Before and During

Much of the action takes place in a Moscow psychiatric hospital during the drawn-out, stagnant years of the late Soviet period. From there the narrative repeatedly slips into fantastic episodes set in the Russian past. Among them: Leo Tolstoy's twin, who was swallowed by the writer in their mother's womb and then reborn as Tolstoy's son; the eccentric philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, who argued that humanity's shared duty was to bring its ancestors back to physical life; a Madame de Staël who copies herself and, in her second existence, is borne across plague-stricken Russia in a glass litter and becomes Fyodorov's lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who lectures Lenin on the shore of Lake Geneva.

The absurd and darkly comic scenes are narrated in a calm, unwavering tone. Through them, Sharov tries to uncover the concealed links and buried impulses of Russian history, including its fierce, sensual pursuit of justice, redemption and God.

Critics have compared the book to a Menippean satire in Mikhail Bakhtin's sense, in which real history is scrambled, eroticized and lit up by the monologues of the dead rather than told as straightforward historical fiction. Notable passages include a study of Tolstoy's failure to live out goodness within his own household and a sensory account of the First World War and the Revolution told through Scriabin's music. The English edition is translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready.