Before and During (Dedalus Europe)
Vladimir Sharov
Language: English
Pages: 348
ISBN: 1907650717
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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. 'Before and During is not a historical novel. Rather, it is closer to one of Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque venues, a Menippean satire in which historical reality, in all its irreversible awfulness, is for a moment scrambled, eroticized ... and illuminated by hilarious monologues of the dead... There are wonderful stretches: an exegesis of Tolstoy's failure to achieve the good in his own family;... an astonishing olfactory history of the First World War and Revolution through Scriabin's music. How Sharov resolves the rejection of death is especially good... With this elegant and dry-eyed translation by Oliver Ready, anglophone audiences can finally weigh in.' Caryl Emerson in The Times Literary Supplement 'Sharov has assimilated, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the artistic and philosophical legacy of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Russian literature. Like Dostoevsky, he is excessive not in order to deny, misrepresent, or flee reality but, rather, to capture it more accurately.' Thomas Epstein, Boston College
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Succeeded, but the appearance of Fyodorov ruined their plans. Losing hope, the sick started babbling excitedly and their pressure abated. But not for long. The old men were also resourceful and cunning, and now, realizing that they couldn’t force their way out, they decided to play on the Sisters’ heartstrings. They grabbed them by their uniforms, kissed their hands, shoved the customary three-rouble notes into their pockets and in orderly fashion, as if after numerous rehearsals, wailed in a.
Cause and effect, was entirely made up of discrete thoughts and scenes. Thoughts, after all, come to one without system or logic, at least on the surface; discovering them afresh, over and over again, was his daily labour as a writer. In reality, of course, logic was present here, but it was internal, inconstant and fickle. In practice, Kochin’s notion of how a writer should work took the following form. On days when he was not depressed, Kochin would spend the whole morning sketching a detailed.
Transferred here – just ordinary convalescents. The result was a kind of rehabilitation centre. A natural process set in: one group shrank, the other grew, and by the end the two were completely mixed up and the boarders ended up without a single room of their own. All the same, he said in summary, they were the patriarchs here, the old-timers. The preferences and privileges they received were taboo; everyone, even the nurses, had to reckon with them. Complete clarity was still a long way off,.
Summer, ruining the crops, will they run shallow. Man will cut down forests and turn them into arable fields, irrigate the deserts and make them arable, too, and then, when the entire earth becomes one enormous level field and nobody ever goes hungry, when nobody has to think only of his crust, day in, day out, man will be able to take up his main task, the task of resurrecting his kin, the lofty task of transforming this world, mortal by nature, into a world without death – the Kingdom of.
Solovyov himself. Solovyov was the Party’s organizer, its acknowledged leader; he had developed both its philosophy and its programme. But he believed that the Party should be led in collegiate fashion and decided to share his authority as leader with Nicholas II’s former personal adjutant, now military commander of St Petersburg, General Dragomirov, and with the celebrated religious activist and preacher John of Kronstadt, whose canonization was only a matter of time. ‘Perhaps, just like.