Founder of the shop "Khokhlovka" Maria Potudina 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, the owner of the Khokhlovka store, Maria Potudina, shares her stories about favorite books.
I grew up in a reading family. Even at a family dinner, it often turned out that everyone was looking into his book — it was only when I grew up that she found out that this was considered indecent towards her interlocutor. At home there was a huge library of classical literature: the volumes of Pushkin, Pasternak, everything that could be obtained in the USSR in exchange for waste paper, and old books preserved in the family thanks to father's noble roots. In my school years, books became a refuge for me. I was sent to school at the age of six; everyone in the class was older than me. It was completely uninteresting for me to communicate with peers - they didn’t like books. But my favorite teacher, of course, taught literature - and she answered me reciprocate.
In adolescence, reading, oddly enough, was associated with music. Traveling in different musical styles, I also captured relevant literature. I studied various subcultures and watched people: ska-punk parties, Zemfira and Mumiy Troll, underground raves and, finally, jazz. We had a company (it seems that everyone had this at the age of twenty), where we passed books in a circle, listened to the same music, wandered around the boulevards, drank wine and discussed art-house, feeling like super-adults.
I read Eric Bern when I was thirteen, and it was a nightmare for me to find my behavioral scenarios in my book, the scenarios of my parents, and most of the people I knew. He made meaningless a lot of activities and topics for conversation. I remember recognizing myself in the book, out of anger, I threw it against the wall, I was offended and did not want to continue reading. Returned to her in a month or so. Now I remember this with a smile. Offended by the book? Oh well.
I am from a family of economists. Grandmother, mother, elder sister, brother - all are busy in this area. I wasn’t even particularly asked who I want to be and who I’m going to learn from: it was planned that I would inherit my mother’s auditing firm. I started working in the tenth grade: first a courier who delivers documents to the tax office, then an assistant accountant and an auditor. But in my third year at the Tax Academy, I finally realized that I didn’t like to work hard with numbers - it’s much more interesting to me with people. Mom begged me not to leave the institute and take an academic. I tried to figure out what I liked, to hear myself - and books came again to the rescue.
Relations with loved ones, parents, circle of friends changed with me. The more I learned, the less I was willing to tolerate manifestations of racism and intolerance around myself. I am an idealist and was not ready to tolerate humiliation or discrimination, because I knew that there were other people free from prejudice and clichés. For example, I really loved Tolstoy - before I read the diaries of his wife. They dispelled the last doubts: to hell, no one is allowed to mock their neighbors, even if it is “our everything” and Leo Tolstoy. The fact that marriages were decided as commodity relations, when a girl of eighteen years old was given to the property of a mature man, shocked me. Yes, of course, I knew about it before, but one thing is to know, and the other is to read the thoughts of a living person, a girl like you. The endless duties of the "great man's wife" - edit texts, endure all whims, constant betrayal and humiliation, including physical ones - the whole diary of Sofia Tolstoy is imbued with pain. I could not understand how to ignore these cannibalistic facts and continue to extol Tolstoy.
I never dreamed of opening a clothing store. For ten years I worked in office positions and all this time I wanted to create a system that would allow me to live and travel as I want. Once on the island of Koh Chang in Thailand, my husband and I had the idea to create an Internet service. The project has undergone a lot of changes - in the end, everything turned into an offline store. Already after I started working with clothes, I began to read about the history of costume, the impact of clothing on the economy and how clothing designers shape the environment. Now for me as a professional, articles on society and fashion are important, for example, lectures by Andrei Abolenkin or materials by Kati Fedorova from The Blueprint.
Surprisingly, the book "Bobo in Paradise: Where the New Elite Comes From" helped me to understand and finally calmly integrate into society, not feeling like a renegade, stuck between generations. It was a great relief to feel part of a large community with well-studied habits and preferences. There was another book that really helped me out at a difficult time. When my daughter was born, she came to intensive care because of an erroneous diagnosis. At that moment every visit to the doctors was a challenge for me. I looked at them as if they were gods of heaven, then as enemies who would not let me go to the child. I don’t remember exactly who advised me to read "The Deception in Medicine", but after it I felt much better. I began to perceive doctors as ordinary people with the right to make a mistake, to question and ask again as many times as I need, until I understand. Therefore, I read with great pleasure the "Deception in Science", which explains why people torture themselves with detox and why this should not be done. Now the book by Edward M. Hellawell and John Ratie "Why am I distracted?" Is very relevant for me. about clip thinking in adults and children, and how to live with it.
