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 Staa-l 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
1120142250
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 Staa-l 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
19.99 In Stock
Before and During

Before and During

Before and During

Before and During

Overview

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 Staa-l 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

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781907650710
Publisher: Dedalus, Limited
Publication date: 03/31/2015
Series: Dedalus Europe
Pages: 348
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

A historian of late-medieval Russia by training Vladimir Sharov, born in 1952, first turned to fiction in the late 1970s. It was not until the 1990s, however, that his extraordinarily imaginative and daring novels come to the attention of the public. When they did, they caused acrimony and controversy.
Before and During in 2014 was his first novel to appear in English, which will be followed in 2016 by The Rehearsals, both translated by Oliver Ready.

Oliver Ready was born in 1976. He was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and read Russian and Italian at Oxford before doing his doctorate . He is the Russian & Eastern Europe Editor for the T.L.S.
He translated The Zero Train and The Prussian Bride by Yuri Buida and Before and During by Vladimir Sharov for Dedalus.
Oliver Ready's translation of The Prussian Bride was awarded the inaugural Russian Translation Prize in 2005.

Read an Excerpt

'Scriabin was still very young then," Ifraimov continued, "but everything about him - his countenance, his demeanor - was erotic through and through: his fine, languorous features, the sensual dimple on his chin, his intoxicated gaze, and that same languor and voluptuousness in the way he moved, the way he touched the instrument; Balmont rightly said of him that he kissed sounds with his fingers. His fingers really did move smoothly and tenderly, as if taking their time, even lingering, so as to draw out the pleasure. He caressed every key, only for the piano to give birth to spasmodic, convulsive rhythms, to sounds that were broken and twisted, and you began to understand that this was not merely a caress, but slow, refined torture, and that only by tormenting himself and the instrument did music exist for him. "When he was alone with de Staa-l for the first time, he was very tense, as though unsure whether she would understand him, accept him; for a long time he held back, playing for time, but then he began talking with a terrible conviction with which she too was instantly infected. She was like Mother Eve, he told her; her passive feminine principle was waiting - still merely waiting - to be given form, and it was hindering him. She found herself inwardly agreeing: she really was cold, uptight. That was when he took her by the hand and told her to relax, and she understood, feeling her body obey his voice and soften, no longer resisting him. " ' Every animal, insect, and blade of grass,' he would say to her, 'bears the countenance of our spiritual movements. They are created by the same caresses with which man caresses woman; so it has been since the days of Adam. It was not God but Adam who, caressing Eve, begat and named with his caresses all that surrounds man in this world.'" ' Here are birds,' he would tell her, barely touching her nipple with his lips or his tongue, 'they are winged caresses. Here are twisting, serpentine caresses - they are caresses wandering at large,' said he, the tips of his fingers sliding up from her little feet, up and up, and then along the very edge, so that she was filled with fear for him; he circled the entrance, the dip which led inside her, then carried on up over the stomach, between the breasts, wrapping his fingers around one, then the other, as if framing them, before straightening up once more over the hollow of the clavicle and up the neck to the earlobe and hair. "Then he would start mauling her,..'

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