Co-founder of Beat Fest Alena Bocharova about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF"we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, Alena Bocharova, co-founder of the Beat Film Festival, shares her stories about favorite books.
From childhood I knew that the letters were closer to my pictures, and I didn’t watch a movie at all (which I have to make up now), but I read a lot. The family had its own literary mythology, which, it seemed to me, somehow brought me closer to the book world. Mom loved to retell the story of the life of her uncle, a unlucky poet who was secretly in love with her and then committed suicide. In his youth, the pope made acquaintance with the company of the poet Leonid Gubanov and often found himself with him in some taverns, however, as a military man, he did not approve of his rallies for left-wing art and large drinking bouts.
I was born in an ordinary Soviet family in Leningrad of the early eighties: dad is a lieutenant colonel, mom is an engineer. In our family bookcases there was a standard book set of the time: the well-illustrated books of the publishing house “The Kid” of the early eighties, a set of whites, in soft covers of the series “Classics and Contemporaries” of the publishing house “Fiction”, one in one matching with the school literature program , strict, with gold letters from the collected works of Pushkin and Tolstoy, Dumas and Dreiser. Until adolescence, Kir Bulychev and Vladislav Krapivin were my favorite authors; I remember, I occasionally ran home from school from a lesson (the blessing was across the street) when I really wanted to finish reading another chapter from "A hundred years ahead" or "Musketeer and fairies."
At fifteen I left for a year to study in America. Back in love with beatniks and Kerouac, Andy Warhol and pop art, and since that time the America of the sixties has remained for me one of the most interesting literary territories. University professors threw firewood in the fire — magnificent Andrei Astvatsaturov and Valery Germanovich Timofeev, both specialists in Anglo-American literature. Miller and Joyce, Fowles and Vonnegut have taken a firm place in my heart for several university years. Over the years, they have been replaced by other authors, but approximately from the same orbit. Only John Fowles remained in my post-modernist mini-pantheon, along with newly arrived Julian Barnes, sunk into the soul of not programmatic works, but diaries published in the zero years, which still serve as an ideal guide for almost any travel.
For example, before going to Rome this summer, I specially re-read a piece about Italy, as always, delightfully grumpy: "He [the Colosseum] is all that so haunts in ancient Rome: a vast pressing building, a spacious baroque torture chamber. It is impossible not to think about people and animals endlessly suffering here - toys of civilization, absorbed not by the desire for culture, but by a thirst to entertain at any price. Ugly and St. Peter’s Cathedral, spread out like a monstrous crab and protruded its claw-columns, ready to grab you and abandon you s in the black mouth of the Great Catholic lie. "
A series of European and American student internships began at zero, and literary tastes also galloped under their influence. So, a couple of years in my top kept Scottish lesbian writer Ali Smith, writing about free love, sexuality and relationships, with collections of stories "Free Love & Other Stories" and "Other Stories and Other Stories". Or, for example, Hollywood screenwriter David Mamet with the play "Oleanna", in which the student and professor argue about whether there was sexual harassment on his part or she was simply reluctant to learn the lessons and easier to blackmail his teacher.
For several years now I have been in the Hemingway period. Just as over the years water became the most delicious of all possible drinks for me, replacing lemonades, juices and whatever else happens, so are the texts of Hunter Thompson or Douglas Copeland, essentially his literary followers (which, however, still stand on the closest bookshelves), changed the rectilinear, simple and masculine style of Hemingway's writing. Perhaps this is due, among other things, to the autobiography of his texts - now the most important place in my reading is occupied by non-fiction.
I do not have a professional bookshelf where books on the history of documentary films or its development trends would be collected - except maybe a few (like “Postdoc” by Zara Abdullayeva), I get information online in professional editions. What is really interesting is to build links between cultural formats and impressions, for example, read Viktor Shklovsky's Eisenstein after visiting the exhibition devoted to him in the Multimedia Art Museum or go to Robert Mapplethorpe at the Kiasma museum in Helsinki after reading Patti Smith's memoirs. In this sense, books often serve as an ideal complement to the viewed documentary: often a film leads to a book, less often the opposite - a book to a film.
An excerpt from Robert Cap's book "Hidden Perspective"
ROBERT CAPA
"Hidden perspective"
I first read about Bob Cape from Hemingway, so when I picked up this book, I still didn’t know that it was amazing journalism written by a classic of military photojournalism and one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency. The Second World War here is just a certain set of circumstances in which Kapa exists (or his hero, given that these are not memoirs in their pure form, but a failed Hollywood script).
Like Hemingway, who was rumored to be the unofficial editor of the book, explosions and deaths of soldiers go through a comma with whiskey and bartenders, nurses and waitresses, moral torments of military men and journalistic peripetias. I like this simplicity of the text, which ensures the immediacy of the immersion: "I was able to take some good pictures. These were very simple photos, they showed how boring and unreal the fight really was."
William Burrows
"Janky"
It is strange to recommend this book now, but then it played an important role for me in understanding literature and combating cultural prejudices. I study in the first years of university, I am fascinated by American literature, I am fascinated by the lifestyle of a lost generation with all its, so to speak, bad habits. It’s ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth, and the beatnic reels rhyme well with that raging clubbing and near-club life going on around me.
Janki has not yet been translated, and his planned translation is being discussed in the circles of my then friends and acquaintances. In parallel, there is university life, where in class we discuss Burroughs, his literary style and origins, the post-war generation of American writers. And the fact that this is exactly what literature lives and breathes, I learned exactly then, having got rid of the portion of prejudices that still prevent many people from seeing an outstanding artist, for example, in the same Robert Mapplethorpe.
