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BEFORE AND DURING, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: China - PEKING UNIVERSITY PRESS, France - PHÉBUS, Italy - VOLAND, Serbia - UTOPIA, World English - DEDALUS
Set in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal surroundings on a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past. The novel invokes real historical events and people (Tolstoy, Madame de Staël, Saint John of Kronstadt, Alexander Scriabin, and Stalin, among others), swirling them into a phantasmagoric alternative chronology. Stories germinate within other stories, unfolding in astonishing variations.
We meet Leo Tolstoy’s twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother’s womb, only to be born as Tolstoy’s ‘son’; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Staël who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass palanquin and becomes Fyodorov’s lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who preaches to Lenin on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies – all described in a serious, steady voice – Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God.
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RAISING LAZARUS, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - VAGRIUS, ARSIS BOOKS, Serbia - UTOPIA
Through a patchwork of letters and second hand memoirs, the novel follows the lives of two brothers in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the brothers, Fyodor, is a bishop-turned-religious-sectarian. The other brother, Nikolai, is obsessed with the idea of reuniting Russian society in the years after the Russian Civil War. As Raising Lazarus progresses, Nikolai becomes interested in esoteric doctrines that promise to transcend ideological conflicts. The reader soon learns through letters written by Nikolai, that he believes that Christ must return to Earth for salvation to be bestowed on Russia and we see a blending of the Christian and Bolshevik expectations for an “end of history.” Nikolai then begins to believe that only truly terrible human conditions can cause the arrival of the Messiah. This time, Sharov’s mixing of religious and communist beliefs was praised by critics because of Sharov’s clever use of symbolism. Raising Lazarus has sold over 10,000 copies in Russian.
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