Scriptwriter Elena Vanina 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 Elena Vanina, a journalist and scriptwriter for the TV series Tomorrow, Londongrad and Optimists, shares her stories about favorite books.
Mom told me that she started reading me out loud, even when I was in her stomach. He says it was mostly Pushkin - fairy tales, "Eugene Onegin", and also "Cat's Cradle", "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Dead Souls" - a little eighteen-year-old mother simply did not leave me any choice. Then I was born, I lived for three years, I have not yet learned to read, but I really wanted to quickly become "like them." Adults read these magic books out loud to me, and then lie down on the sofa and take on their personal books that are inaccessible to me. So I took some volume, lay down on the bed and pretended to read - most often the book was turned upside down. Quickly learning to read was a matter of principle. At five years old I somehow could do it. My little friends and I fell in love with reading out loud to each other, and this occupation was as fun as jumping from the closet.
I remember reading Turgenev's First Love. It was the first adult book - I clearly see how I lay on my bed and think: "Wow, about the world, about everything that is happening inside you, you can say this. That is, someone else understands everything the same way?" It was about that time that I felt terribly offended because I understood that no matter how much you read, you still don’t have time to read everything — there’s not enough time. So, all this beautiful will get to someone else, not you. I still think so, and sometimes I still feel childish about it.
It is very funny to remember how a little later, children's and adult reading got along in me. For example, in secret from my mother, practically under the covers, I read Lolita. Mom rarely forbade me anything, but she asked about “Lolita”: “Wait a couple more years”. I, of course, categorically did not want to wait. After a couple of days, we are going to go swimming in the lake, and there I already take with me not “Lolita”, but “Three Musketeers”, whom in early childhood I considered too children's book. And now I sit on a stone next to the water, I don’t eat it, I don’t bathe, I just read, read and read.
It so happened that all the time we moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. During my life, I changed eight schools and learned not to experience stress. Coming to a new class, I just took a book, sat at the last desk and read - lesson by lesson, day by day. Even in the harshest schools, it worked: the guys considered me not to be learned, but just strange. With time, I got used to the fact that literature is my shield and sword. I knew much more than the school curriculum, never particularly listened to what the teachers said, and wrote essays with one left. It turned out badly, but I did not care.
It all ended up quite ridiculous: I moved to a new school, the most paradoxical of all eight - an Orthodox gymnasium in Tushino, which was located in the building of the kindergarten. Here I met the best and, probably, the most important literature teacher in my life - Yuli Anatolyevich Khalfin, an amazing mind and subtlety of a person. I came to the lesson, handed out notebooks, and on the cover for the first time in my life, I saw a bright red "3". Inside was the accompanying text by Yuli Anatolyevich about how I wrote this essay. I love and appreciate when people point out my mistakes to me - sometimes it seems to me that this is generally the most important thing for you that another person can do. Halfin told me how I wrote this essay: in fifteen minutes at home, between the twenty-second and twenty-third, one left, for fools. It wasn’t just not like the truth - it was the truth, just inside and out. In order to deserve five from Halfin, I had to try hard. He taught me to read differently - more slowly and more accurately. Do not choke with a book, but seek out the details, watch how it is done, how the language works.
I grew up entirely on Russian literature, and I had very personal relationships with Russian writers. I remember reading Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature and so got angry with him for the way he treated other writers that she came up and threw the book out of the window. And for some time did not speak with Nabokov. Then the Silver Age began. My sister still laughs at me for twenty years, because then, as she says, everything was very serious: "Mouthpiece, volume of Akhmatova and shawl."
I studied Russian philology, and we sometimes measured the books that needed to be read in meters: “I only have one and a half meters to read, and you?” Then I took to write a term paper on the "Rhythmic Quotation" and plunged into poetry. This is probably my main habit, which has remained with me to this day, to read at least one poem every day. Poems for me - like breathing yoga: it immediately becomes calmer and a bit more pleasant to live.
In general, I am a drunken person in everything, and this concerns me first of all - if I had to finish reading, then everything was transferred: an exam, a date, a meeting. I remember calling a friend five times and postponing the meeting for an hour, three and three more to finish reading Agota Christophe's Fat Notebook. Now this rarely happens - and very sorry. There are several novels that I re-read regularly, these are “Demons”, “Doctor Zhivago” and for some reason “Ada” by Nabokov. The first time I read "Hell" at a very special moment of my life, and now, probably, when I read, I remember how I was then. These novels occupy a separate place within me. Like friends that you may not see for years, and when you meet, you just continue the conversation from the place where it ended.
