Theology of Terror: Vladimir Sharov’s Historiographic Metafiction

During Vladimir Sharov’s lifetime, his historical novels at first triggered heated discussions, serving as an example of postmodernist “blasphemous” treatment of Russian history; later they received important literary prizes; yet, they never belonged to the mainstream and enjoyed wide readership. However, after the writer’s untimely death, many literary authorities spoke about Sharov’s historiographic metafiction as one of the most powerful and original literary achievements of the last decades. Written from the 1980s to 2017, his novels present the millenarist discourse as the driving force of Russian revolution, as well as its prehistory and subsequent events, first and foremost, the Great Terror. Sharov reconstructs a metanarrative that fuses sectarian eschatologism and interpretation of the revolution as the path toward the Second Coming, combining modernist sensibilities with theological justifications of Rusian and Soviet history.