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Before and During
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.
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.
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.
348 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
11 people are currently reading
231 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir Sharov
16 books11 followersVladimir Alexandrovich Sharov (Russian: Владимир Александрович Шаров, April 7, 1952 – August 17, 2018) was a Russian novelist who was awarded the Russian Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel Return to Egypt (Возвращение в Египет).
Vladimir Sharov was born in April, 1952 in Moscow, Russia. His father, Alexander Sharov (Shera Nurenberg), was a well-known Soviet children's writer. Sharov grew up in Moscow where he attended secondary school at the State Physics and Mathematics Lyceum of Moscow. He studied history at the Voronezh State University. In 1984, Sharov defended his thesis on the historiography of the Time of Troubles and Ivan the Terrible's secret police, the Oprichnina. Sharov lived in Moscow. He gave guest lectures on Russian history, literature and culture at international universities such as Harvard, Lexington VA, Cologne, Rome, Zurich as well as Oxford and Cambridge. He was a member of PEN International.
Vladimir Sharov was born in April, 1952 in Moscow, Russia. His father, Alexander Sharov (Shera Nurenberg), was a well-known Soviet children's writer. Sharov grew up in Moscow where he attended secondary school at the State Physics and Mathematics Lyceum of Moscow. He studied history at the Voronezh State University. In 1984, Sharov defended his thesis on the historiography of the Time of Troubles and Ivan the Terrible's secret police, the Oprichnina. Sharov lived in Moscow. He gave guest lectures on Russian history, literature and culture at international universities such as Harvard, Lexington VA, Cologne, Rome, Zurich as well as Oxford and Cambridge. He was a member of PEN International.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 17, 2021
Before and During is a book of the mental asylum patient’s revelation…
Christianity and madness, faith and ideology, philosophy and dementia, revolution and religion are interlocked in the most apocryphal ways… And any journey to reach good must pass through evil…
Leo Tolstoy turns out to be a villainous egotist trading lies. Madame de Staël finds a method to be reborn and in her second incarnation, she becomes a mistress of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov – a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher. In her third incarnation she gives birth to Joseph Stalin.
And the entire world consists of doers and beholders…
There always are believers and unbelievers.
I first set foot in this hospital in October 1965 – the eighteenth, if I’m not mistaken. They weren’t supposed to keep me in. The plan was for a certain Professor Kronfeld to see me privately and choose a set of pills to match my particular ‘profile’.
Christianity and madness, faith and ideology, philosophy and dementia, revolution and religion are interlocked in the most apocryphal ways… And any journey to reach good must pass through evil…
Lenin: “God Himself became human long ago, and expects humans to become angels – that’s absurd. Take, for example, that old chestnut about divine Providence: that the exile of the Jews from Palestine and their dispersion throughout the world was a blessing, for it enabled the true faith to spread. God thinks like a general or a politician: if I’ve lost a thousand men and my enemy two thousand, then everything is as it should be and I’m in the right. In other words, He has long accepted that good is mixed up with evil, long realized that evil is often the shortest and only path to the good. Such is the world we live in and neither He nor we, at least for now, can do anything about it.”
Leo Tolstoy turns out to be a villainous egotist trading lies. Madame de Staël finds a method to be reborn and in her second incarnation, she becomes a mistress of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov – a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher. In her third incarnation she gives birth to Joseph Stalin.
And the entire world consists of doers and beholders…
‘The windows of my room face the roof of a nine-storey building. For some time this roof has been a hive of activity. People are forever walking on it. Some are out on errands, others are just out for some air. My sympathies are entirely on the side of the former. People who are out on errands always walk straight. When they reach the edge of the roof, they jump. Their jumps have strength and force, they are well thought through, swift and business-like. On reaching the edge, those just out for some air turn back. Or they sit on folding chairs and look down.’
There always are believers and unbelievers.
i-want-money
May 25, 2015Two more Anna Karenina translations.
Another trans for Crime and Punishment.
How many War & Peace's are there in Engels?
And don't even get me started on that boring trans Q re: The Master and the Marguerita.
