Poet Maria Stepanova 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 poet, essayist and editor-in-chief of the online publication Colta.ru Maria Stepanova shares her stories about favorite books.
One day, a child close to me brought himself and relatives to tears in the shop "Moscow", repeating: "I want, I want a book - but not this, but even another!" It seems that something like this happens with reading in recent years, at least where fiction is concerned. The fact that they are so fond of various awards is a big European sample, a thick novel, eight hundred pages in binding, family life in several generations, in general, something made like the pattern of Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland, Galsworthy, further everywhere.
Back in the days when all these "Forsythe sagas" were fresh, fresh from print, a novelty, Osip Mandelstam wrote an article "The End of the Novel", where he says that this horse is over - the novel as a genre no longer works. The time has come when individual destiny gives way to mass - time of big movements, large numbers of people, wholesale deaths. And in such a macro mode, a separate human fate ceases to interest. What happened to Tolstoy Ivan Ilyich ceases to be unique, loses its size or weight. Our death and our life become an error — something that is lost in rounding when counting.
Fudge stops working. The document turns out to be more interesting than any fictional story, not to mention the fact that it seems to be slightly humiliating to buy something that seems like a layout, for compassion for a fictional cat with its blue ribbon. But nevertheless, interest in someone else's fate is what is implanted in our flesh: the instinct of compassion and empathy will die perhaps with humanity. We want it to be interesting - it is not very clear how to attach this interest to the life of an unconvincing character, that every decade becomes more and more cardboard. What competes with it is a living reality, where there are even too many objects for sympathy, unexplored zones, unbelievable stories - just choose. Now more than ever before the reader is the question of choice: where to invest your attention, trust, empathy. Sympathy makes invisible things visible: we direct it to an object like a ray of a flashlight, and it comes out of the dark. And the choice of reading in this case is similar to the crowdfunding system - you give the book a chance to exist; so a person chooses who to transfer the free three hundred rubles to a sick, independent media, cinema startup.
And the entertainment industry is developing nearby, which does not try to deceive us and say that a certain amount of rational, kind, eternal is necessarily present in its gift set, and at the same time it reaches incredible perfection, some kind of reconciliation in jewelry. "Game of Thrones" or the new Twin Peaks does not teach anyone anything, it does not try to change the world for the better. This is a self-replicating machine, whose only task is to preserve the effect of surprise. The assertion that the series has become a new novel has itself become a common place - but instead of the Booker novel we happily dive into the Fargo last season, and this even becomes a matter of pride: we boast to our friends that we didn’t sleep until four in the morning and watched the new ones a series of something exciting. Behind this is the logic of potlich: it is a celebration of lost time, we recklessly and unwisely spend time on things that in the classical value hierarchy mean nothing or almost nothing.
Hierarchies also change. It is somehow embarrassing to say that you read it and spent the whole night on a new novel: this is such a grandmother's behavior, this is how the year behaved in 1960. Read to get wiser, know more and be better; reading has ceased to be erotic, a zone of freedom and pleasure. Respect for reading is preserved, but pleasure is sought somewhere else: read for some reason, with clear work goals. I, as a man of the old formation, read voraciously, in hundreds of pages, this is how my daily diet works. But my thirty-year-old friends have a pleasure zone in some other place - not exactly where they buy and discuss books. And when everyone is going to drink and talk, then start with the "Game of Thrones". Reading ceased to be a territory of community, as well as a territory of identity.
But books, which are completely unrelated to the logic of entertainment and zones of interest, become important. When the old mechanisms (suspense, empathy, the desire to live someone else's life) are used by other types of art, interesting in literature suddenly turns out to be uninteresting. Suddenly, it becomes important that not smeared with a thick layer of external attractiveness. And here is the place for books from my bookshelf.
