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arirang's review
3.0
"God judges us not only for our actions, but also for our intentions. I write the entirely real history of thoughts, intentions and beliefs. This is the country that existed. This is our own madness, our own absurd."(Vladimir Sharov, interview with Moskovskie novosti, as quoted in the introduction)
"Good metaphors are not merely games with words, they are true, they contain the real semblance of things, the unity of the universe created by the One God."
Before and During could be described as an alternative history, albeit Sharov (a historian himself before he became an author) would reject that label as per the quotes above, but not one of the "what would have happened if ...." form but rather a type of absurdist parable. The obvious, albeit extremely superficial, comparison is with Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerita.
It was translated by Oliver Ready, Russian and East European editor of the TLS and best known for a celebrated re-translation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and this translation itself won the, well-deserved, 2015 Read Russia prize.
The novel, set towards the end of the Soviet Union, opens with our narrator Alyosha on his way to a psychiatric institute to be treated for an illness that leads him to have periodic fits and losses of memory. And memory is key to the novel. The first half of the novel mainly focuses on his thoughts and anecdotes on memory and how memories are key to preserving someone's life and place on earth even after they are dead.
He decides to write his own Memorial Book, inspired by Ivan the Terrible's own 'Memorial Book of the Disgraced', to preserve those whose memory only he maintains. One of those he writes about is an elderly and distant relative whose only dementia was correlated with the writing of her memoirs:
"It was those volumes that devoured her memory. Her family eventually noticed that no sooner did Mama write down some episode or other from her life than she immediately forgot it...
She knew that it would all just die is she forgot it, or, if you like, wouldn't even be born; but now she had no need to remember anything."
Another, involved tale of another friend, told second and third hand, concludes:
"All that mattered to him was that I, or somebody, knew what he'd been thinking about and then went on thinking about it for themselves and remembered him."
But as the novel progresses, Alyosha turns his, and the reader's, attention to the other patients in the institute. He finds that the hospital was actually begun in the 1930s to house patients showing an "extraordinary coupling of pathology and genius", in a deliberate attempt to encourage them in their efforts to re-imagine society and ferment revolution, something denied to most people who are too constrained by society's many taboos:
"Genuises are society's sworn enemies. They alone are capable of destroying it, for they understand that it could be otherwise...Defending itself society tries to persuade the genius that his thoughts, ideas and theories are follies, delirium. madness."
And the source of this idea leads to the story, as relayed to Alyosha by one of the original inmates, that dominates much of the rest of the novel. The Institute was established by, inter alia, Madame de Staël. And this is where the "alternative" history really begins, with "real-life" characters reimagined. The first Madame de Staël did indeed visit Russia, but died in 1813 but Sharov imagines her having discovered the secret of reincarnating herself by giving birth to her own genetically identical daughter, a secret handed down previously only to Jewish women as a way of preserving the faith during time of persecution.
In Sharov's reimagining, de Staël ends up in Russia heavily involved with the start of the Bolshevik revolution, using her experience from her first incarnation in 1790s France. She becomes involved, intellectually and romantically, with the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, and his ideas are key to the novel, in particular his focus on "achieving immortality and resurrection of all people who ever lived" as key and inseparable goals for mankind:
"The value of a thought is determined by the larger or smaller number of people it concerns; the most general evil affecting all – a crime, in fact – is death, and therefore the supreme good, the supreme task, is resuscitation."
I understand that the most controversial part, in Russia, of the novels is the direct links the storyteller asserts between the religious philosophy of late 19th Century Russia and the ostensibly godless Bolshevik revolution. de Staël first becomes involved with Fydorov when he mistakes her, travelling in a glass palanquin, for the Dead Princess from Pushkin's poem (a blend of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) and the storyteller goes on:
"The Fydorovists' influence on the Bolsheviks was multifold. In particular, it explains why Lenin, contrary to his clearly stated wishes, was not committed to the earth after his death, but placed in a glass coffin for public display."
The tale becomes increasingly fantastical. Stalin is both Madame de Staël's (in her third incarnation) biological son and also her lover. And his ruthless elimination of all his rivals in the Party is from jealousy as she takes each of them in turn as a lover, rather than political ambition, the result of a deliberate plan by de Staël to force the otherwise unambitious Stalin into a position of supreme power, a position she failed to obtain in her first life in revolutionary France.
This part of the story can become difficult for those unversed in the relevant Russian history. Re-imaginings are less powerful when one fails to appreciate the differences to the original - for example the significance of a triumvirate of Vladimir Solovyov, John of Kronstadt and Dragomirov playing, in this re-telling, a key role in the revolutionary movement was rather lost on me, and at times I found myself spending more time on google than reading the book when confronter with a string of names of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Kamenev, Zinoviev, etc).
The reader is left without any easy answers merely more questions - but the novel argues that is key:
"The world of God is the world of questions. Only questions are commensurate with the complexity of his world... Answers have no place on God's world; they're inimical to it, artificial. They're simple and make the space around them just as simple and comprehensible as themselves, but this is an illusion, an imprecise, distorted and approximate world. "
And the novel argues that ambiguity in interpretation is equally vital. Talking of the Torah:
"People wrote without vowels back then, and words quite different in meaning often looked identical or similar on paper. All this allowed the text to breathe, to change, to open up to man each time anew, to be understood and explained anew. It was alive, as alive as the world. In translation, this has been lost...The Kabbalists were wrong; the Torah is open to us in its entirety, given to us in its entirety; we are the ones who make it closed."
... Monosemic words are a terrible disease. They are born of lies and the fear of being deceived. There is no trust, no freedom in a language like that. It's good for lawyers and bureaucrats, but you can't pray with it."