I have a habit since childhood - to keep several books in bed. Usually this is one main book that I am reading at this moment, and a few more, which are nice to open anytime, anywhere. At some point a strange pattern appeared that still works: books in the same bed begin to influence each other, as if turning into one text. You just read in one, as the hero falls into a terrible snowfall. You open the next book on an arbitrary page. And what's there? It's snowing too. I really love such electrical connections with everything. When I manage to catch them, I am childlikely happy.
Lee Bo and Du Fu
Selected Lyrics
This little book appeared at home before I was born. Together with me she changed a lot of apartments. I liked not just the poems of two Chinese poets, but the idea that the book was based on an example of the incredible friendship of people from the 8th century. This friendship turned out to be so strong that the XXI century has already come, and their poems are still being published under one cover. The book is very touching and funny Soviet preface - about how Lee Bo and Du Fu were firmly friends, walked, gathered herbs and read poems to each other. For some reason it seemed to me that Li Bo and Du Fu laughed a lot together. What kind of strong friendship can there be without it? Li Bo has a short poem: "Clouds float / Rest after a hot day, / Swift birds / The last flock flew away. / I look at the mountains, / And the mountains look at me, / And we look for a long time, / Not boring each other." I always think that Li Bo and Du Fu didn't bother each other either. Well, or did not have time to get bored.
Ilya Ehrenburg
"My Paris"
This old and very rare book for my birthday gave girlfriend. It all came together: the poet Ehrenburg, the camera Leica, through the lens of which he looked at the city, and, in fact, Paris itself. From early youth for a long time, Paris became for me the most important city. A city of piercing beauty, from which sometimes it blinks or begins to feel sick, because well, it’s just so impossible. When there was money and the opportunity to go somewhere, I always went to Paris. Then I decided that it was enough - I would never look at anything else, and made a strong decision with Paris to stop. And it was then that the Ehrenburg book came to me. He described Paris, to which I missed so much more precisely than I did myself. Fictitious city, which consists of all the details. If the cat is running or the window is open - it's not by accident.
Robert Capa
"Hidden perspective"
It seems to me that if I met with Robert Capa, I would instantly fall in love with him. Handsome, loner, immersed in their own business. He is not there all the time, but they are waiting for him everywhere. He knows how to see things like no one else, and as skillfully arranges a holiday around him. It was not for nothing that Ingrid Bergman fell in love with him, and Alfred Hitchcock wrote off the hero of his film Window to the Yard from him. In general, a rare type of handsome. "Hidden perspective" - an amazing document about the war. Live, scary and funny at the same time. There are a million beautiful episodes there, but for me there is one special: when Kapa tells how he entered Paris with the American troops. He rode a tank next to the soldiers. People were dancing around this tank, someone was kissing the barrel, because this barrel was a symbol of long-awaited freedom. Girls in beautiful dresses jumped on the car to hug the soldiers. And here the photographer Kapa rides on a tank past his house, his concierge sees him, waves his handkerchief to him, and he yells at her: “It's me! It's me!” Life sometimes can be amazingly beautiful.
Anne frank
"Asylum". Diary in letters
This is a very cinematic story about how several Jews in Amsterdam were able to hide from the Germans in almost all the war in an abandoned building hidden behind the facades of residential buildings. When they first came to the shelter, Anna was thirteen years old. The horror and beauty of this document is that the author does not know at all how much they will have to sit in the shelter and what to wait for in general - and at the same time he believes that everything will end well. I thought a lot about how people get used to the most terrible things, how life grows even where death seems to have already seized everything.
Asylum the farther, the more begins to live their lives - strange, paradoxical, but real. They are shooting outside, they have to make forays there for food, they drive terrible green cars that are looking for Jews and then take them to the unknown, people are starving to death there. And in the shelter of a new daily routine, there are boiled potatoes, sick stomachs, quarrels with parents, leaky shoes, French lessons, first love and first kiss, fear of bombings and another great youthful desire to live. Here Anne Frank is already fifteen years old, the end of the war is treacherously close. We know that, and Anna feels it. She has a million plans. And suddenly the diary is interrupted. August 1, 1944. Afterword is the worst thing in this book. Because life most often ends this way - in half a word, without any script.
