The task of contextualizing Vladimir Sharov's novels is in many ways as complicated as analyzing his novelistic strategy. Sharov's fictions are at once a profound meditation on, and a parody of, the eschatology of Russian history and Russian-Jewish history; an aggressive experiment in postmodern Russian prose; and a bewildered cry of the eternal human condition. His combination of playfulness and seriousness, of parody and lyric, and of the sacred and profane not only complicates the reader's interpretive task but also suggests that Sharov has assimilated, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the artistic and philosophical legacy of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Russian literature.

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sharov was born in Moscow on 7 April 1952. His grandparents were, in his own words from a personal interview, "professional revolutionaries," and his parents important liberal Soviet intellectuals. His father, Aleksandr Israilevich Sharov (or Shera, as his friends called him...