The record made in his birth certificate declares his birthplace to be his parents' place of residence: Chupa railway station, Loukhsky District, Karelian ASSR.

Later he studied in several more institutes in different towns, including Kolomna and Vladimir, but he never managed to graduate from any, usually being expelled due to his "amoral behaviour".

He started writing at the age of 17; in the 1960s he unsuccessfully submitted several articles on Ibsen and Hamsun to literary magazines.

Referred to by David Remnick as "the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era",[3] the poem was published for the first time in 1973 in a Russian-language magazine in Jerusalem.

[5] Galina Nosova died three years after Yerofeyev - having thrown herself off the balcony of her 13th floor apartment in Moscow.

[7][6] Yerofeyev died five years after he was first diagnosed with the disease, on 11 May 1990, at the Russian Oncological Centre in Moscow.