Be as Children

At the centre of Be as Children is an ailing Vladimir Lenin, infected not with syphilis, as some historians have claimed, but with Christian fervour. Regressing stroke by stroke to an infancy of his own, he renounces his faith in the proletariat and puts all his hope in the many children left homeless and orphaned by the Civil War. Only they will be loyal to the cause and only they can save it. Around this story Sharov weaves two other plots: a murderer who converts a Siberian people to Christianity and the life story of a female holy fool. Epic in scope and highly original in execution, Be as Little Children shows exactly why, since his untimely death in 2018, Vladimir Sharov has been widely celebrated in Russia as one of the few outstanding novelists of his era and a true heir to the classic authors of the nineteenth century.

A historian of late-medieval Russia by training Vladimir Sharov(1952-2018), first turned to fiction in the late 1970s. It was not until the 1990s, however, that his extraordinarily imaginative and daring novels come to the attention of the public. When they did, they caused acrimony and controversy. Before and During in 2014 was his first novel to appear in English, which was followed in February 2018 by The Rehearsals, and in 2021 by Be as Children all translated by Oliver Ready. He has won all the major Russian literary prizes including the Booker Prize in 2014. Before and During won The Read Russia Prize in 2015 and in 2018 The Rehearsals won The Read Russia Prize for the best translation of a contemporary Russian novel into any language.