Here's a new trans of a never-transd-into-English kind of novel from a never-before-transd-into-English(isthattrue?) kind of an author... And it's up for a Trans=Prize.
[again, thanks to the literary saloon ;;
http://www.complete-review.com/saloon...
Another trans for Crime and Punishment.
How many War & Peace's are there in Engels?
And don't even get me started on that boring trans Q re: The Master and the Marguerita.
Here's a new trans of a never-transd-into-English kind of novel from a never-before-transd-into-English(isthattrue?) kind of an author... And it's up for a Trans=Prize.
[again, thanks to the literary saloon ;;
http://www.complete-review.com/saloon...
September 2, 2009
Историческая фантасмагория, усложняющаяся с каждой страницей: Толстой, Сталин, евреи, Скрябин, Господь Бог, клоны и русская революция. Казалось бы, такой текст должен бесконечно обрастать новыми смыслами, подобно текстам Пинчона, но дидактичный роман Шарова вязнет в мамлеевообразной метафизике, от которой нехорошо веет натуральным безумием.
January 31, 2016
"God judges us not only for our actions, but also for our intentions. I write the entirely real history of thoughts, intentions and beliefs. This is the country that existed. This is our own madness, our own absurd."(Vladimir Sharov, interview with Moskovskie novosti, as quoted in the introduction)
"Good metaphors are not merely games with words, they are true, they contain the real semblance of things, the unity of the universe created by the One God."
Before and During could be described as an alternative history, albeit Sharov (a historian himself before he became an author) would reject that label as per the quotes above, but not one of the "what would have happened if ...." form but rather a type of absurdist parable. The obvious, albeit extremely superficial, comparison is with Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerita.
It was translated by Oliver Ready, Russian and East European editor of the TLS and best known for a celebrated re-translation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and this translation itself won the, well-deserved, 2015 Read Russia prize.
The novel, set towards the end of the Soviet Union, opens with our narrator Alyosha on his way to a psychiatric institute to be treated for an illness that leads him to have periodic fits and losses of memory. And memory is key to the novel. The first half of the novel mainly focuses on his thoughts and anecdotes on memory and how memories are key to preserving someone's life and place on earth even after they are dead.
He decides to write his own Memorial Book, inspired by Ivan the Terrible's own 'Memorial Book of the Disgraced', to preserve those whose memory only he maintains. One of those he writes about is an elderly and distant relative whose only dementia was correlated with the writing of her memoirs:
"It was those volumes that devoured her memory. Her family eventually noticed that no sooner did Mama write down some episode or other from her life than she immediately forgot it...
She knew that it would all just die is she forgot it, or, if you like, wouldn't even be born; but now she had no need to remember anything."
Another, involved tale of another friend, told second and third hand, concludes:
"All that mattered to him was that I, or somebody, knew what he'd been thinking about and then went on thinking about it for themselves and remembered him."
But as the novel progresses, Alyosha turns his, and the reader's, attention to the other patients in the institute. He finds that the hospital was actually begun in the 1930s to house patients showing an "extraordinary coupling of pathology and genius", in a deliberate attempt to encourage them in their efforts to re-imagine society and ferment revolution, something denied to most people who are too constrained by society's many taboos:
"Genuises are society's sworn enemies. They alone are capable of destroying it, for they understand that it could be otherwise...Defending itself society tries to persuade the genius that his thoughts, ideas and theories are follies, delirium. madness."
And the source of this idea leads to the story, as relayed to Alyosha by one of the original inmates, that dominates much of the rest of the novel. The Institute was established by, inter alia, Madame de Staël. And this is where the "alternative" history really begins, with "real-life" characters reimagined. The first Madame de Staël did indeed visit Russia, but died in 1813 but Sharov imagines her having discovered the secret of reincarnating herself by giving birth to her own genetically identical daughter, a secret handed down previously only to Jewish women as a way of preserving the faith during time of persecution.
In Sharov's reimagining, de Staël ends up in Russia heavily involved with the start of the Bolshevik revolution, using her experience from her first incarnation in 1790s France. She becomes involved, intellectually and romantically, with the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, and his ideas are key to the novel, in particular his focus on "achieving immortality and resurrection of all people who ever lived" as key and inseparable goals for mankind:
"The value of a thought is determined by the larger or smaller number of people it concerns; the most general evil affecting all – a crime, in fact – is death, and therefore the supreme good, the supreme task, is resuscitation."
