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TEMPTATION BY REVOLUTION (RUSSIAN SUPREME POWER), collected essays by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - ARSIS BOOKS
The volume shows us the author as a philosopher of Russian geopolitics. Its nine essays develop a unified rationale for Russia’s fate from the Time of Troubles to the death of Stalin, driven largely by an internal, eschatological dynamic. Exemplary is an essay from 2000, “Capital and Province”, on the capital (the seat of Power) versus the provinces (home of the people) as two conceptual modes. Power identifies with heaven and ravages the earth even while constantly expanding over it, while the provinces align with the soil, hover over it, nurture it—and neither is much interested in the other except instrumentally, each side fearing the other with “areciprocal terror, persecution mania and mutual flight”.
Other entries range from hardcore history to opinion pieces: on Ivan IV’s oprichnina; on Saint George the Dragon-Slayer; a history of absolute power in Russia titled; several pages of political insights under the title “Grandfather’s Jottings”; a savage meditation “On the Past of thePresent and Future” that addresses our self-serving need for a cleansed history; a discussion of the “Conflict of Civilizations” (Christian and Islam) and the refugee crisis; and two brilliant essays that peak on Andrei Platonov but cover far more philosophical territory.
The “Temptation” of the book’s title is an attitude toward time. For a people of the End, revolution means the wait is over. Time’s slow, incremental passing can at last be short-circuited, permitting a leap out, or up. Clarity and simplicity reign in moments of revolutionary ardor. But paradoxically, as time speeds up and our surroundings stay the same (or degenerate), human agents slow down or stop altogether, leaving us with the dreamy ineffectual subjects of Chevengur, whose revolutionary slogans lack all real-world referents. Sharov notes in his preface to this collection: “with salvific regularity, whenever my major task [novel-writing] hit adead end, history would suddenly come to my aid”.
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GODS OF THE STEPPE, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov
Rights sold: France - ACTES SUD, Bulgaria - ENTHUSIAST, Russia - EKSMO, World English - AMAZON CROSSING
It is the summer of 1945. Germany has been defeated, Hitler has disappeared, and tensions are mounting ever higher along the Russian-Chinese border…where the threat of Japanese invasion haunts.
For Petka, no life could be more thrilling and glorious than marching into battle alongside the Red Army. But he is only twelve, the bastard child of a fractured family, trapped in a village too tiny for his bursting spirit. So he must make his own adventure wherever he can find it. And if that means passing off a wolf cub as a puppy under the nose of his ferocious grandma, stealing bootleg alcohol for the bivouacked troops he worships, smuggling himself in a barrel across the border and into the line of fire, fighting for his life when his own aimless peers turn inexplicably vicious, or befriending an enigmatic Japanese POW who transcends Petka’s provincial world, then so be it.
By turns comical, harrowing, poignant, and exhilarating, Petka reveals the soul of a boy who knows only to take from life all that he can—not merely what his circumstances allow.
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