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The Kingdom of Agamemnon

The Kingdom of Agamemnon

by Vladimir Sharov, translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready, afterword by Boris Belenkin

$29.95
$29.95
Available as E-Book Russian Literature
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The coruscating fictions of the late Vladimir Sharov, astonishing, hilarious, brooding, and somber, count among the transformative novels of the last twenty-five years. Sharov was a daring literary innovator—also a professional historian—whose fantastical inventions turn a probing light on the dark depths of Russia's past. The Kingdom of Agamemnon, his final novel, is both a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov and a reimagining of Greek myth. In it, Sharov explores the harrowing legacy of state terror in today's world.

The Kingdom of Agamemnon revolves around the quest for a missing novel: The Kingdom of Agamemnon. Its author, Nikolai Zhestovsky, was a mystery man: a Tsarist pretender, theologian, informer, and Gulag convict. His daughter, Galina, is driven to recover his work and uncover his story. Calling herself Electra, she pulls back the curtain on the complex history of her family. A tale of vengeance and terror emerges, set in a world where the line between victim and perpetrator is impossible to discern.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230380
Pages: 584
Publication Date:

Praise

In the nineteenth century, Russian writers announced a scriptural vocation for themselves, one that was never totally consummated—not until the appearance of Vladimir Sharov's gnostic gospels in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His combinatory verve reaches delirious new heights in his final novel, The Kingdom of Agamemnon.
—Max Lawton

Vladimir Sharov relates to world history as if it were an ocean in his own backyard—an ocean in which he discovered new currents, tracked down sunken treasures, and caught a great many wondrous, fantastical fish of the highest literary quality.
—Vladimir Sorokin

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