Be as Children
20th century Russia, and a shadowy narrator known only as Dmitry tells of the people whose lives have touched his. His characters are an extraordinary parade of deeply wounded people. The huge cast includes a murderer turned evangelist, a female ‘holy fool’, an Orthodox monk, a Samoyed shaman, and Vladimir Lenin himself. All are obsessed with sin. The monk demands salacious details in a woman’s confessions. Lenin, rendered ‘childlike’ by a series of strokes, dreams of a crusade of innocents to erase the country’s sin. Meanwhile, his acolytes prepare Lenin’s path to sainthood in the new ‘Communist religion’.
Sharov’s emphasis on religious thought—and the suffering of his many characters—echoes the great 19th century novelists. Despite decades of state-sponsored suppression, in Dmitry’s memoir, Russian Christianity thrives. One character comments that ‘…those who had … survived the two world wars, as well those who had survived the camps… all were marked with the stamp of divine miracle…’ Another comments, ‘Righteousness is a terrible force.’ Characters bear the scars of that force.
Sharov structures his novel like the lives of his characters: one long meander. Early on is the death of an innocent child, and the revelation that a nun prayed, not for the child to live, but to die. Thereafter, we are plunged into Dmitry’s stream of memory, speculation, snippets of information, and downright philosophical essays. Through it emerges a mass of humanity, each person locked into a destiny of sin; each person striving for absolution.
I read on to discover why a woman would pray for the death of a child. But to read this as a conventional story is to miss the point. This is a book not for entertainment, but for scholarship, as layer upon layer of parable, allegory and symbolism is unpeeled, to reveal the Russian soul.
