His father, who was the interpreter for Stalin in the late 1940s, wrote a book of memories; his brother is a curator at the Tretyakov Gallery.

He later organised his own literary magazine, Metropol', in which many of the big names of Soviet literature participated, including Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Bitov, Bella Akhmadulina, and others.

As a result, Erofeyev was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and was banned from being published until 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

[1] Alfred Schnittke's opera Life with an Idiot is based on Erofeyev‘s 1980 story of the same name, which he made into a libretto for the composer.

[2] Erofeyev regularly contributes to The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The International Herald Tribune.