Musician and journalist Serafima St. Petersburg 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 musician, journalist, vocalist and bassist of the punk band "Kruzhok", the editor-in-chief of the STRIDE Mag magazine and co-founder of the magazine "12 Extreme Points" Serafima Piterskaya is sharing her stories about favorite books.
Until I was eight, I did not like to read. It was a disaster for mom: because of her difficult childhood and acting, she was in love with the intellect and really wanted to grow a well-read person out of me. Once, when I was seven years old, my mother managed to impose on me a couple of pages of a book about Sinbad the Sailor. Before that, I perceived Sinbad by ear — and I was able to overcome the page on my own only when my mother left me alone in the room with a book. I was very obedient but proud child. The book offended me because it was obligatory to read, but in the end I submitted to it.
Three months later I returned to Khabarovsk - there we lived with our grandmother. While my parents tried to catch on in Moscow, were looking for work in the theater, I went to school - and in all that time I did not read anything longer than Rodnichka poems. After graduating from the first class with the fives, I finally moved to Moscow, having barely parted with a huge pile of comics about the Bamsey bear cub.
On a trip to Ruza, where theatrical figures and their children rested — the current bohemian of Moscow — my mother made me choose: after dinner, or to sleep, or read. The first thing I hated with all my heart since kindergarten, so after a while - after resistance, antagonism, boredom, and resentment of literature in general - the dirty blue edition of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales was the first book I loved to read. The stories filled me with horror, pain, joy, compassion, and anticipation of love. It was impossible to stop, and I went for overclocking.
Because of reading, under the ray of light from the corridor, the vision began to fall rapidly at night. I was a very emotional child, who was bursting with my own desires and other people's expectations: I danced, sang, painted, wrote poems and caustic prose. I wanted to become an actress, like parents, a journalist, like Ilf and Petrov, an artist like Vrubel and Dali, Margarita, the lion Aslan, Sailormoon, Jose Aureliano Buendia, Zemfira, the goddess Bastet and Britney Spears. And mom and dad threw up another volume in this fire, after reading which a person can no longer be the same. I joked like an adult, fell in love with all the handsome men in a row, did not know how to enter into a dialogue with one of them and by the age of thirteen I read the extracurricular program of the eleventh grade. Only physical education and turntables could argue with literature on importance.
In the graduating class as cut off. The noise in my head (familiar, as it turns out now from enlightening articles about puberty, to many teenagers), stupefied and caused a feeling of guilt because I could not wish anything constructive. Enrolling in the RSUH on Istfil, I met the guys, whose erudition finally dissuaded me from my own. It was simply impossible to boast of reading the books, the inner emptiness and noise did not fill anything but emotions and feelings of guilt. The books came back to the forefront only when I went to the academy and started earning articles on my own.
The next wave of love for reading covered me at twenty-two, with the beginning of my "high life" - I was a budding journalist. I stuck at work until late, was killed because of falling in love, went to sports, got drunk to unconsciousness, played out people who depended on me, hated and at the same time painfully loved myself. Reality pretty seriously lost to the fictional world in terms of high-quality solid images, and the meeting with the right person gave me a world of very cool books. Most of this list refers to this period of life.
The reality began to change later - when Misha (my husband, and at that time, my lover) began to live together and invented our own magazine about absurdist literature. The whole grotesque, absurd, tremor of my former life fit into three cleverly visually resolved numbers of "12 Extremes", consisting of the works of our contemporaries. Immediately after, the agonizing relationship with literature passed into the manic phase; I survived the depression, and she swallowed up all the other worlds from the books. When we woke up, Misha and I finished drinking, threw away all the books with no printing value and, leaving all the snobbish ideas about the complexity of being, began to sing and play in our own punk band. Today I read infrequently, in my mood - it is too interesting to live my own life. Of course, I am not an intellectual, but my mother is proud of me. That's enough for me.
Kurt Vonnegut
"Slaughterhouse number five, or the Crusade of children"
In this list, “Slaughterhouse Five” turned out to be for the sole reason: it was from here that I learned about the Tralfamadors (although they are described in other works by Vonnegut) - it is impossible not to get carried away with them when you are a teenager. Creatures from the planet Tralfamador lived at once in all times and therefore never felt sad if, for example, someone from their loved ones died, because they could always go back in time and relive it.
I usually associate myself with the main character of the work, but in this book, the ability of the Tralfamadorers made me feel related to the secondary characters, with functions, with aliens. This is due to the fact that before the depression I had a strong memory: I could reproduce all the details of the conversation, the events of life - to the details, to the time and day of the week. I really could really appreciate this ability (which, for most of my life, only made me sad that I recognized the happy moment after the fact) I could only today, after I almost lost it.
Ilya Masodov
"The darkness of your eyes"
The first book I read from the phone screen is probably the most correct one in order to start reading it in digital form and understand that literature is sometimes more important than a medium. The imaginative series of Masodov did not climb into any gates: the terrible world of childish horror, described in the language of a literary maniac, choked me, dragged me along, made me suffer, want to get drunk - melted snow, blood from the baby’s neck. Dead Grandfather Frost, Death-Snow Maiden, welcome Vladimir Ilyich in a sunny field, tanned shoulders and knees. The triumph of horror and eroticism, very cool.
Mikhail Elizarov
"Librarian"
Since this book, like most of the others on this list, was advised to me by a person with a clear taste who appealed to me, I began to read it, not having a clue who Elizarov was, what significance it had for the Russian intelligentsia, and so on. These were years of fascination with the pure concept, and the "Librarian" with his straightforwardness knocked me down, enthralled.
