Director of the Museum of Moscow Alina Saprykina 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 director of the Museum of Moscow Alina Saprykina shares her stories about favorite books.
Do the books you read affect your choice of profession? Yes, they are simply of great importance. Like air, like people around. Because of them you add up. I love to read as I can remember, from about six years old. Of course, now my children are reading at the age of four, but earlier, before the school — the Soviet school with vigorous Octobrists and pioneers — they were not in a hurry especially: everything had its time. We had a large library in our house: from philosophical and culturological books to textbooks on economics and cybernetics - these are my parents' specialties. We also had a lot of albums on art. I myself read everything in a row - what came across, what appeared new. Books in my childhood were generally more valued, and the library judged the person, so they were selected with special care. Among them were those that got it with difficulty or received in exchange for handed over trash. This is partly why I still can not throw away the book: the hand does not rise. I do not read in electronic form at all: for me, the book must be tangible, have weight, history, smell of paper.
The first thing I read, having barely learned to put words into sentences, is “Tales” by Hans Christian Andersen. Already in childhood I was a serious and responsible person, so I didn’t like fantasy and adventure. I read historical novels, the series "ZHZL" about Euripides, Chaadaev, Omar Khayyam, Mayakovsky. She loved classical literature. Then Rozanov, Berdyaev and Solovyov, then Kharms and his comrades. In my life there were old suburban filings of the magazines "Foreign Literature" and "New World". Then "Questions of Philosophy" and "Logos" - a happy student time. There were funny magazines like “Ptyuch” and “Om”, when it became suddenly clear that visual formats are beginning to push texts - and now we are in a single media space.
An important book in transitional age was the novel Master and Margarita, which I read with great sadness. A complex feeling, very suitable for the formation of a young soul, that good and evil are two sides of the same thing, but you must always feel the truth, make a choice at every step. The two main writers of my life are Chekhov and Gogol. Gogol is a genius, but Chekhov is closer. If I were offered time travel to meet with some writer, the choice would be unequivocal. For me, the words that speak about life in Chekhov's universe — tenderness, love, pain, glibness, faith, dedication — are the basic concepts that define a person.
I am interested in searching and browsing publications that now seem strange. Documents of country houses of the end of the XIX century, literature of agronomists of the beginning of the XX century, Soviet industrial realism, any town-planning statistics are a kind of antipodes of fiction. Now, such texts and numbers are perceived as infographics, so it’s better to look at old materials exactly as we look at old maps, for example.
I read either rather slowly, when the book is absorbed by the heart, or very quickly, when it needs to be caught by the mind. I do not buy books, but I take them from the shelves that seem endless. Editions all the time themselves come from somewhere, as if they multiply, and they are also presented. Children also love to read, and they have their own library: fortunately, the tradition of reading in our family continues. I read in the mornings over a cup of coffee, when the children went to kindergarten and school, and before the working day there is still some time. I always take at least one book on a journey, but I don’t always read it - sometimes it turns out that I only carry it with me. Traveling is the best substitute for a book, but a book is a replacement for one’s own experience for other people. In the journey you need to listen to yourself and your feelings, and in the book it is important to hear the voice of the author and his characters.
Alexandra Litvin
"The story of an old apartment"
We bought the book for children at the fair, but we read it and looked at it with pleasure for the whole family. It tells how the history of Russia of the 20th century was reflected in the history of the simple inhabitants of the old Moscow apartment. Formally childish, she raises non-child questions about denunciations and repression. On each page one and the same apartment of an old house in a Moscow lane is drawn, in which the inhabitants, the furnishings and the topics of conversations on the sofa change from year to year.
The reader enters the apartment in the evening of October 1902 and stays here for a hundred years. The stories are told not only by the heroes themselves, but also by their things: furniture and clothes, dishes and books, games and household items - objects bear the imprint of time and keep traces of the era in which they were created and served. Then I bought another "History of the old apartment" and took it to work. A year ago, my colleagues and I at the Museum of Moscow conceived the exhibition “Old apartment”, which will open in November, and it should have looked like this book.
