Dramaturg Teatra.doc Zarema Zaudinova about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask heroines about their literary preferences and editions, which occupy an important place in the bookcase. Today, the director and playwright Teatra.doc, curator of the direction "Civil Theater" (aka the Department of Pain), the director of the performances "Odnushka in Izmailovo", "Companions", "When we came to power", "Your calendar / Torture, curator of the festival of documentary projects "The Hunt for Reality" Zarema Zaudinova.
INTERVIEW: Alice Taiga
PHOTO: Alexander Karnyukhin
MAKEUP: Anastasia Pryadkova
Zarema Zaudinova
director and playwright of the Theater.doc
I had an amazingly cool grandfather whom I adored. He read in syllables, wrote "karova" and in general was indifferent to literature, if he was not read to me
My elder sister taught me to read about five years old, because she really wanted to get rid of me: she was already nine, I had to be naughty with me, and from childhood I was able to create problems and trouble out of the blue. Books turned out to be salvation for everyone: sisters, parents, me. With books, I turned from violent misunderstanding into the quietest person in the world.
My "criminal" literary taste was formed not by a school or a teacher, but by two people. Mom, who always said: "You see, all the children are calm." And I thought: "Here is a pancake, what is wrong with me?" And I also had an amazingly cool grandfather whom I adored. He read in syllables, wrote "karova" and in general was indifferent to literature, if I did not read him. He collected broken toys - there was a special shelf on the fence, where there were dolls without a head, the body of bears and bunnies with torn limbs, and some arm or leg of a Barbie doll. He found them on the street and carefully collected the "outcasts" in his house, so they found their last love. So I loved forever broken and "crazy".
I lived in a small village in the Altai Territory, the Internet came to us when I was in the tenth grade - before that I had gutted the village library cheerfully and passionately. Sat tight on science fiction. Then she went over to the classics: she read books for the older sister from the program of the senior classes while she was hanging out with friends, and in the mornings she told the content to her - such a lively compilation in brief.
When I was twelve, I found a dusty collection of poems in the library, opened it on a random page, it was “Buried, buried deep, the poor mound grows with grass” - and I fell in love with Blok. Then the adored grandfather died, and I did not understand why this happened. The librarian shied away when a twelve-year-old girl asked her for books about death, and told me that it was for adults. I almost stopped talking to everyone — I just sat in books; then she rumbled to the village hospital, where doctors could not understand that with me, vitamins were dripping and were fed glycine. The books were selected so that I did not even try to read and "did not strain my brain."
I thought that I could never read again, and did not understand why to live. My sister then called me "crazy", I fought with her because of this, but I fell in love with the "abnormal" even more - my people. After many years, I forgot how to read, watching the letters crumble in my head - and the horror of it became the last line, after which I went to a psychiatrist, received a diagnosis of "bipolar disorder" and realized how such a book love for those who are considered " crazy. " And how the world collapses, crumbling like letters in a head.
Blok has always remained one of my favorite poets. From that first poem in the dusty library, I made a habit of scrupulously finding everything related to my literary love — biographies, diaries, and memories — and stuffing it through my internal shelves. Then I spread to Byron, and for me all my life remained an inexplicable riddle, why did Blok suddenly become just "poems about a beautiful lady" (written by an eighteen tender boy), and Byron - an icon of sad demons. And one and the other had a great sense of humor.
I am always not sure that the world exists in principle, therefore I am constantly seeking confirmation of this - in books and around - I grab pieces of evidence and shove it in my pockets. All books are on my internal shelves "panic", "loneliness", "madness" and "death"; there is a separate one - "a graveyard of shitty texts," written so badly that they will never be forgotten. In essence, all this is about consciousness and those points where it collapses and falls: where? Why? What happens in this second and all the others, not ending and at the same time ending forever?
I am always not sure that the world exists in principle, therefore I am constantly seeking confirmation of this - in books and around
William Faulkner
"Noise and Fury"
“Noise and rage,” I, of course, have “insanity” on the shelf, and the adorable Faulkner himself - “despair” on the shelf. This is a six-volume book that I love dearly. Once the first part of "Noise and Rage", written on behalf of Benji - men with specialties - turned all my ideas about not only literature, but also about time. Since then, I adore the discreteness and fragmentaryness of the text - for me, it becomes more reliable than that: it is more like a person’s consciousness and how it generally works. So I type the text, but I am haunted by the phrase that one dog was very hard and bad to live with a person with a mental disorder. And now I feel very sorry for the dog, and then myself, which is also in the “unstable” camp, then I scold myself for self-pity and remember that I am talking about Falkner. And all this - a few seconds of rebellion on the ship of electrons in the brain. Wonderful world, a brilliant writer.
