MOSCOW - When the novelist and short story writer Viktor Yerofeyev dared to publish an anthology of unauthorized literary works in 1979, Soviet authorities accused him of producing "pornography." He was then barred from publishing a word of his writing for eight years.

Now, at the age of 55, Yerofeyev, an author who mixes the philosophical and the erotic, is once again the target of a moral crusade. The author is being harassed not by dour agents of the KGB but by a nationwide association of students known as Moving Together, who revere the country's president, Vladimir V. Putin - a dour former agent of the KGB.

Like the Communist Party's guardians of public morals, Moving Together finds Yerofeyev's sardonic view of Russian society offensive to the point of being obscene. Once again, his freedom of expression seems at risk.

Yerofeyev is not an overtly political writer. An admirer of the 20th-century American novelist Henry Miller, whose sexually explicit novels shocked readers, Yerofeyev's work focuses on highly personal themes.

His first published work was an essay on the Marquis de Sade. One recent book recounts his travels around the world with a young German journalist. The cover carries a glossy photo of the fully dressed author and his companion, who stands naked underneath her partly opened fur coat.

Explicit literature shocks no one in Moscow, with its many prostitutes, kiosks selling hard-core magazines and nightclubs featuring live sex acts. But Moving Together has shown scant interest in these traditional targets of moralists. Yerofeyev is a cultural heretic, not a political one. What really shocks Russians are his ideas.

For centuries, he says, Russian literature blamed the state - from the czars to the Communists - for the brutal, impoverished lives of most of the Russian people. But he and other postmodernist writers reject this view.

The evil inside

"We must understand better who we are, if we want to save ourselves," Yerofeyev said in the kitchen of his modern Moscow apartment on a recent wintry afternoon. "The main topic of Russian literature was that the main evil is not inside us, but outside us. And outside us are Jews, Poles and so on. But we have nobody to blame but ourselves."

This view rankles. Russian critics have called Yerofeyev "illiterate," "anti-humanist," "satanic" and "dangerous to Russian culture." It also led Vasily Yakimenko, a former aide to Putin and the leader of Moving Together, to single out Yerofeyev as the group's most important foe.

Moving Together claims 100,000 followers and seems to have tapped a deep reservoir of idealism. Young people desperately want to believe in Russia, but the problem is, in what can they feel pride? The Great Terror? Stalin? The rise of the oligarchs? The war in Chechnya?

Moving Together celebrates two things: Russia's rich culture and President Putin. Still, someone needed to take the rap for Russia's ills. So Moving Together blamed a tiny, splintered group with little political influence: Russia's postmodernist writers.

The campaign began in January, when Moving Together set up tables in Moscow and a few other cities where readers could swap the works of postmodernist authors for expensive editions of Russian classics.

The targeted writers

Among the despised authors were Yerofeyev, the fantasist Vladimir Sorokin, and Viktor Pelevin, the author of the novel Generation P, the title of which echoes the old advertising slogan, "The Pepsi Generation." All the surrendered books were stamped "Return to Author," and mailed back to publishers.

This joking approach helped soften the campaign's image - Moving Together wasn't burning books, merely trading them. Group leaders insisted they were mocking soulless modern writers, not trying to suppress them. But the campaign soon turned bitter, especially after Moving Together leader Yakimenko appeared in February on a television talk show with Yerofeyev.

Yakimenko brandished a copy of Yerofeyev's book Russian Beauty, written during his eight years of his official silence. And Yakimenko surprised the writer - as well as the show's host and producers - by challenging the writer to read aloud a passage describing the rape of a provincial girl by a Soviet bureaucrat.

"How could I not read from my book?" Yerofeyev asked with a smile, recalling the incident.

But how could he? It was live television. The passage included some of the vivid Russian language's most graphic words. As the television network executives frantically called to try to halt the broadcast, Yerofeyev read the passage, raising his voice when he spoke the unspeakable. "I pronounced these words for the first time in Russia on television," he said.

Afterwards, Yerofeyev braced for a barrage of criticism. Instead, the studio audience applauded him. He received more than 100 e-mails and calls of support, he said. "I would say that I won the battle," he said. "There was really popular support for me. It wasn't for the words. It was about the attempt at intimidation."