Dmitry Oparin, Anton Akimov
"Stories of Moscow houses, told by their residents"
Dmitry Oparin, a former columnist of the “Big City”, lectured at the educational center of the Museum of Moscow and was a guest guide at the tour desk at our museum. The bureau has always had a dream to make excursions to workshops for artists or simply for Moscow old-timers. The first time we tried this format was in 2013, when we held the exhibition Moscow Moscade, about the Nirnsee house, which marked the centenary. The exhibition was then gathered together with the residents, those who were born there and lived all their life (there were very few of them). When Dmitry later came up with the idea of a book about the life of old houses and their inhabitants, we decided to publish it as part of the museum’s publishing program - and it became one of the bestsellers at the Non / Fiction Fair.
"ABC Museum"
Our other publication, which I am proud of, is the ABC of the Museum, timed to the 120th anniversary of the Museum of Moscow. This is a catalog of the exhibition of the same name, in which we tried to collect the brightest exhibits of our collection. A collection of a million artifacts must be handled carefully, and the most difficult task of the exhibition curator and author of the catalog is to choose material from all this wealth: maps, graphics, sculptures, books, photos, advertising and household items. We applied the simple principle of the children's alphabet, when each letter contains a word, and the collection objects are selected for this word.
In the "ABC Museum" at the same time a lot of rarities and very recognizable things. The objects of everyday life that are dear to us easily wake up memories: “Grandma walked like this”, “it was in our communal apartment,” “I was bought as a child”. Each exhibition and its catalog is a product of collective creativity, and all of our twenty-five custodians, three curators and two architects worked here. This is a year and a half of efforts and more than a hundred years of history of the largest city museum.
"Museum of the 90's. Territory of Freedom"
The project "Museum of the 90s" was launched in 2014 and first existed as an interactive museum on one Internet portal, and then as a series of monologues. The book has become part of this dialogue about the era of Russian history. They still argue about the nineties - they are remembered with nostalgia or hatred. "The Museum of the 90s" are the voices, documents and artifacts of the time of my formation. Here there are memories of everything - from the "Party of beer lovers" to the shuttles and the catch from overseas trips. Here it is told about the era newspeak, the program "About it" and films from video distribution, the first earnings of the millionaire Chichvarkin and the emergence of the Luzhkov style in architecture.
Donna tartt
"Goldfinch"
The book, which was read by all my friends who you ask. This is a book about the power of art and how it is - sometimes not at all the way we want it to be - capable of turning all life. The story begins with the fact that thirteen-year-old Theo Decker miraculously remains alive after the explosion, in which his mother died. Without a single soul mate around the world, he wanders around other people's homes and families - from New York to Las Vegas - and his only consolation, which, however, almost leads to his death, becomes a masterpiece of the Dutch master stolen from the museum. Surprisingly fascinating book, from which it is impossible to break away - I was not surprised by its popularity. And this fat volume is ideal for taking it with you on a business trip or on a long journey.
Aleksey Ivanov
"Tobol. Many are called"
A great historical novel about Siberia of the time of Peter the Great, recreating the image of the epoch. Ivanov is that modern writer whose new book I immediately rush to read as soon as it comes out. I like how Ivanov himself talks about his approach: “There is historical truth, which historians advocate, that is, how everything happened in reality, in real sequence, supported by documents. There is a policy prerogative - this is the ideology that is most often formed in modern times, and then artificially introduced into the past in order to make the current ideology more legitimate. But there is also the writer's work - artistic understanding of the epoch ... I, as a writer, do not bring ideology into historical works, Referring to the image. And for the sake of the image at times need to deviate from the historical basis. "
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
"Lord Golovlyov"
“He took off his dressing-gown, in one shirt, he rushed back and forth through the hotly heated room, stopped at times, came up to the table, dabbled in the darkness and once again took to walking. He drank his first glasses with jokes, sucking voluptuously into himself the burning moisture; but little by little the heartbeat increased, the head lit up - and the language began to mumble something incoherent.The dull imagination tried to create some images, the dead memory tried to break into the region of the past, but the images went out torn, meaningless, and the past e did not respond any single memory nor bitter, nor light, as if between him and the present moment of time dense wall stood forever.