I understand that the most controversial part, in Russia, of the novels is the direct links the storyteller asserts between the religious philosophy of late 19th Century Russia and the ostensibly godless Bolshevik revolution. de Staël first becomes involved with Fydorov when he mistakes her, travelling in a glass palanquin, for the Dead Princess from Pushkin's poem (a blend of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) and the storyteller goes on:
"The Fydorovists' influence on the Bolsheviks was multifold. In particular, it explains why Lenin, contrary to his clearly stated wishes, was not committed to the earth after his death, but placed in a glass coffin for public display."
The tale becomes increasingly fantastical. Stalin is both Madame de Staël's (in her third incarnation) biological son and also her lover. And his ruthless elimination of all his rivals in the Party is from jealousy as she takes each of them in turn as a lover, rather than political ambition, the result of a deliberate plan by de Staël to force the otherwise unambitious Stalin into a position of supreme power, a position she failed to obtain in her first life in revolutionary France.
This part of the story can become difficult for those unversed in the relevant Russian history. Re-imaginings are less powerful when one fails to appreciate the differences to the original - for example the significance of a triumvirate of Vladimir Solovyov, John of Kronstadt and Dragomirov playing, in this re-telling, a key role in the revolutionary movement was rather lost on me, and at times I found myself spending more time on google than reading the book when confronter with a string of names of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Kamenev, Zinoviev, etc).
The reader is left without any easy answers merely more questions - but the novel argues that is key:
"The world of God is the world of questions. Only questions are commensurate with the complexity of his world... Answers have no place on God's world; they're inimical to it, artificial. They're simple and make the space around them just as simple and comprehensible as themselves, but this is an illusion, an imprecise, distorted and approximate world. "
And the novel argues that ambiguity in interpretation is equally vital. Talking of the Torah:
"People wrote without vowels back then, and words quite different in meaning often looked identical or similar on paper. All this allowed the text to breathe, to change, to open up to man each time anew, to be understood and explained anew. It was alive, as alive as the world. In translation, this has been lost...The Kabbalists were wrong; the Torah is open to us in its entirety, given to us in its entirety; we are the ones who make it closed."
... Monosemic words are a terrible disease. They are born of lies and the fear of being deceived. There is no trust, no freedom in a language like that. It's good for lawyers and bureaucrats, but you can't pray with it."
Overall, a less confusing read than perhaps my review might suggest, but I was left with the impression that parts of the novel were rather wasted on me. But a powerful novel with some wonderful writing nevertheless.
"Good metaphors are not merely games with words, they are true, they contain the real semblance of things, the unity of the universe created by the One God."
Before and During could be described as an alternative history, albeit Sharov (a historian himself before he became an author) would reject that label as per the quotes above, but not one of the "what would have happened if ...." form but rather a type of absurdist parable. The obvious, albeit extremely superficial, comparison is with Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerita.
It was translated by Oliver Ready, Russian and East European editor of the TLS and best known for a celebrated re-translation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and this translation itself won the, well-deserved, 2015 Read Russia prize.
The novel, set towards the end of the Soviet Union, opens with our narrator Alyosha on his way to a psychiatric institute to be treated for an illness that leads him to have periodic fits and losses of memory. And memory is key to the novel. The first half of the novel mainly focuses on his thoughts and anecdotes on memory and how memories are key to preserving someone's life and place on earth even after they are dead.
He decides to write his own Memorial Book, inspired by Ivan the Terrible's own 'Memorial Book of the Disgraced', to preserve those whose memory only he maintains. One of those he writes about is an elderly and distant relative whose only dementia was correlated with the writing of her memoirs:
"It was those volumes that devoured her memory. Her family eventually noticed that no sooner did Mama write down some episode or other from her life than she immediately forgot it...
She knew that it would all just die is she forgot it, or, if you like, wouldn't even be born; but now she had no need to remember anything."
