Philologist Dasha Borisenko 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, journalist, philologist and translator Dasha Borisenko shares her stories about favorite books.

Magnetic board, cubes with letters and cards with syllables - these are the tools that I was taught to read. I remember them much better than the process itself. Surely my grandmother taught me to read (and count, and swim) —the parents were very young and busy. I was closed and moved a little, so the books became my life. And any: anthologies, history textbooks, encyclopedias, yoga instructions, women's novels and detective stories from my grandmother's regiment - I swallowed them, as if I wanted to read all the words in the world. The adults didn’t want this at all, and everyone tried to drive me out, but I could not stop. Sometimes I even read English-Russian dictionaries.

In the third grade for my birthday, along with a Spice Girls cassette and an album of Barbie stickers (this was necessary for socialization at school) I was presented with a ten-volume adventure novels. Since then, I have been reading for a couple of years the stories of the Aztecs, the ancient Egyptians and the medieval witches - I read all the books of Henry Rider Haggard in my home library. Sometimes she experimented with writers like Hugo, and at the age of twelve she finally switched to adult books. For some reason, she began with Freud's “Interpretation of Dreams”. As a child I read a lot on the advice of my father: he loves literature with "deep philosophical thoughts", so I let through tons of Hermann Hesse and Richard Bach. But he, for example, advised me of "Gone With the Wind", and I still consider them one of the greatest great novels that they shoved "lady's literature" on the shelf for nothing. Like Jane Eyre, a poignant book about the impossibility of happiness.

I had a wonderful teacher of literature, honest and open, who did not follow any post-Soviet canons of teaching. For several years I traveled around the literary Olympiads and still keep a pack of diplomas about the first places in the field. It was very useful indeed: I forced myself to read slowly and "solve" the text, like a system of equations. In Taganrog, where I lived, it was difficult to get new books. Therefore, I missed the Orange series and other teenage literature. Palanika and Copeland replaced Sartre and Rambo for me. I even started dating one guy only because he had a little Camus. Somehow unfamiliar girl gave me "The Name of the Rose" Eco strictly for a day and a half - I didn’t sleep two nights in a row to be in time. But for Haruki Murakami I had to go to Rostov-on-Don.

At 16, I moved to Moscow to study history and philology at the Russian State Humanitarian University. After that, the world was never the same. For five years, I read everything I could stuff into myself after living in an information vacuum. After university, I constantly suffer from the fact that I want to read ten times more than it turns out. I can read a book of eight hundred pages per day, but I have to look for this day for a very long time. Moscow is constantly distracting, and sometimes I leave here especially for reading. For example, last summer I spent the day on the embankment of Yaroslavl with the correspondence of Ingeborg Bachman and Paul Celan, two of my favorite poets.

I appreciate a good non-fiction, but fiction is an immeasurably more valuable experience. Many refuse it, and they can be understood: the knowledge that gives non-fiction is much easier to convert into social ties and careers. Especially nauchpop, which is deposited in the head with a set of interesting facts and anecdotes - they will be very appropriate when you want to meet at the bar. An artistic text is always an experience of loneliness: a book is not even a film that can be watched in an embrace with someone. This is an experience of silence (unless you begin to read out loud to someone). A good text is more often the experience of suffering. In the city, there is little practice available for confronting the abyss: running, swimming, yoga, meditation and, of course, reading. Only from the abyss of reading does the far Other look at you, with whom you are conducting a silent dialogue.

I try not to buy books. There are already too many of them to travel in rented apartments. Since at the turn of the zero dad gave me a CD "Library in my pocket", I do not care what media to read. I do not have a printed version of most of my favorite texts. Books are my Madeleine cookies. I appreciate them for how they came to me and with whom they are connected, for the font, texture and smell, for the memory. But the words do not care how they are stored. Of course, when I become an adult and build a big house from words, there will be a place for a home library. But for now, its main hall is inside the skull.

