Владимир Шаров
Biography
A historian of medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952) is the son of a geneticist who turned to writing prose, for children and adults, in the 1960s. Sharov himself began writing fiction in the late 1970s, but it was not until the 1990s that his highly unusual historiosophical novels came before the public gaze. In so doing, they caused genuine acrimony and controversy among influential editors of the literary journals (especially Novyi mir). Many were appalled both by Sharov's literary method and by his exploration through fiction of the mythological and religious substrata of Russian (and especially Revolutionary) history and thought - in particular, of its Utopian, eschatological, and messianic tendencies. Undeterred, Sharov has continued in his distinctive groove, writing, in the opinion of many critics (some of whom now consider him a ‘living classic') one and the same book: an ongoing commentary on philosophy, history, and the sacred texts. In these complex meditations, the views of the author himself remain elusive.
According to the scholar Thomas Epstein, Sharov's ‘combination of playfulness and seriousness, of parody and lyric, and of the sacred and profane not only complicates the reader's interpretive task but also suggests that 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.'
Sharov has described himself, in an interview with Moskovskie novosti, as a realist, and ridicules the notion that he is an author of ‘para-historical' fiction, arguing that there is a real history which is not the history of facts and events and which does not find its way into school textbooks. He points to the industrious scientific research conducted in the 1920s to create a ‘new man' and to raise the dead: ‘hundreds of people were engaged in this in secret institutes, and the government did not consider them mad. God judges us not only for our actions, but also for our intentions. I write the entirely real history of thoughts, inventions, and beliefs. This is the country that existed. This is our own madness, our own absurd.'
Published works
Будьте как дети (Be Like Children)
Moscow, Znamia, 2008
20 лет на свободе (20 Years of Freedom)
Moscow, Znamia, 2006
Contact
Translation rights to The Raising of Lazarus (Voskreshenie Lazarya, 2003, 365pp) are held by the author, as are those to Sharov's other six novels, with the exception of Rehearsals (Repetitsii, 1997), rights to which belong to the French publishers Actes Sud.