Before and During

Set in a dementia ward in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal setting into 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 Stael who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass post-chaise and becomes Fyodorov's lover. (In her third and last life, she becomes mother and lover to Stalin). Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies - all described in a serious, steady voice - Sharov seeks to retrieves the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God. Cover design: Marie Lane. Russian critics have described Vladimir Sharov's writing as an almagam of Tolstoy, Doistoievski and Soljenitsyn."