SUMMARY:

This text is a response to Dina Khapaeva’s book, Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia (2024), specifically regarding her interpretation of the writer Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018). While the author Mark Lipovetsky agrees with Khapaeva’s central thesis about the manipulation of historical memory by the Putin regime and the rise of political neomedievalism in Russia, he strongly dissents from her portrayal of Sharov as someone who participated in this manipulation. Lipovetsky argues that Khapaeva misinterprets Sharov’s complex literary explorations of religious-messianic ideologies and fails to recognize the critical distance between Sharov and his characters. Instead, Lipovetsky posits that Sharov’s work deconstructs the millenarian logic that fuels Russian history’s cycles of violence, and that Khapaeva’s critique unfairly simplifies Sharov’s nuanced perspective in a polarized political climate.