Craig Thompson

"Habibi"

In recent years, I read quite a lot of comics. It has long dreamed of settling in this world and once met the one who brought me up to speed. It is always convenient to rely on powerful graphic novels - they help not to get lost among countless superhero series and small independent stories. "Habibi" no one was taken to translate into Russian, and I did not hear about it until I came across a German translation in the Leipzig comic shop. But buying a transfer for forty euros was stupid, and my friend, local resident Anya, helped me to order the original from Amazon with express delivery. I read it then in one fell swoop in a train from Leipzig to Vienna. This is not the last advantage of comics: when you get used to their device, large and informative novels are ingested like a dragee. Then you can endlessly return to their consideration.

"Habibi" is a prohibitively beautiful and complexly-cut book about Arab culture. This is a sad story of two orphans who met children, fell in love with each other as teenagers, but could only be together many years later. Everything is played out in reality, where medieval cities coexist with industrial dumps, biblical stories intertwine with the Quran, and the image is poured into Arabic script and back. I wrote an article about the Habibi, and one angry commentator resented how superficially this Sunday school-educated American understood the Arab East. I don’t know how much closer the commentator is to his understanding, but for me "Habibi" became an important stage in the way of studying Arabic, and my acquaintances of Arabs he delights. Because even the most complex culture is built on simple characters: 28 letters, up to four types of styles for each.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

"Parzival"

I have not devoted to any other text so many days and nights of my life - starting with the coursework in the first year and up to the diploma. From childhood I was in love with each of the knights of King Arthur, but the story of Parzifal always seemed special to me. The version of Wolfram von Eschenbach turns it from a knightly adventure into the first parenting novel in the world. Parzival - a fool who becomes a knight by an absurd coincidence. Wanderings lead him into the realm of the Holy Grail, the kingdom of the fisherman with a non-healing wound. The next morning, the magic castle of the Grail disappears, and the young man will have to seriously suffer, before he finds his way back and realizes that he did wrong the first time. And all this is written with good-natured humor, excursions into magic and astrology and is sprinkled with colorful minor characters (at the end of this edition there is an insert with the genealogy of characters, from which it follows that they are also all relatives). I do not regret for a second that for many months I was wiping through the Middle High German grammar — I did not become a medievalist, but the fact that I understand the Partifal device makes me a very happy person.

Pernilla Stalfelt

"Dödenboken"

The best in Swedish culture is a gentle attitude towards death and an advanced approach to raising children (Bergman and meatballs, but not in the book). I found the book on death in a store at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and read it on the stool there, while I was waiting for my friend. This is part of a series telling children about the most important things: love, food, hair and poop. In "Dödenboken" death is shown versatile, funny and truthful. They do not hide from the children that stillbirths occur in the world, that death bears a terrible grief and, most importantly, that we have no idea about the afterlife. It is presented here in all versions: there is a god with a beard and without, vampires and ghosts, reincarnation and absolute nothing. Personally, I now like to repeat in the darkest hour of the night: "Kanske blir man en älg ..." ("And someone may become an elk"). Nordic Buddhism.

Grigory Belykh, Leonid Panteleev

"Republic SHKID"

SHKID overtook me as an adult. I then worked as a tutor. One of my Padawans was home schooled, and I came to him every day with English textbooks, Russian dictations and books for discussion. He began to read the "Republic" himself, and I, ashamed of my ignorance, were catching up with him. Then we spent a few more months playing in the Shkidian canteen for morning tea, and each time, cutting off my bread, he asked: "Well, Daria Andreevna, the fourth or seven o'clock?" A terribly uncultured joke about the world of street children in the hungry 20s, but we had fun.

I love all the books where there is a boarding school for boys. I adore the "Mental Disorders of a Pupil of Turles" of Musil and the Masked Confession of Mishima. But “Republic ShKID” is more than a story of teen hearts. This is evidence of an incredible pedagogical experiment, thanks to which a handful of juvenile hooligans from the street turned into the best people of the era. Even now, when I started teaching, Director Vikniksor remains my role model. Humanism, respect for others and discipline are professional principles that should be learned not only by the teacher.

