Theater of ideas and endless perfomance of history: poetics of Vladimir Sharov's novel “The rehearsals”

The historian and writer Vladimir Sharov was worried about the lack of historical memory, its preservation, against the background of the tragically repeating events in the Russian history. Considering the borrowing of ideas, readymade development scenarios, and their artificial inculcation on the Russian soil to be disastrous, the author raises the question of the choice of one’s path by the people and each person who makes it up. The article considers the poetics of the novel “Rehearsals” through the prism of the development of the idea of God’s chosen people of Russia and the mythology of the Second Coming of Christ in Russia. Analyzing the historical scenarios represented by the three narrators, we traced their implementation in the life of a closed community, accidentally created by the French comedian Sertan. A too literal understanding of their roles in the performance based of the Gospel of Matthew, excessive performativity, turns the lives of sectarians into a vicious circle of rehearsals, followed by massacres. The hero can break this circle only when he realizes the possibility of independently building his destiny without breaking with his past. When writing the article, we used the methods of motivational, semiotic, intertextual, and discourse analysis.