Before him was only the present in the form of a tightly locked prison, in which both the idea of space and the idea of time sank without a trace. A room, a stove, three windows in the outer wall, a wooden squeaky bed and a thin trampled mattress on it, a table with a shuffle standing on it - did not think of any other horizons. "The last thematic issue of Snob magazine? No! 1875 Saltykov-Shchedrin. The best in the national literature description of a hangover.
Dmitry Bykov
"Soviet literature. Short course"
Dmitry Bykov's book "Soviet Literature. A Short Course" is more than three dozen essays about Soviet writers, from Maxim Gorky and Isaac Babel to Bella Akhmadulina and Boris Strugatsky. It is based on lesson materials for high school students and lectures for students. I even like the names of the chapters themselves: "Myself a man" - about Gorky, "The Battleship" Frivolous "" - about Lunacharsky, "I Can" - about Akhmatova, "Translation from the Unknown" about Green, "Wild Don" - about Sholokhov. Somewhere, Bykov and about the biography, and about the works in general, somewhere just gives a critical assessment, somewhere retells the text, and sometimes stops only on one work of the author - and everything adds up to an amazing stream of information, thoughts and feelings, life itself.
The main impetus during reading is to run and search (and put on the shelves in a different order) all the Soviet classics available at home. So Dmitry Bykov writes about the USSR: “In order for this country to emerge, it took a lot of devastation and fratricide first, and then a rapid totalitarian modernization. This modernization was accompanied by priority attention to the development of science and culture — equally unfree, but eventually learning to lead double life.Soviet culture was the product of this enthusiasm, fear, compromise, the search for Aesop's speech - despite the fact that it did not know the market oppression at all and depended only on the ideological conjuncture, and Nobody obliged to wake up before a mass reader. The resulting product deserves study, regardless of quality - no culture in the world has known such conditions for seventy years. "
Alexander Kuprin
Selected Works
Selected works of Kuprin were published many times and in various publishing houses. Most of all I like the beautiful yellow book of Fiction (1985) with the introductory article by the compiler Oleg Mikhailov (he is also the author of Kuprin in the ZHZL series), in which he recalls how in Yasnaya Polyana at Tolstoy's guest Repin ( "small, fast, reddish, with graying goatee").
In the evening, when relatives gathered in the fruit hall, Repin asked Lev Nikolayevich to read something out loud. "He did not think long:" Of course, Kuprin ... Two small stories - "Night Shift" and "Allez!" "Tolstoy read incomparably. Simply, without a hint of theatricality and even without expression. Not emphasizing anything, not selecting anything, he is like would thus give the writer the opportunity to tell himself ... Having finished reading “The Night Shift”, Tolstoy pointed out some places that he particularly liked, adding: “You won't meet anything like this.” Then Tolstoy began to read “Allez!” - touching a story about a little circus rider, but when l before the suicide scene, his voice trembled slightly alto. Tolstoy put aside the book in paperback, took out a gray fustian blouses fulyarovy and brought his handkerchief to his eyes. The story of "Allez!" and was not read. "
Donald Rayfield
"The Life of Anton Chekhov"
“Three years spent searching, deciphering, and interpreting documents convinced me that nothing in these archives can either discredit or discredit Chekhov,” wrote British literary critic Donald Rayfield about Chekhov. Any biography is partly fiction, which, however, must be linked to documentary evidence.
In the writer's biography, an attempt was made to expand the list of sources involved, so that his figure became even more ambiguous. But neither genius nor charm in Chekhov diminished. Rayfield describes how Chekhov constantly harassed the intransigence of the artist’s interests with obligations to family and friends. And this book is a study of talented and sensitive intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, one of the most intense and controversial periods in the cultural and political life of Russia.