Another, involved tale of another friend, told second and third hand, concludes:
"All that mattered to him was that I, or somebody, knew what he'd been thinking about and then went on thinking about it for themselves and remembered him."
But as the novel progresses, Alyosha turns his, and the reader's, attention to the other patients in the institute. He finds that the hospital was actually begun in the 1930s to house patients showing an "extraordinary coupling of pathology and genius", in a deliberate attempt to encourage them in their efforts to re-imagine society and ferment revolution, something denied to most people who are too constrained by society's many taboos:
"Genuises are society's sworn enemies. They alone are capable of destroying it, for they understand that it could be otherwise...Defending itself society tries to persuade the genius that his thoughts, ideas and theories are follies, delirium. madness."
And the source of this idea leads to the story, as relayed to Alyosha by one of the original inmates, that dominates much of the rest of the novel. The Institute was established by, inter alia, Madame de Staël. And this is where the "alternative" history really begins, with "real-life" characters reimagined. The first Madame de Staël did indeed visit Russia, but died in 1813 but Sharov imagines her having discovered the secret of reincarnating herself by giving birth to her own genetically identical daughter, a secret handed down previously only to Jewish women as a way of preserving the faith during time of persecution.
In Sharov's reimagining, de Staël ends up in Russia heavily involved with the start of the Bolshevik revolution, using her experience from her first incarnation in 1790s France. She becomes involved, intellectually and romantically, with the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, and his ideas are key to the novel, in particular his focus on "achieving immortality and resurrection of all people who ever lived" as key and inseparable goals for mankind:
"The value of a thought is determined by the larger or smaller number of people it concerns; the most general evil affecting all – a crime, in fact – is death, and therefore the supreme good, the supreme task, is resuscitation."
I understand that the most controversial part, in Russia, of the novels is the direct links the storyteller asserts between the religious philosophy of late 19th Century Russia and the ostensibly godless Bolshevik revolution. de Staël first becomes involved with Fydorov when he mistakes her, travelling in a glass palanquin, for the Dead Princess from Pushkin's poem (a blend of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) and the storyteller goes on:
"The Fydorovists' influence on the Bolsheviks was multifold. In particular, it explains why Lenin, contrary to his clearly stated wishes, was not committed to the earth after his death, but placed in a glass coffin for public display."
The tale becomes increasingly fantastical. Stalin is both Madame de Staël's (in her third incarnation) biological son and also her lover. And his ruthless elimination of all his rivals in the Party is from jealousy as she takes each of them in turn as a lover, rather than political ambition, the result of a deliberate plan by de Staël to force the otherwise unambitious Stalin into a position of supreme power, a position she failed to obtain in her first life in revolutionary France.
This part of the story can become difficult for those unversed in the relevant Russian history. Re-imaginings are less powerful when one fails to appreciate the differences to the original - for example the significance of a triumvirate of Vladimir Solovyov, John of Kronstadt and Dragomirov playing, in this re-telling, a key role in the revolutionary movement was rather lost on me, and at times I found myself spending more time on google than reading the book when confronter with a string of names of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Kamenev, Zinoviev, etc).
The reader is left without any easy answers merely more questions - but the novel argues that is key:
"The world of God is the world of questions. Only questions are commensurate with the complexity of his world... Answers have no place on God's world; they're inimical to it, artificial. They're simple and make the space around them just as simple and comprehensible as themselves, but this is an illusion, an imprecise, distorted and approximate world. "
And the novel argues that ambiguity in interpretation is equally vital. Talking of the Torah:
"People wrote without vowels back then, and words quite different in meaning often looked identical or similar on paper. All this allowed the text to breathe, to change, to open up to man each time anew, to be understood and explained anew. It was alive, as alive as the world. In translation, this has been lost...The Kabbalists were wrong; the Torah is open to us in its entirety, given to us in its entirety; we are the ones who make it closed."
... Monosemic words are a terrible disease. They are born of lies and the fear of being deceived. There is no trust, no freedom in a language like that. It's good for lawyers and bureaucrats, but you can't pray with it."
Overall, a less confusing read than perhaps my review might suggest, but I was left with the impression that parts of the novel were rather wasted on me. But a powerful novel with some wonderful writing nevertheless.
