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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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Palisandria (Astrophobia), a novel by Sasha Sokolov (1985)
Rights sold: Czech Republic – PROSTOR, Italy - ATMOSPHERE LIBRI, Russia – AZBOOKA, OGI, USA – GROVE WEIDENFELD
"An enchanting, tragic, and touching work." - VLADIMIR NABOKOV
"A book of rare depth, ...wildly funny and oddly fascinating and sad; it is the sort of book you feel sorry to close after the last page." - TATYANA TOLSTAYA
"It will undoubtedly come to be recognized as one of the great classics of Russian prose." — Newsweek
"The voice is amazingly sensitive and imaginative, gloriously lucid of language and full of broad comedy and whimsical wit." — The Washington-Post Book World
"Sokolov [is] already, on the strength of A School for Fools, assured of a place in the pantheon of twentieth-century Russian literature... He is a prose poet who combines, to a rare degree, linguistic precision, imaginative boldness, and wit in its profounder sense—the intellectual faculty that directs a penetrating, pencil-thin shaft of light on that elusive point where absurdity and sadness meet." — Voice Literary Supplement
"A lyrical vision of extraordinary intensity..." — Chicago Daily News"There is no other book in Russian Literature that is perfect stylistically and conceptually, and is capable of simultaneously arousing a lucky reader in the middle of the night and making him laugh as loud as never before; and marvelling at the true wisdom of some or maybe all of the statements in the book... The Nobel-worthy Palisandria by Sasha Sokolov is a pleasure to read, unlike the overrated pompous loads by such bores as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn. Sokolov finally shows that you do not have to sport a mass of facial hair and preach about Russian "soul" to be truly a writer of genius." (amazon.com)
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