The Rehearsals

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before and During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015). AUTHOR: A historian of late-medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov, born in 1952, 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 was his first novel to appear in English when it was published in 2014.

“"The clarity and directness of Sharov's prose are disconcerting, almost hallucinatory. His writing is at times funny, at times so piercingly moving, so brimful of unassuaged sorrow, that it causes a double-take." -- Rachel Polonsky, NY Review of Books”

Sharov has assimilated, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the artistic & philosophical legacy of Russian literature. Like Dostoevsky, he is excessive not in order to deny, misrepresent, or flee reality but, rather, to capture it more accurately. Thomas Epstein, Boston College 'The clarity and directness of Sharov's prose are disconcerting, almost hallucinatory. His writing is at times funny, at times so piercingly moving, so brimful of unassuaged sorrow, that it causes a double-take.' Rachel Polonsky in The New York Review of Books

Historian of late-medieval Russia by training Vladimir Sharov, born in 1952, 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.subsequently his novels have won all the major Russian literary prizes. Before and During in 2014 was his first novel to appear in English. Oliver Ready was born in 1976. He was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and read Russian and Italian at Oxford. After graduating in 1998, he lived in Poland and Russia, where he worked as an editor at the Moscow News and The Moscow Times. He is now the Russian editor for T.L.S.Oliver Ready's translation of The Prussian Bride was awarded the inaugural Russian Translation Prize in 2005 and his translation of Before & During won the Read Russia Prize 2015.

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before & During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015).

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