November 15, 2020
Really a highly fictionalised and semi-immortal version of Madame de Stael is the protagonist of this book. Whether or not you like this (not sure I did?) will probably affect your view of the novel. It's highly allegorical; I know a decent amount of Russian history and literature but still feel like I was probably missing a lot here, which is unusual for me. Not certain what to think of this book, and not sure I ever will.
April 15, 2021
Уже третий роман Шарова погружает меня в иную реальность, иную Россию, но там все мы – те же неизменные, наши божественные проекции, лежим между букв образами (да, тут двойственно).
Приближая конец света, великий мыслитель считает, что необходимо уже сейчас воскрешать ушедших, идти от обратного, от сына к отцу, чтобы каждый воскресил своих отцов, так протянуть нить к Адаму и выяснить – что сгубило ту самую невинность, как посмел Бог создать по подобию своему неразумное дитя в облике взрослого, и какую ответственность Он дал на самом деле?
Что-то сцепляется молоточками-крючками-валиками с предыдущими книгами Шарова (по очереди прочтения – «Будьте как дети» и «Репетиции»), но здесь свой, особый взгляд на революцию и после��ние дни.
Каждый ждёт апокалипсиса, готовит его, торопит, чтобы мир схлопнулся вместе с ним; мечты идиотов: мир должен умереть вместе со мной, я – конечная точка мира, его последний совершенный изгиб, après nous le déluge..
Шаров предрекает время, когда мир ожидает чистый лист. Глобус не выдерживает накопившихся страданий, кряхтит и скрипит по швам. Словно ему до срыва – ещё одна слезинка. А он всё выдерживает, сжимая в запотевших от ужаса ладонях последний «авось».
Приближая конец света, великий мыслитель считает, что необходимо уже сейчас воскрешать ушедших, идти от обратного, от сына к отцу, чтобы каждый воскресил своих отцов, так протянуть нить к Адаму и выяснить – что сгубило ту самую невинность, как посмел Бог создать по подобию своему неразумное дитя в облике взрослого, и какую ответственность Он дал на самом деле?
Что-то сцепляется молоточками-крючками-валиками с предыдущими книгами Шарова (по очереди прочтения – «Будьте как дети» и «Репетиции»), но здесь свой, особый взгляд на революцию и после��ние дни.
Каждый ждёт апокалипсиса, готовит его, торопит, чтобы мир схлопнулся вместе с ним; мечты идиотов: мир должен умереть вместе со мной, я – конечная точка мира, его последний совершенный изгиб, après nous le déluge..
Шаров предрекает время, когда мир ожидает чистый лист. Глобус не выдерживает накопившихся страданий, кряхтит и скрипит по швам. Словно ему до срыва – ещё одна слезинка. А он всё выдерживает, сжимая в запотевших от ужаса ладонях последний «авось».
February 8, 2025
дикая, дикая история, наложенная на мой нишевый интерес в лице русского космизма. для меня чересчур. слишком подробно и слишком поточно. но очень было интересно читать первые страницы с оригинальным синодиком! его изначальные цели. и то, как вообще закрутилась вся тема с жерменой де сталь, федоровым, игнаташвили и т.д. сумасшедше. сумасшедше еще и то, что больницу, в которой лежал главный герой я этой осенью посещала. а про космизм накануне много-много читала и смотрела. самой чувственной после синодика мне показалась история со скрябиным. и среди всех космистов он для меня был наиболее интересным (в реальности, то есть).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 30, 2025
Не самый лучший роман Шарова, по моему скромному мнению, но абсолютно в русле всех его основных идей и художественных приёмов. Если большинство авторов, пишущих о русской истории, рассказывают о том, что и как было, то Шаров повествует о том, почему было именно так. Не со всем можно соглашаться, но это точно небанально и крайне самобытно.
Без преувеличения великая (хотя и не всегда легкая для восприятия) литература.
Без преувеличения великая (хотя и не всегда легкая для восприятия) литература.
Want to read
June 8, 2015
February 3, 2024
Очень неровная, но в лучшие моменты идеально еретическая книга
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews