At the centre of Be as Little Children is an ailing Vladimir Lenin, infected not with syphilis, as some historians have claimed, but with Christian fervour. Regressing stroke by stroke to an infancy of his own, he renounces his faith in the proletariat and puts all his hope in the many children left homeless and orphaned by the Civil War. Only they will be loyal to the cause and only they can save it. Around this story Sharov weaves two other plots: a murderer who converts a Siberian people to Christianity and the life story of a female holy fool. Epic in scope and highly original in execution, Be as Little Children shows exactly why, since his untimely death in 2018, Vladimir Sharov has been widely celebrated in Russia as one of the few outstanding novelists of his era and a true heir to the classic authors of the nineteenth century. Reviewing Vladimir Sharov's The Rehearsals in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Caryl Emerson described it as possibly "the most ambitious attempt since Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita to integrate biblical plots and the terror of the Living God into the fabric of Russia's horrific 20th century". Be as Little Children, which Sharov completed in 2007, might be described in similar terms.
