Venedikt Yerofeyev is one of the most mysterious figures in the history of uncensored Russian literature. To a wide reader familiar with him from "Moscow - Cockerels", it may seem that the Broom from the poem is the real Yerofeyev. But is it so? There is no unambiguous answer either in the works of his biographers or in the memoirs of acquaintances and friends. The purpose of this collection is to present the little-known pages of Yerofeyev's biography and give a cross-section of the most revealing works about his life and work. The book includes materials that allow you to see the author of the famous poem from a variety of perspectives: from the autobiography written by Yerofeyev at the age of sixteen, archival documents, his interviews and correspondence to responses to his works by famous writers (Viktor Nekrasov, Vladimir Voinovich, Tatiana Tolstoy, Zinovy Zinik, Viktor Pelevin, Dmitry Bykov) and articles by critics and literary critics, some of which have already become philological classics. A significant part of the materials and most of the photographs included in the collection are printed for the first time. The authors of the book are Oleg Lekmanov, Doctor of Philology, Professor of the School of Philology of the Faculty of Humanities of the Higher School of Economics, and Ilya Simanovsky, a researcher of the biography and creativity of Venedikt Yerofeyev.