Gottfried Benn

"Before the end of the world"

For the New Year, Benn's bilingual poetry gave me my dearest friend, and for me this is a great value. In fact, I love Benn's entire poetry — he quickly became terribly mannered. But his early poems, the cycle "Morgue" and others inspired by the work of the pathologist and surgeon are the most terrible and accurate pages of world poetry. My dream is that my own poems once reach such expressive power. Hopefully, this will not have to go down into the anatomical.

Marquis de Sade

"Philosophy in the boudoir"

I treat Marquis de Sade with great warmth, but this edition is more a joy of a bibliophile than a serious reading. My friends worked in the round-the-clock book "Project OGI", and I sat with them all night long. I found a book of 1992 in the local rubble, its superpower is marked like this: "Translation from French and story about the life and work of the Marquis de Sade of Ivan Karabutenko." It’s just a monument to the rampant publicity of the turn of the 1990s, when it was so anxious to find an adequate language of pornography that the harshest methods were used. "I'll scorch you during this sweet incest" or "dearest chevalier who quietly jerks herself off" - you can open it on any page and, restraining a hysterical tantrum, read roles. In actual fact Ivan Ivanovich Karabutenko turned out to be a serious scientist and translator of half of the French classics. Twenty-five years later, we never learned to talk about sex in Russian.

Alexey Tolstoy

"Hyperboloid of engineer Garin"

I don’t even remember how this book turned up in my library, but I got to it only last summer: I took it with me to spend a lonely weekend in Sergiev Posad. I have never developed a relationship with science fiction - except that the child has experienced a hobby of Roger Zelazny, but this is mostly fantasy (which I also dislike). But here the writer's gift of Tolstoy and the nutritional atmosphere of the 20s are stronger than the genre framework. "Hyperboloid" can hardly be called dramatic - lyrical digressions, psychological portraits, confused plot. Here, science fiction seems to be in the process of budding from "big" literature: it no longer knows what to do with all these useless details that make the text realistic, but not yet ready to get rid of them. Therefore, the main femme fatale, Zoya Monroz, appears before the reader "in a white cloth suit, sheathed on the sleeves, from wrist to elbow, with long black monkey fur." Well, what could be more beautiful than the ray of death, capable of "cutting through any dreadnought." Text you want to eat.

Y. Orlik, E. Krizhan

"How to behave"

This greetings from Bratislava in 1968 left a friend for me before leaving to live in London. The etiquette textbook for respectable socialists is balancing between proletarian straightness and the classical rules of conduct. From the book you can learn that "a burning cigarette can be put in the ashtray for a while, but not on the furniture or window", "registration of the child at the registry office takes place in a solemn atmosphere," and "meals and drinks are served so that it will be useful for digestion. "

Aleister Crowley

"Book of Thoth"

I love all witchcraft. At fifteen, I bought a Tarot Tot deck for my first serious salary of four hundred rubles, and my sister's boyfriend found a guide. I took him to drive and, as it is easy to guess, never returned. Crowley is a cool but rare lover of muddy water, so it’s almost impossible to clearly understand his own maps with the help of this book. I do tell friends sometimes, if they ask, but more often I follow my knowledge and intuition, and keep the book at hand for inspiration.

Adalbert shifter

Werke in sechs Bänden. 1. Band

I bought the first volume of Shtiterk's antique six-volume book on a flea market for fifty cents when I was studying in Vienna. This is not the most obvious to the Russian reader. The author: the Austrian classic was translated several times, but the circulations were not even sold. Maybe the problem is a lack of PR, but rather in the incompatibility of Stifter with the culture of Dostoevsky. Once I wrote an article about Stifter, and it was called "Nothing Happens." So I still do not know how else to describe his work. Huge, heavenly landscapes of several pages, a minimum of events. Until recently, his texts look like an idyll, and at the end turn into a quiet tragedy - the pastoral world fades and collapses. So did Shifter, he lived for himself, and then quietly killed himself. If I had been forced to go back to the past and choose a specialty at the university again, I would have stopped for the second time in Austrian literature - if only for his sake. This book is often flipped through like a relic - in the house there are a lot of other Stifter editions, and I hate reading the Gothic font.