A historian of late-medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (born 1952) turned to fiction in the early 1980s. One of Russia’s most distinguished living writers, he is the author of eight novels. The Rehearsals, which was written in the mid to late 1980s, is the second of his books to be published by Dedalus, following Before and During in 2014. He is the recipient of several awards, most recently the Russian Booker Prize in 2014.
Disputing the characterisation of his fiction as ‘alternative history’, Sharov has said: ‘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.’
He lives in Moscow.
Oliver Ready teaches Russian at Oxford and is a Research Fellow of St Antony’s College. His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin, 2014) and from contemporary fiction, works by Yuri Buida and Vladimir Sharov for Dedalus. In 2015, he received the Read Russia Prize for Sharov’s Before and During, and in 2005 the Rossica Translation Prize for Buida’s short-story cycle, The Prussian Bride. His book, Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013, was published in 2017.