Before and During - Vladimir Sharov

Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, translated by Oliver Ready / ISBN 9781907650710 / 348-page paperback from Dedalus European Classics *** 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 Stael 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 connection