Overall, a less confusing read than perhaps my review might suggest, but I was left with the impression that parts of the novel were rather wasted on me. But a powerful novel with some wonderful writing nevertheless.
"Good metaphors are not merely games with words, they are true, they contain the real semblance of things, the unity of the universe created by the One God."
Before and During could be described as an alternative history, albeit Sharov (a historian himself before he became an author) would reject that label as per the quotes above, but not one of the "what would have happened if ...." form but rather a type of absurdist parable. The obvious, albeit extremely superficial, comparison is with Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerita.
It was translated by Oliver Ready, Russian and East European editor of the TLS and best known for a celebrated re-translation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and this translation itself won the, well-deserved, 2015 Read Russia prize.
The novel, set towards the end of the Soviet Union, opens with our narrator Alyosha on his way to a psychiatric institute to be treated for an illness that leads him to have periodic fits and losses of memory. And memory is key to the novel. The first half of the novel mainly focuses on his thoughts and anecdotes on memory and how memories are key to preserving someone's life and place on earth even after they are dead.
He decides to write his own Memorial Book, inspired by Ivan the Terrible's own 'Memorial Book of the Disgraced', to preserve those whose memory only he maintains. One of those he writes about is an elderly and distant relative whose only dementia was correlated with the writing of her memoirs:
"It was those volumes that devoured her memory. Her family eventually noticed that no sooner did Mama write down some episode or other from her life than she immediately forgot it...
She knew that it would all just die is she forgot it, or, if you like, wouldn't even be born; but now she had no need to remember anything."
Another, involved tale of another friend, told second and third hand, concludes:
"All that mattered to him was that I, or somebody, knew what he'd been thinking about and then went on thinking about it for themselves and remembered him."
But as the novel progresses, Alyosha turns his, and the reader's, attention to the other patients in the institute. He finds that the hospital was actually begun in the 1930s to house patients showing an "extraordinary coupling of pathology and genius", in a deliberate attempt to encourage them in their efforts to re-imagine society and ferment revolution, something denied to most people who are too constrained by society's many taboos:
"Genuises are society's sworn enemies. They alone are capable of destroying it, for they understand that it could be otherwise...Defending itself society tries to persuade the genius that his thoughts, ideas and theories are follies, delirium. madness."
And the source of this idea leads to the story, as relayed to Alyosha by one of the original inmates, that dominates much of the rest of the novel. The Institute was established by, inter alia, Madame de Staël. And this is where the "alternative" history really begins, with "real-life" characters reimagined. The first Madame de Staël did indeed visit Russia, but died in 1813 but Sharov imagines her having discovered the secret of reincarnating herself by giving birth to her own genetically identical daughter, a secret handed down previously only to Jewish women as a way of preserving the faith during time of persecution.
In Sharov's reimagining, de Staël ends up in Russia heavily involved with the start of the Bolshevik revolution, using her experience from her first incarnation in 1790s France. She becomes involved, intellectually and romantically, with the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, and his ideas are key to the novel, in particular his focus on "achieving immortality and resurrection of all people who ever lived" as key and inseparable goals for mankind:
"The value of a thought is determined by the larger or smaller number of people it concerns; the most general evil affecting all – a crime, in fact – is death, and therefore the supreme good, the supreme task, is resuscitation."
I understand that the most controversial part, in Russia, of the novels is the direct links the storyteller asserts between the religious philosophy of late 19th Century Russia and the ostensibly godless Bolshevik revolution. de Staël first becomes involved with Fydorov when he mistakes her, travelling in a glass palanquin, for the Dead Princess from Pushkin's poem (a blend of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) and the storyteller goes on:
"The Fydorovists' influence on the Bolsheviks was multifold. In particular, it explains why Lenin, contrary to his clearly stated wishes, was not committed to the earth after his death, but placed in a glass coffin for public display."
The tale becomes increasingly fantastical. Stalin is both Madame de Staël's (in her third incarnation) biological son and also her lover. And his ruthless elimination of all his rivals in the Party is from jealousy as she takes each of them in turn as a lover, rather than political ambition, the result of a deliberate plan by de Staël to force the otherwise unambitious Stalin into a position of supreme power, a position she failed to obtain in her first life in revolutionary France.
This part of the story can become difficult for those unversed in the relevant Russian history. Re-imaginings are less powerful when one fails to appreciate the differences to the original - for example the significance of a triumvirate of Vladimir Solovyov, John of Kronstadt and Dragomirov playing, in this re-telling, a key role in the revolutionary movement was rather lost on me, and at times I found myself spending more time on google than reading the book when confronter with a string of names of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Kamenev, Zinoviev, etc).
The reader is left without any easy answers merely more questions - but the novel argues that is key:
"The world of God is the world of questions. Only questions are commensurate with the complexity of his world... Answers have no place on God's world; they're inimical to it, artificial. They're simple and make the space around them just as simple and comprehensible as themselves, but this is an illusion, an imprecise, distorted and approximate world. "
And the novel argues that ambiguity in interpretation is equally vital. Talking of the Torah:
"People wrote without vowels back then, and words quite different in meaning often looked identical or similar on paper. All this allowed the text to breathe, to change, to open up to man each time anew, to be understood and explained anew. It was alive, as alive as the world. In translation, this has been lost...The Kabbalists were wrong; the Torah is open to us in its entirety, given to us in its entirety; we are the ones who make it closed."
... Monosemic words are a terrible disease. They are born of lies and the fear of being deceived. There is no trust, no freedom in a language like that. It's good for lawyers and bureaucrats, but you can't pray with it."
Overall, a less confusing read than perhaps my review might suggest, but I was left with the impression that parts of the novel were rather wasted on me. But a powerful novel with some wonderful writing nevertheless.
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