“Russian Beauty” is Viktor Erofeev’s most famous novel, written in the early 1980s but published only ten years later, translated into twenty languages. European critics received the book as one of the largest literary events of postmodernism. The beauty bestowed on the heroine, Irena—a provincial girl with naive courage who set out to conquer the capital—is a promise of happiness that destiny never fulfilled. A breath-taking, phantasmagoric monologue about eternity that lasts a moment—whose name is life.