in the settlement of Niva-2. His father was the station master of a railway station and was repressed and served a camp sentence from 1939 to 1954. After completing courses for railway track workers of the Murmansk Railway, Vasily Vasilyevich Erofeev was appointed duty officer at Poyakonda station.

Venedikt spent most of his childhood in an orphanage in Kirovsk (the Kola Peninsula).

He graduated from school with a gold medal. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s he studied first at the philology department of Moscow State University, then at the Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Kolomna, and Vladimir Teachers’ Institutes, but was expelled from all of them. From 1958 to 1975 he lived without official registration and worked as a store loader in Kolomna, a mason’s helper and receiver of wine bottles in Moscow, a stoker-firer in Vladimir, a duty officer at a police station in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, a driller in a geological party in Ukraine, a librarian in Bryansk, a cable-line installer in various cities of the USSR, a laboratory assistant in a parasitological expedition in Uzbekistan, and a laboratory assistant at the All-Union Research Institute of Disinfection and Disinfestation, “dealing with winged bloodsucking gnats,” in Tajikistan. In 1974, his marriage made it possible for him to register in Moscow.

From a young age, Venedikt was distinguished by remarkable erudition and a love of literary language. At the age of 17, in Vladimir, he wrote Notes of a Psychopath (long considered lost, first published in 1995). In 1970 Erofeev finished the prose poem Moscow to the End of the Line. It was published in the Israeli almanac Ami in 1973. In the USSR the poem was first printed in December 1988–March 1989 in the magazine Sobriety and Culture; the uncensored version first appeared in the almanac Vest in 1989. In this and his other works he is inclined toward the traditions of surrealism and literary buff