There are books to which I come back constantly. In the topic of parenthood, the reference point for me is the work of Julia Gippenreiter, if it is necessary to cope with emotions, the books of the Dalai Lama. In 2014, at the height of the personal crisis and depression, I went to Riga to study the Dalai Lama: I was amazed that what I heard was not about religion at all - it was a secular lecture about culture, society and the individual in the modern world, with comments from modern scholars . When I arrived home, I listened to everything I could on YouTube and made sure that it did not seem to me and was not heard. In 2016, I took a lay Buddhist vow at the teachings in Riga. Now most of all I am consonant with the idea of Jidda Krishnamurti that each person is responsible for everything that happens on our planet, and the thought of the Dalai Lama that we are all the same in nature and all want love. We are all human and we are at the beginning of our evolution.
Catherine Baker and Julia Gippenreiter
"The influence of the Stalinist repressions of the late 1930s on the lives of families in three generations"
Hippenreiter is in all the lists of compulsory literature for parents, and in my manner I simply read to her everything I found. Lyudmila Petranovskaya's widely replicated text about generational injuries is a greatly simplified work of Yulia Borisovna. Basically we are talking about the difficulties in the lives of older generations, for whom the decision to beat children was the norm, dictated by the sad events in the history of our country, and not at all a personal choice.
War, famine, repression, the seizure of private property, the separation of families and other traumatic situations in which several previous generations lived, gave us the current situation. Gippenreiter offers several techniques, such as active listening and speaking feelings, which are suitable not only in communication with children, but also absolutely everything. After reading, I changed my attitude towards my parents, I began to better understand the older generation. Periodically, when I feel powerless in parental issues, I listen to her audio classes, and it becomes easier at once.
Chogyam Trungpa
"Overcoming spiritual materialism"
Trungpa is the abbot of several Tibetan monasteries who left their homeland after the occupation. He studied psychology at Oxford and founded the first US meditation center. The book became for me an antidote to pseudo-spiritual quest: it came into my hands when I was twenty — a friend left her husband and transported her library to my home. Expanding such concepts as the idealization of the guru, life attachments and disappointments, mystical and transcendental experiences, the author explains the structure of human nature.
"I am ready to share my experience of life in its entirety with fellow travelers, with quest, with those who walk with me. I don’t want to rely on them to gain support; I only want to go with them. There is a very dangerous the tendency is to move on others while moving along a path. When everyone in a group of people lean on each other, then if someone happens to fall, everyone else will fall. Therefore, we don’t want to lean on someone else. side by side, shoulder to shoulder, working with each other, moving together e. This approach to the submission, this idea of taking refuge is very deep. "
Gunter grass
"Memory Bulb"
Not enough, in my opinion, a popular book that answers the question of who were the people who went to fight from Nazi Germany, and how they could fall under the influence of Hitler. This book is autobiographical. Matured Grass does not make tragedy out of his act, but calmly reflexes, trying to describe his memories in as much detail as possible. The author tells how he was called to serve in the German troops and he agreed. Usually, the image of the enemy is specially hardened, its human features are destroyed - here we are dealing with an honest, cynical and inexperienced adolescent, with his naive motives. Each side of this conflict suffered huge losses - and all for what?
Polina Zherebtsova
"An ant in a glass jar. Chechen diaries 1994-2004."
An incredible force and a very simple book. It's one thing when you hear all the teens from the TV about anti-terrorist operations, and quite another when reading a peer diary about how civilians are bombed, a story about how to live when your house is destroyed and there is nowhere to go. The heartbreaking details were written in a childish, naive language and at one time completely knocked me out of the rut: stories about survival, feeding with melt water, bombed houses, attitude to the Russian or half Russian population, complete disregard for the state of refugees whose passports were lost.
There is no condemnation in the book, it is just a diary of a little girl who was not lucky enough to be in the meat grinder of others' ambitions. My close colleague, who has been working in our shop for almost five years, turned out to be half Chechen and told me that for the first three years of work she was afraid to admit her origin. It turned out that this fear described in the book spreads very widely, and I didn’t even suspect how close it was - these people remain invisible because of fear of condemnation.