But Moving Together's campaign didn't stop. In April, Yerofeyev was signing books in Moscow when a group of eight young men arrived. Yakimenko describes them as university students; Yerofeyev calls them fascist thugs.

After buying four of Yerofeyev's books, they flung them back at him. Then they blocked Yerofeyev's table for 50 minutes, grappling with some outraged readers.

But perhaps Yerofeyev has too high a profile. Perhaps he has powerful support: Anatoli Chubais, former chief of staff to President Boris Yeltsin, had called Yerofeyev his favorite writer. Whatever the reason, Moving Together's campaign shifted focus.

A shift in focus

The organization took aim at Sorokin and his 1999 novel, Sky Blue Lard, a novel that features an imaginary sexual encounter between clones of the former Russian Communist Party chiefs Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. (While the group is anti-Marxist - it swapped copies of Karl Marx's Das Kapital for classics - it appears offended by unflattering portraits of Communist-era leaders.)

Executives at the Bolshoi Theater commissioned an opera by Sorokin, further outraging Moving Together. The group responded in June by placing a mock-up of a giant toilet in front of the theater, filling it with chlorinated water and dumping copies of Sorokin's prose inside.

Then the campaign shifted from Sorokin's works to the writer himself. Moving Together's director of legal affairs filed a criminal complaint in July accusing Sorokin and his publishers of producing pornography. The Moscow city prosecutor formally filed charges a few days later. If convicted, the 47-year-old author could be sentenced to two years in prison.

Police launched a series of raids on the offices of his Moscow publishers and hauled Sorokin in for questioning. He refused to answer questions, citing his constitutional rights.

At one point, Moving Together activists showed up at Sorokin's apartment carrying iron bars and offered to install them on Sorokin's windows, turning his home into a prison. He slammed the door.

Prosecutors convened a panel of writers to analyze Sorokin's novel. While several panel members called it literature, three others - all members of the Union of Writers - concluded that the book was a mixture of pornography, "graphomania" and mockery of Russia's sacred national symbols.

'Protracted barbarity'

Sorokin said last week that he had been shocked by this harsh judgment and disappointed at the silence from most of his fellow writers. His most vocal supporter has been Yerofeyev. "I am ashamed that only a few Russian writers have supported me," he said. "But they are the best writers."

Yerofeyev wrote to Putin in September, accusing Moving Together of "protracted barbarity." The works of writers such as James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov were once labeled pornography, he pointed out. "Nobody but you can put an end to this outrage," Yerofeyev wrote.

Putin replied that the matter should be solved between the authors and Moving Together. But Yerofeyev and others say that the campaign against the writers could not have advanced without Putin's approval. Now, though, that approval may have been withdrawn.

Late last month, a high-ranking Kremlin official told Yerofeyev that Putin has decided to halt all court actions against allegedly harmful literature. Yerofeyev appears tremendously relieved.

The president, he says, may have halted a return to the Soviet system of officially sanctioned and banned literature. "It's not just Sorokin and me," he said. "The whole structure of the culture could have changed."

Expanding the struggle

Yakimenko of Moving Together said last week that if Putin had decided to halt prosecutions of writers, it was news to him. "I don't understand how President Putin can stop all legal suits," he said. "Our courts are independent."

Moving Together is seeking to expand its struggle. On Nov. 10, the group sent a letter to the government's Ministry of the Publishing, Television and Mass Media asking for a ban on the publication of what was termed "non-normative vocabulary" - that is, obscenities. Ministry officials say there are currently no legal grounds for such a ban.

The group would listen if Putin asked it to stop taking legal action. "Without any doubt," Yakimenko said. "Of course, we would very much like to have some grounds for this advice, but in any case, the wishes of the president will be taken into consideration by us."

Yakimenko said Yerofeyev exaggerated the confrontation with group members at the Moscow book store. Sorokin, he said, hallucinated the episode with the iron bars.

Yerofeyev senses that Russia's latest campaign against allegedly dangerous ideas may almost be over. And he feels a deep sense of relief.

"In Russia, it's better for things to be unpredictable than for them to be predictable, as in the Stalin era," he said. "Then, it was predictable that tomorrow would be worse than today."