This translation is based on the authoritative and most recent edition of the novel (Repetitsii) as published by Arsis Books in Moscow in 2009. Some minor inconsistencies or errors have been amended in consultation with the author, and other small changes made. The Biblical translation used is the New King James Version. Footnotes have been kept to a minimum.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Vladimir Sharov and to his wife, Olga Dunaevskaya, for patient and illuminating replies to several hundred questions about the novel, and to the author for accompanying me on a visit to New Jerusalem Monastery. The explanations and memories supplied in the course of these precious exchanges have improved the translation greatly. My thanks are also due to Evgeny Reznichenko and the Institute for Translation in Moscow for supporting the translation, and for organising lively biennial conferences among fellow translators from Russian. A workshop convened by Andrei Rogatchevski in the appropriately atmospheric setting of Tromsø in mid-December, 2016, offered further opportunities for dialogue. For sharing their thoughts and interest I also thank Philip Bullock, Lijana Dejak, Boris Dralyuk, Ilya Kalinin, Ania Ready and Michael Rozenman. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge a debt to Paul Lequesne, whose translation into French appeared in 1998 (Actes Sud). I borrow from him the idea of setting the first paragraph of the novel as a separate page, and am envious that only his title, Les Répetitions, can fully capture the novel’s twinned themes of rehearsal in art and recurrence in history.