Diary as a Mystification of Reality in Vladimir Sharov’s Novels
Authors:   Kemerovo State University (Kemerovo, Russian Federation), Ashcheulova Irina V. 
Published: November 2020

In Vladimir Sharov’s novels, the text structure of the narrative is of crucial importance. The text structures of Sharov’s novels are diverse: letters, diaries, archives, notes, treatises, dissertations, etc. Sharov consciously chooses the diary as a form of narration, as a stylisation of the document of one’s personal presence in history. The diary allows Sharov to reveal the characters’ psychology, to identify their attitude to reality, its perception, and image. The article analyses the form of the diary in the novels The Rehearsals (1992), The Old Girl (1998), Raising Lazarus (2003). In The Rehearsals, the diary of Jacques de Sertan, a French director and actor brought to Russia by the will of fate, becomes the key form of the narration. For several years (1660s), Sertan describes the plot of the rehearsals of a religious mystery about the life of Christ staged under the patronage of Patriarch Nikon. The meaning of the diary at the level of the author’s consciousness is to establish the laws of historical mystery. The author comes to the idea that the idea (political, theocratic, utopian) influences the historical process. Service to the idea and fascination with it entail a desire to change, remake reality. This is how, according to Sharov, the endless revolutions of Russian history arise leading to national divisions, opposition of one part of the people against another. The algorithm of Russian history is extremely clear: repeated splits lead to absurd dead ends. The narration in The Old Girl is connected with the comprehension of the most important event in Russian history for Sharov’s authorial historiosophy: the Revolution of 1917 and the political repressions of the 1930s. The basis of the narration is texts of different statuses that the author imitated: first of all, the diary of the main character Vera Radostina. The diary here is a personal document of one’s own life and a document of the historical era of the 1920s and 1930s. This is the narrative function of Vera Radostina’s diary, stories about the revolution, its role, its meaning for a person and for contemporaries. The author’s modeling of the diary of a character such as Vera is associated with the perception of the role of a person in the historical process of the 1920s and 1930s. Vera turns out to be identical with the epoch. She is fascinated by the grandeur and phenomenality of what is happening. She understands that the revolution should be involved in the general historical flow, that it is necessary to “enter the revolution into the history of Russia”. From the point of view of the author’s consciousness, with a common historical pattern, the revolution turns out to be a catastrophe in the national historical process. In Raising Lazarus, the diary performs three functions. At the plot level, it logically ends the search for the missing manuscripts. At the level of the consciousness of Nikolai Kulbarsov, the author of the diary, it “documents his identity”, confirming the continuity of his self. At the level of the author’s consciousness, the diary becomes a fact of the resurrection of the individual in the abyss of history.