W.G. Sebald
"Austerlitz"
I specifically call here not the "Saturn's Rings", which already exist in Russian too, but "Austerlitz" - a book that most resembles the conventional novel of this writer, who is not like anything at all. For me, what he did with prose is such a quiet, little-noticed revolution with completely deafening consequences. Democratic revolution: Zebald somehow manages to do the impossible: abolish in the literature the hierarchy of the important and unimportant, enticing and boring. In his story reigns absolute equality of everything with everything. There is an amazing old-fashioned syntax that gives the reader a feeling of absolute reliability - they do not play, do not manipulate, do not provoke you, do not make you laugh and cry out of the blue - all the tricks and tricks that we expect from prose are missing here. And at the same time it is impossible to break away from the text.
In "Austerlitz" everything seems to be like that of people, there is a hero there, a plot, a necessary secret, to the disclosure of which the narration is beating slowly and gradually. At the same time, what is most visible there is a sudden interruption of the rhythm, where the author blurs, as it were, and begins the enumeration of butterflies with their Latin names or a detailed description of the architectural structure. In the old days such a move was called a lyrical digression: that is, here we have the main story, who married whom, who killed whom, and here is a special recreational zone, where we pause and express our views on the structure of the world. But "Austerlitz" is a space where the important and unimportant, the main and the minor simply do not exist: any small detail or consideration has equal rights with its neighbors. It is necessary to get used to it - to agree to exist in this space, where the “interesting” is deliberately driven out: everything has the right to the reader's attention, and the more inexpressive the subject, the more chances it has for Sebald to notice and caress it. All his books are arranged this way, but "Austerlitz" is the last, special one, something like a farewell to the outgoing world and attempts to remember everything in the end.
Correspondence of Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak
Another confirmation that the document can replace almost everything that fiction can offer with its tricks. Correspondence between Tsvetaeva and Pasternak is one of the most incredible love stories written in Russian over the last century, only it was all real, and it becomes scary: shrug your shoulders and say that all this is not true, literature, fiction, fails . Here are two great poets, one in Moscow, the other in the Czech Republic, the story begins immediately with a high note - so in the Middle Ages they fell in love by portrait, by song. For several years there has been an incredible sublimation of feeling between them - the rising tide of epithets, promises, vows and plans to spend all their lives together.
It is quite unbearable to read this correspondence in the second half of the twenties, when the distance takes its own: the intonation changes, other love arises, Pasternak gets farther, but the memory that they were going to "live up to each other" does not go away. It can be seen how they missed each other, how two equal poets cannot agree and understand each other, how two self-forgetting internal monologues exclude the interlocutor more and more, as if everyone is sitting inside their own bubble - there is inertia of conversation, but there is no interlocutor. Absolutely hopeless reading, to be honest.
Nikolai Kun
"Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece"
I am from children who grew up on the book of Kuhn - this is a common alphabet, which determined our internal structure for the years ahead. In a sense, our generation read it instead of everything else — first thing, before the Bible, the Scandinavian epic and Homer. "Myths and Legends" - our book of emblems and symbols, when meeting them, the internal space becomes suddenly habitable, filled with amazing divine beings. And it works years later: you can ask adults who they loved in childhood - Hermes or Artemis - because this is also the first school of selectivity, a set of role models. The set is very close to life: all these gods and demigods do exactly the same thing as humans - quarrel, reconcile, change each other, steal, invent this and that - but all this is lit up with the promising light of immortality. You feel, if not a relative of these heavenly creatures, then at least their follower - everything that you do is gilded with tradition, has meaning and value, any human nonsense.
Jacob Golosovker
"Tales of the Titans"
And this is a must-have addition to Kunu, a kind of sequel, where everything is overwhelmed. The same story that Kuhn has for his official, ceremonial side, is told here from the vantage point of view. The Olympic myth with its solemn hierarchy turns out to be a lie, standing on the bones of defeated titans, who were earlier, better, more noble; they are trying to resist, they are hunting. Now it is impossible not to think about the fact that the Golovker book was written against the background of party cleansings, references, shootings, on the bones of another dead world, where hundreds of thousands of people were in the position of the former, lost their right to life.
