Before and During
Vladimir Sharov
Oliver Ready, translator
Dedalus £12.99
(978-1-907650-71-0)
Church Times Bookshop £11.70 (Use code
CT217 )
THE leading words of the blurb of this novel "set in a
psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet
stagnation" led me to expect that it would be an exposé of the
shameful abuse of this aspect of medicine (used as torture) in the
Soviet Union. It turned out tobe far different. It is a work of
pure fiction, recounting the extended ravings of inmates who were
deeply disturbed.
Since the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn, no Russian novels have
penetrated Western consciousness, and we have had to wait a long
time for this one: Vladimir Sharovis 62, and this was first
published in Moscow in 1993. Superbly translated by Oliver Ready,
of St Antony's College, Oxford, it is worth the wait, and is the
only one of his eight novels to have appeared in English. We should
know more of him.
The "ravings" are disturbing to us, too. They inhabit the sort
of realm first explored by Nikolai Gogol, the 19th-century
Russian-Ukrainian novelist and playwright best known for The
Inspector General. Sharov's enclosed world is a phantasmagoria
with a foot so firmly planted in reality as to upset many -
Russians as well as us, as evidenced by the scandal created when
the famous literary journal Novy Mir (New World)
originally published it.
It upset many because of the satirical basis of the book,
reflecting the hold that the ghosts of Lenin and Stalin still had
(and have?) on the Russian mind. Inmates recount their imaginings
to the author, who reports them objectively and in serious literary
language. The nub of the book (not revealed in the blurb, but I
must do so) is that Mme de Staël admired the French Revolution and
begot the Russian one. She did, in fact, visit St Petersburg in
1817 and obtained a Russian passport. Endued with immortality(she
died in 1817, aged 51), shelived on to inspire Lenin and -wait for
it! - her progeny eventually produced Stalin (Staël -Stal - Stalin,
whose real name was Djugashvili).
There is much more, involving the composer Scriabin, and Lenin;
but to unravel it you must read this book, which, incidentally, to
me, has a controversial Christian underlay.
Canon Michael Bourdeaux is the President of Keston
Institute, Oxford.