Maurice Blancheau
"Waiting for Oblivion"
Another is my god of text that exists according to the laws of human consciousness (that is, without them). When out of shreds, scraps and even gaps, something is born and dies along with the text. "The words that brings speech, which brings the voice, which we keep waiting. In each word - not words, but the space that, appearing, disappearing, they designate as a changeable space of their appearance and disappearance. In each word - the answer to the ineffable, failure and the appeal of the ineffable. "
Yuri Olesha
"Farewell Book"
It is terribly annoying when the Book of Farewell is published under the title “Not a day without a line”. He was invented by Viktor Shklovsky, who was married to the beloved woman Olesha and, it seems to me, he so posthumously revenged him: he simply made the well-known Latin phrase of a diary note of one of the best stylists.
The man who wrote Envy at the age of twenty-seven years and soon became silent almost forever did not manage to become a Soviet person and, all the more, a Soviet writer. The “Farewell Book” is the scattered memories and thoughts of Olesha that he tried to write every day, just to write. So from his dying, restlessness and despair, generously poured by alcohol, he made great literature.
Roland Topor, Fernando Arrabal
"100 good reasons to immediately commit suicide"
This book, as, in general, and everything that Ax and Arrabal wrote, is a pocket guide on how to work and live with panic. And yes, it is terribly funny. And it is necessary.
Pavel Zaltsman
"Puppies"
It can be said that this is a novel about the Civil War, which two puppies are considering and in which they try to survive - but any description of the plot of "Puppies" will be defective in advance. Some kind of inhumanly powerful text. Because of the language in which the novel was written, you can die of delight, but it is better not to - and then read "Shattered shattered pieces": his diaries, a collection of poems "Doomsday Signals" and everything else.
“Puppies” is an unfinished (and this makes it only more surprising) a novel, where people and animals (often not very clear who is who) live in incessant panic and - moreover - live it. For me, this is a story about how a representative of the dead-end branch of evolution - a man - can make any circle of hell cozy and how this hell comes out of him, but — importantly — along with aching tenderness for the world he has entered. And which, most likely, will destroy - but will have time to hang the curtains.
Boris Savinkov
Favorites
With this book, I deserve the title of "party-goer of the year." Once we decided to spend Friday defiantly fun and left for "32.05". The fun turned out a bit different for everyone: I read Savinkov and was happy, but this is still a reason for joking about me as the queen of parties. Savinkov I love with the devoted love of a teenager, because I do not understand. I look intently at all the Social Revolutionaries from the militant organization and try to understand what made these often well-educated and talented boys and girls start killing people.
Savinkov's favorite is the "Pale Horse." There is preparing an attempt on the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, who is killed by Ivan Kalyaev. This boy, who wrote bad poems and blew up people, does not give me rest; he and the underground name was - Poet. And the more I read about them, the less I understand. And it is interesting, as it is known, that which is not clear.
Well, Savinkov and I also have a birthday on one day - not that it solves it, it's just nice.
Sergey Stepnyak
"Underground Russia"
Love and awe of a man who loves paper: the book is more than a hundred years old, it is still with yatyami and, as it is written on the flyleaf, with “ed portraits” of narodnik terrorists. Young Vera Zasulich, Sofia Perovskaya and others. These are Stepniak's articles about populists, moreover of that time, and not memories many years later, such a document of the epoch. This book was presented to me by Lena Kostyuchenko, it has the signature of an unknown previous owner - L. Gvarashvili. I wonder who it is, but Google does not give an answer.
Ivan Papanin
"Life on the ice"
In addition to two books by Papanin (1938 and 1972 editions), I have many other publications about this incredible expedition on the ice and about polar explorers in general. This is also from a series of things that I don’t understand: what could make people drop everything and nine months (!) To swim on a three-by-five-kilometer ice block - at the very beginning, it diminished. "Life on the ice" wrote Papanin (or someone for him), who during the Civil War was the commandant of the Crimean Cheka: he "carried out the sentences" - executions. The scientific expedition was headed by an exemplary security officer. The coolest thing is to compare publications and find that the Soviet censorship was washing out of the memoirs of the security officer.
