Vladimir Sharov
A historian of medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov began writing fiction in the late 1970s. Nevertheless, it was not until the 1990s that Sharov's highly unusual historical-philosophical novels came to the attention of the public, becoming a literary sensation due to Sharov’s controversial use of fiction to explore the mythological and religious substrata of Russian history and thought. Many critics now consider Sharov to be a ‘living classic'; nevertheless, the views of the author himself remain elusive. Sharov ridicules the notion that he is an author of ‘para-historical' fiction, arguing that there is a real history which is not the history of facts and events and which does not find its way into school textbooks.