Giorgio Vasari
"Lives of famous painters"
This book was written in the XVI century, and still, it seems, nothing better about painting of the Renaissance did not work. The man tried, the man knew what he was doing. Once in my childhood I went to school at the Hermitage, but then I abandoned systematic study of art. And five years ago she enrolled in courses at the Moscow House of Photography and began to attend.
This book was a discovery for me. Because it is not at all like a scientific work, and at the same time you cannot imagine a better scientific work. The author knew about many of those about whom he writes, firsthand. His life stories are full of anecdotes and stories that are not found anywhere else. His great artists are very lively great artists. It has always been difficult for me to imagine that Rembrandt or Vermeer are living people. A picture is something very capacious, complete and perfect: there is no room for doubts, without which there is no person. Vasari, I was grateful that he humanized my most beloved of the epochs in painting.
Andrey Platonov
"I have lived a life." Letters
Andrey Platonov is a language. For me personally, this is the best thing that has happened to the Russian language lately (at least now I feel that way). This is a writer who can bring me to tears - literally - by the way he builds his sentences, by the way he intentionally makes mistakes, by the way he invents metaphors. When I read Platonov's letters, it became a little clearer to me where this all came from. He has a naked heart. They say "a man without skin" - I do not like this expression, but about Platonov, so to speak. He is without skin and without any protection and at the same time with some incredible dignity. He knows how to love, as never happens - that is, it happens, but always tragically.
Francois Truffaut
"Hitchcock / Truffaut"
There is a time in life when it seems that you are special. Everything around tells only about you. With this time Truffaut coincided with me. I liked everything in him: from how he looks and speaks, to each frame in his films. I did not understand why I was not a boy, or rather, why I was not Antoine Doinel. There was everything: romanticism, hooliganism, irresponsibility, melancholy, madness and amorousness. Hitchcock is a method. This is forethought, consciousness, alignment. This is a rational world and a genre, to which one really wants to grow. Truffaut, too, always wanted, but the romantic took up. And here they are sitting opposite each other and talking. The book was brought to me by a friend from New York a couple of months ago. Since then, she has been lying in my bed and I read it every other day from anywhere in a couple of paragraphs.
Mikhail Ardov
"The Great Soul: Memories of Dmitri Shostakovich"
I have a friend-composer, and we talked a little about Shostakovich. Not much, but enough for me to understand that I know treacherously little about Shostakovich. The book of Archpriest Michael Ardov is quite tiny. Ardov knew Shostakovich’s children well — Galina and Maxim — and at some point decided to write down their memories of his father. Then I interviewed about a dozen more acquaintances, found letters from Shostakovich, worked. Ardov does not write about Shostakovich - he writes about a great soul, and he manages to do this very delicately and accurately. Through funny stories about how the composer taught his son not to lie. Or as simply and without any aplomb, he composed music amid domestic chaos and screams. In this book, a lot of poetry and beauty of the individual. I love and appreciate this, and therefore I have been reading 250 pages for two months now: I don’t want them to end.
Pavel Bassinsky
"Leo Tolstoy: the flight from paradise"
I love Leo Tolstoy. He fascinates me not only as a writer, but also as a person. When I feel bad, I want to read "Anna Karenina", when I feel good too. In general, often when I take a book in my hands, I think: why? Maybe better "Karenin"? And it's not just that I consider Anna Karenina the best novel (yes, I think so).
For some reason I read the whole book of Basinsky in the bathroom. And when I finished reading, I took my mother and went to Yasnaya Polyana for the first time in my life - and there this book quickly came to life. It was as if I went and watched a film about the last years of Lev Nikolayevich, which he spent at the estate — this is what Basin writes in his book. Then he did not just come to life, he settled in me completely. It is very difficult for me to realize that it physically no longer exists. How is it if I feel his presence? Maybe, if it were not for the book Basinsky, I would not have long reached the grave of Tolstoy. And, better than this place, laconic beauty and truth, it seems, does not convey anything.