In the four of the Papanins, all the participants are amazing, but I love one more than the rest - Peter Shirshov. This is a hydrobiologist. During the Second World War, he met with actress Ekaterina Garkusha, fell in love and stayed with her when his legal wife returned from evacuation. Then Garkusha was noticed by Beria, who wanted to sleep with her; she answered slap in the face and left for eight years in the camps on charges of treason. No title of her husband could not save her, Beria refused. My daughter was one and a half years old when she was taken away from home with the phrase “they are called into the theater” and never returned. But in the diary of Papanin, Shirshov knows nothing about this. He lives as if neither war, nor great love, nor the betrayal of the so-called homeland, for which he lived for nine months on an ice floe in the middle of the ocean, will not happen, and there is only a new beautiful world ahead and everything will be fine. Will not be.
IVAN PAPANIN
"" Dirigible "on Dolgoprudnaya: 1934, one year out of life"
Airships are also on the list of love romance unfinished. The book is like a calendar of plant life, collected from some absolutely beautiful pieces of reality: a factory newspaper, letters, reports, notes or audit reports. There and the lack of cheese in the dining room, and the workers who do not correspond to the image of the Soviet man, and the first launches of airships. In the wall newspaper, for example, you can find this: "Shame! In the dormitory of the old construction company for eight months never wash the floor in the corridor. The dirt is incredible."
Mikhail Ugarov
"Bummer off"
"If you ask what this book is about, I will answer.
Nothing. Like all the great books in the world.
This book is about how I read it. Like lying on the couch. How to light the lights when it was getting dark in the room. How to smoke lying, and how the ash fell anywhere. How the birds screamed outside the window, and how the doors in the far rooms slammed. Especially what bookmark is best - a Chinese slash with a brush, or a color old flyer, or a visiting card of one deputy I don’t need? But most often this is an old ticket for twenty trips ...
This is a very good and detailed book about how I read it.
And if it had completely white blank pages, it would be about how I slowly turned white blank pages. "
Mikhail Ugarov
"Masquerade Masquerade"
I am a man of the text, but I never believed that books - or one play - can change life. But with Ugarov, I did just that. I gave up an established and comfortable life in Siberia and flew to Razbezhkina and Ugarov’s school in Moscow, because at some point I read his play “Breaking Off” and realized that I would either go to study with this person, or everything doesn’t make sense . And I was not just “lucky”, but reality did an incredible thing and issued a “lucky” card - I managed to work with Ugarov. Although it is difficult to call it work: it is an amazing state, which, if it happens, is once in a lifetime - when your teacher, idol and part-time boss are also your friend. That is, you can memorize monologues from his plays, admire his texts and performances, but this does not in the least interfere with the existence of such dialogues of two hours in the night: "Oh my God, MJ [Mikhail Yuryevich], I fucked at Platonov's grave." - "And how Platonov?" - "Not resurrected."
For three years next to the MJ, I have gone from when you read the text of your favorite writer, not knowing him personally, and admire; then you become friends, and you read the text, recognizing every intonation, you can literally hear how he would say it, argue with him somewhere; and then he dies, and you are left alone with his texts. You will have memories, photos, videos, correspondence with him, but all the same, the closest will he be in the texts. And it is with them that you will talk silly and foolishly to joke. In fact, you can fool with little and foolishly joke - this is some kind of completely different category of intimacy between people. When such a person dies, you still have his texts with which you continue to imitate the dialogue from silly jokes, and it seems to you that there is no death. But she is, and she - with ** a. And the texts are a brilliant attempt to argue with her weakly.
I suffer a lot, that today we have dramaturgy - this is such an application to the theater, and not independent literature, because for me the playwrights Ugarov or Kurochkin are among the best modern writers. Therefore, soon in the publishing house common place will begin to leave a series of modern drama "Department of Pain." And the first in this joint project of Theater.doc and common place will be a collection of all the documentary plays of Doc for seventeen years (with the stories of their creation) - this is the story of modern Russia in non-fiction dramaturgy. And yes, all the other favorite books, about which I have not told, I will soon publish myself.