The writer Alyosha, successful in the 1920s but experiencing memory problems as he nears senility, consigns himself to a remote rest home, thinking to begin work on his memoirs. Instead, he soon spends days in endless conversation with the nonagenarian Ifraymov, a fellow inmate, who tells him that the 19th century French woman of letters Germaine de Staël is alive and well and living on the grounds.
Madame de Staël, it seems, did not die in 1817 but fled to Russia, where she twice reincarnated herself as her own daughter. The second time, she was impregnated by a Georgian prince with a child she named Joseph…de Staël, or Stalin. She is Eve, the eternal temptress; she is the secret instigator of the era’s social and political turbulence; she has lured generations of the brilliant to her arcane cause, and at the asylum continues to plot and plan.
The rest home is revealed to have been, at its inception, a sort of Noah’s ark established by the government in 1922 to breed genius. Now the inmates run it. Each of the patients, committed for posterity, represents an idea, or an ideology, failed but forever hopeful.
Avant et Pendant has been compared to Andrey Biely’s modernist masterpiece St. Petersburg and the Moscow saga of Vassily Axionov. Packed with biblical, literary, and historical allusions as well as satirical takes on contemporary Russian events, this novel dazzles with iconoclastic erudition, offering a uniquely skewed view of European history combed with occult plot, secret orders, and fantastic continuities. In the great Russian tradition, Charov’s novel overflows with black humor and surreal Gogol-esque invention, the whole recounted in a serenely ironic prose.