Julian barns
"England, England"
I do not remember how this book came to me, but I read it with a practical, so to speak, sight - just as several years earlier the advertisers had read Victor Pelevin’s Generation P. Then, in my twenties, I worked on the first works related to culture marketing, and for me it was a book about a girl who participates in a large-scale marketing adventure: her boss, a businessman, buys out an island to build England on it in miniature , an attraction for wealthy tourists, where everything that is the quintessence of Englishness is collected, and subsequently England-England becomes a separate state and is part of the European Union.
This is one of the best examples of modern English prose - utopia, satire, postmodernism and everything, but also a book that showed me how large-scale marketing ventures are.
Boris Gribanov
Hemingway
I have several biographies of Hemingway, including a gigantic nine hundred-page volume by his official biographer Carlos Baker, ordered to a friend from the New York-based Strand Bookstore (thanks, Philip Mironov!). The same biography was written by his Russian translator Boris Gribanov in 1970 and also dear to me.
Despite the ideological raid, Gribanov seems to be writing his own adventure novel about the life of Hemingway - a journalist and war correspondent, a wanderer and a loveloader, a citizen who could not sit still when the war was going on in the world, whether World War II . When in 1940 he was denied the opportunity to go to the front as a war correspondent, Hemingway, who was living in Havana at that time, created, with the approval of the US embassy, a counterintelligence network to fight the Nazi agents in Cuba, and equipped his own fishing boat to the fighting.
BORIS BALTER
"Goodbye, boys!"
I clearly remember how I read this book, lying on the couch in my children's room during the summer school holidays. Summer, I'm fifteen, my room is filled with boxes of books, because we are moving to a new apartment, and after a month I am leaving to study in America and I do not know what awaits me. This book in a blue paperback, chosen at random, called, as I learned much later, a line from Okudzhava's verses - about two boys and their carefree maturation in the Crimea on the seashore on the eve of World War II - has remained for me a symbol of the end of childhood and it just so happened that it was the last book I read in my own childhood.
Malcolm Gladwell
"David and Goliath: How Outsiders Beat the Favorites"
Malcolm Gladwell, of course, is not Thomas Piketty, and his books are a quick journalist at a junction of psychology and economics. Nevertheless, if you read something, for example, about intuition, then the collection of Gladwell’s articles published in The New Yorker is better (his book “Blink” translated as “Enlightenment” is exactly that) can not found.
The main thing in Gladwell's books is his style of exposition as a whole, such juggling with logical constructions, which his opponents periodically call anti-scientific. However, if the task is to shake a set of hardened judgments and stereotypes, then his books are the perfect training for the brain. My favorite is "David and Goliath", in which the author consistently proves on contemporary examples that David’s victory over Goliath was not an accident, and the underdogs always have a chance. As a co-owner of a small cultural business, such internal encouragement is required regularly.
Zara Abdullaeva
"Seidl. Method"
The book is a study of film and theater critic Zara Abdullayeva about the Austrian director Ulrich Zaydle, which I produced several years ago not only because of my great love for his films, but also to make friends with Zara. And then we brought Zaydl himself to the presentation of the book in Moscow, and this was one of the most memorable days in my life.
It seems to me that all people need to watch at least one film by this director for greater humanity and understanding of the basic internal conflict, for example, the practically entertaining trilogy Paradise or the more exotic Animal Love about love for pets. And this book itself is the work of a brilliant critic, which no longer do, and her associates.
Konstantin Paustovsky
"The Tale of Life"
I heard about Paustovsky's diaries a long time ago, but I read them only a few years ago, and they immediately got up on the internal shelf of the best books in the world. Paustovsky is a terrific storyteller, his diaries not only unfold the twentieth century, but also reflect all Russian literature, which was before and after it. There are also some dovlatovski ridiculous sketches, like in Odessa of the forties, he founded a department of the Food Committee with a couple of self-capture journalists to get a piece of bread and work.
There are descriptions of the pogroms of the 1920s, forcing you to recall Babel, and reminiscent of the “Adolescence” of Tolstoy’s history of the 1910s from the life of the Kiev gymnasium. Here is my favorite: the end of May, in the Kiev Gymnasium exams, students of Russian and Polish origin agree among themselves that they must get four at least one subject so that they do not get gold medals, because all gold medals must be retired to Jews - they are without medals did not take to the university. Then classmates vowed to keep this story secret, and Paustovsky breaks this oath in his diaries: only because almost no one of his comrades in the gymnasium is left alive.
Titeux Sybille & Amazing Ameziane
"Muhammad Ali"
A documentary comic about the great American boxer Cassius Klee, aka Mohammed Ali, is one of the most recent treasures found in New York this April. Ali is the indispensable hero of the sixties American pop culture and civil rights movement. The comic book genre with its mythological potential is the best suited for describing his life, really similar to the life of Superman.
Among the key episodes are his refusal to fight in Vietnam on the side of the American army, the bitter struggle for the rights of African Americans, which led him to the “Nation of Islam” and to friendship with Malcolm X. This is not so much his personal history as the history of America of his time, there is also the text of the song Billie Holiday "Strange Fruit", a hymn against the lynching of African Americans, with a man hanging from a tree, obviously drawn from the documentary evidence of that time.
Patti Smith
"Just kids"
One of the best birthday gifts, followed by another "I graze the clouds" and "Train M", donated by the same person. New York of the sixties: all the names are familiar and filled with associations, and less public ones are immediately located in the search box in conjunction with other names - and the existing universe is completed in the head for a long time. And this book is about the mythology of couples - that can glue together relationships (in the case of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, this is art that for them is life and religion) and therefore the perfect declaration of love. If you love someone, give him or her this book.