William Gibson
"Pattern recognition"
The best I read about fashion and trend formation. The other day I learned that this is actually a trilogy, and now I really want to read the other two books. This is a great book explaining the modern world: it seems that this is how the coohunters work for large corporations. For me, it was not so much a fantastic novel, as a completely current description of the marketing processes in modern corporations.
Tom wolf
"Electrocooler Acid Test"
Strongly loving the sixties, I could not help but pay attention to all sorts of literature on this subject - from Ken Kesey and Terence McKenna to Hunter Thompson - but the most memorable were the adventures of Tom Wolfe. In general, the very idea of traveling artists of a company on a bus with countercultural get-togethers was close to me, understandable and pretty. My favorite moment of the book is the letters of the girls picked up by the bus with them after the parties. They all started with one phrase: "Mom, I'm fine, I met wonderful people." It seems to me that this is one of the first memes - even in our company, this is how we began to communicate with excited parents with laughter when the bell rang in the middle of the party. From my point of view, this journey is the progenitor of raves with installations and music, which now seem to us to be something completely ordinary. I still dream to realize a stylized shooting for this book.
Irwin Welsh
"Nightmares of the Marabou Stork"
After the period of the "flower" sixties, the years of love for trash came - naturally, the whole of Bukowski and Burroughs, Chuck Palahniuk and Ian Banks with the "Aspen Factory". In 1996 he came out and became the cult first "On the needle." I adored reading about the life of the working class in the Scottish suburbs - it was surprisingly close to a girl from the Workers' Village of the Kuntsevsky District of Moscow. “Nightmares of the Marabou Stork” about a teenager in a coma, in my opinion, is Welsh’s strongest book. A fantastically cruel story about violence turned me inside out. The plot revolves around the girl's group rape: the main character does not remember whether he participated in it or not. Some of the memories are mixed up in his coma-hallucinating mind with a marabou stork hunt. I remember how strange it was to sympathize with all the heroes: the victim of violence, the rapist, his family. By the way, the marabou really look pretty ugly and scary - I realized that when several years later I met two birds in a park in Tanzania.
Karl Sagan
"The Dragons of Eden: Discourses on the Evolution of the Human Brain"
Stunning scientific pop about the brain. The book brought me relief: I was hooked by an analogy - mankind exists only the last five minutes of the twelve o'clock dial. All our life at school and at the institute, we are assured that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution, that we know almost everything. However, in fact, it turns out that evolution has just begun, and most of the reactions remain only outdated evolutionary mechanisms and limited interaction options. At the same time, humanity has great potential for development, but it is unattainable without awareness and daily work.
Simone de Beauvoir
"Strength of circumstances"
I love biographies and, in my usual manner, “swallowing” everything, I began to read de Beauvoir and reached this book. This is not a manifesto, but a book about life. On the existence of an open relationship, not in theory, but in practice. On the aging institute of marriage and bisexuality. On the attitude towards clothing and the attitude of society towards it: the writer deliberately avoided fashionable things, she wore wooden shoes. This is a book about how she grew from a "Muse of Sartre" into a separate cultural figure.
All this still seems difficult for us to discuss, and then it was completely unthinkable for a woman. And yet Simone de Beauvoir existed - alive, talented, writing about herself without pity, modesty and boasting. Described his feelings, throwing, fear, the struggle for women's rights and criticism of their actions. Another important and interesting point is its contact and disappointment about the women's issue in the USSR: how first she and Sartre were fascinated by the equality of women in our country and how they managed to see behind the facade only another, no less brutal totalitarian system.
Erich Fromm
"On the other side of the enslaving illusions. Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis"
For me, this book is a bridge between psychology and Buddhism, between which there is really a lot in common. Fromm is one of my favorite humanists: I read all his books, but I want to mention this one. Religion and psychoanalysis, he submits in the context of the era when they appeared, and their values, which largely overlap.
"The pursuit of human well-being through the study of its nature - this common feature inherent in both Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis - is most often mentioned when comparing these systems, reflecting the characteristics of the western and eastern mentality. Zen Buddhism combines Indian concreteness and realism. Psychoanalysis, however, based on Western humanism and rationalism, on the one hand, and the romantic search for those beyond the rational understanding of the mysterious forces characteristic of the 19th century, on the other, is a phenomenon exclusively in the Western world. It can be said that this scientific and therapeutic method of studying man is the fruit of Greek wisdom and Jewish ethics. "