The idea that there are seven books in the world (in the post-Soviet space) and each one gives an incredible power to someone who reads it seems to me as crazy as it is accurate. Of course, everything in life is much more complicated, but sometimes, when you meet the living embodiment of those who seem to have read the Book of Rage, the Book of Patience, the Book of Power, the Book of Joy, it is shocked. I would like to read them all.
Tom McCarthy
"When I was real"
For many years the feeling of unreality of what was happening did not leave me; This was partly due to depersonalization, partly due to the fact that I could not find myself in the profession. The fact that I am not a philologist, it became clear right away that I was not a theater specialist - after a while, that I was not a journalist - a little later. All this time, reflection reminded me of what happened to the hero of the book by Tom McCarthy "When I Was Present."
He had an accident, he completely lost his memory, and with money from compensation for damage, he is engaged in reconstructing events that he allegedly recalls. Thus, he lives them, as if trying to become "real" again - and so until he gets bored and wants to go to a new reconstruction. Very familiar to me.
Luigi Serafini
"Codex Seraphinianus"
A friend gave it to me with the words: "Sim, you must have this book." It was a meeting, one might say, there is nothing more like me than she. This is the encyclopedia of the non-existent world. The creatures that inhabit it are very similar to humans, but strangely, they are pretty ugly.
All local inventions are delusional and completely meaningless: what is a table with a slope, so that crumbs do not accumulate on it (which does not prevent crumbs from accumulating on small horizontal supports for dishes)? What about a very beautiful crystal city in which it would be fun to live if all the houses did not consist of glass sarcophagi with corpses? You can spend the whole evening trying to figure out how the local language sounds. And the book itself is very beautiful, on cool paper. Perhaps, then I thought about the fact that some books should be kept in paper form.
Pavel Pepperstein
"Swastika and Pentagon"
Peppershtein's stories and stories are wonderful, although they cannot be compared in breadth, scope, wealth of the world with his own “Mythogenic love of castes”. In the list, this book was due to the story "Swastika", or rather, because of the character. This is a detective story in which, despising all Sherlock and Poirot, the killer is a nasty poisonous something formed in the pool of the swastika form and itself taking the form of a swastika.
Psychedelics, which are not attributed to the author in vain, are not so numerous in this story, but the sensations of deceived expectations, the dummy, which often and erroneously arise from reading absurdist texts, are filled up. This, as it is not difficult to guess, along with the works of Kharms and Vvedensky, became one of the invisible foundations of the selection of literature for "12K" (our magazine is shortly called). And then, I have a special relationship with this symbol - a swastika: I am very attached to him and very disappointed in a person when I hear from him that this is only a fascist sign.
Jim Dodge
"Trickster, Hermes, Joker"
This is a very interesting mix of Beatnik aesthetics and "magic" literature, despised by many philologists of magical realism. I love this from Marquez, from Heiman, from Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, and even from Vodolazkin - and at the same time in absentia from many other authors whose books I have not read. In The Trickster, besides the story itself and the cool, wonderfully written characters that fans of Guy Ritchie films will attract, I like the concept that knowledge is incomprehensible, and the one who will acquire it will immediately dissolve into nothingness. And simple and elegant. I will not spoil more, it should be read.
Mariam Petrosyan
"The house in which ..."
The three books that make up this work were the only paper literature that went with me to Quebec: I spent six months studying there, desperately trying to become a bilingual. When I was going there and quit, the boss said to me: "Sima, you will not be able to live in prosperous Canada, you need to strain for life." He was wrong. Quebec, Montreal were really quite measured and even boring provincial cities, but it only went to my advantage. For six months of studying there, I stopped being nervous because of each call and message, as it happens in Moscow, I began to run (I use this position of the editor-in-chief, often telling readers of our running magazine) and draw a lot.
It was a very cool time, and "The House in which ..." was next, somehow fitting between my curriculum, strength and cardio, drawing and romance. Finally, I first learned how my friend sees himself, who advised me all this literature - the hero of the book, Elk, one of the most respected educators in the magic orphanage. I myself in that frosty winter, being a student, occupying the farthest room on the floor, blown by all the winds, felt like a child, slightly rumpled and interesting in my own way.
Stephen King
"Rebirth"
The only work of King that I read, and one of the few books that completely overcame after depression. I was advised to do this by my husband, I succumbed and did not regret. The clarity with which the images drawn by my imagination stand in front of me says that I have not forgotten how to perceive literature vividly; besides, as in childhood, the thought that I would end, and then - either nothing or hell, with the King's submission again does not give me rest. With this thought, as with the idea that we do not belong to each other, I still can not accept it, it torments me, forcing me to hug and thank my close ones. It is terrible that suddenly I blink, but they are not.
Mark Danilevsky
"House of leaves"
I once considered myself a film critic, thanks to which I learned to go to the movies alone. Today, this does not happen to me, but before it was pretty often. Sometimes I made myself extreme tests - for example, I went to thrillers alone, although I usually scream and squat in the air with my legs and hands in horror. It disciplined me - it is clear that the movie will end, and you will go out on the street safe and sound. With books not so. You closed the book, went to another room, and what you read goes with you like a black cloud.
In general, such sensations from the "House of Leaves", which we began to read with Misha together - partly because it is interesting, partly because it would be scary for me alone with this thriller. Everything that Danilevsky describes is too recognizable: the implicitness of twilight; suspicious stains in the dark room (they may be a recess in space that was not there before); rustles and crackles in the next room (you try not to think about them in the night); potential infinity of your own home. Distracts from tinkering in the depths of this horror and returns to reality only the layout (this book should also be kept in paper form): pages written backwards and in a chaotic manner, listings, lists, use of different fonts and pins for transferring discord and the like. Interesting thing, anyway.