As a child, you don’t know about it - but the lesson still remains, and it is important for the younger person: not a single story is definitive, it always has many versions and points of view from which those you managed to love may look completely different, completely strangers. If you have already read your Kun and love Hermes or Athena Pallas more than life, it hurts you to learn that in the story of another author they turn out to be violence machines, tools of injustice. This school of duality does not give ready conclusions - but after it you begin to feel sorry for everyone. For me, this book was a part of resistance not only to officialdom, but to any didactic in relation to life in general - all the simple truths that are instilled in an ideological school of a child must be balanced. For example, similar books.
Patricia Highsmith
"A Game for the living"
In general, I like genre literature - it is connected with my reader's diet: I am used to reading at least a hundred pages a day, without this I cannot fall asleep. There are fewer pages in the world than it seems; the missing has to get foreign language texts - and, yes, niche or genre books. I respect genre literature for honesty - this is a thing that does not try to do anything with me, except for those I immediately agreed to by buying a book with a revolver or a kissing couple on the cover.
In almost every book, Highsmith has something for which it seems to be her love: a complex story about evil, which most often wins, the killer wins the game, the innocent victim remains unreported. These are such brilliant chess games - but besides this, there is an amazing quality in her books that is not related to suspensions - a special way of describing life, which gives a great writer. This is the life seen from the outside, like a colored flashlight, I want to participate in it, to become part of the picture. Remember how Anna Karenina reads an English novel in the train and wants to be alternately each of his characters, including hunting dogs? Which she lived while reading on the train? Only at Highsmith the whole charm of life is demonstrated from the reverse side, from hell or something.
In her personal life she was a rather "evil witch." And, like any "evil witch", she perfectly imagined where she was expelled from and what type of happiness was unavailable to her. It seems to me that this is why she writes stories with infinitely long exposures — she likes to describe lasting happiness very much — and then destroy it herself with distinct pleasure.
Alice Poret
"Notes. Drawings. Memories"
Alice Poret’s memories are a totally unexpected way to tell stories. All Poret's friends were exiled, implanted or tortured in one way or another. She survived the revolution, repression, war, blockade, all that was before and after. We all read a huge number of letters and diaries that are related to these time periods - and all this is a different kind of meeting history with unbearable: resistance and falling, resistance and accidental salvation, survival. Such an experience, which can hardly be called useful, is knowledge that eats away from the inside of the reader.
At one time, I read the book in bewilderment and perplexity: it was a collection of stories about happiness, experienced in circumstances, with happiness that are not very compatible. I want to re-read the book right away - it seems that Poret missed something or kept silent about something, told her story too delicately. And here it turns out that in fact Poret is not silent about anything. All the arrests, landings and deaths in this story are there, but also there is a wonderful, alien kind of anecdote - an easy shift that makes a scary story seem fabulous. Terrible, but a fairy tale. This tone, this approach to reality is a kind of resistance, another, very difficult and seductive. A person decides that he will not give this lead melancholy reality to get to himself: he will live without noticing it.
But when you finish reading Poret, the ease, if not the frivolity, of how she handles her story is amazing. This is a pure holiday - a picture book, it is handwritten in calligraphic handwriting, and important words are highlighted with a colored pen, as in a children's album. This can be given to a ten-year-old girl for her birthday, as “Alice in Wonderland” - and nothing will disturb her peace of mind forever.
Mikhail Kuzmin
"Leader"
Kuzmin's posthumous fate is absolutely amazing. In the ten years it was one of the main Russian authors, but its popularity completely disappeared in the next decade. When his Trout breaks the ice was published in 1929 (in my opinion, one of the best poetry books of the twentieth century), it went completely unnoticed - Pasternak appreciated it in the literary community and maybe two or three people from ex. At the same time, she is nothing like her radicalism - as if all poison and the charm of expressionism had leaked through the state border. Nobody wrote this in Russian, either then or later.
I have a suspicion that the texts that were read very strongly and often during the life of the authors seemed to demagnetize, and books that were not read enough retain their promise. They are a visual alternative, a corridor through which you can walk here and now. The late Kuzmin, with his seemingly careless, but in fact scary weighted intonation, with his impossible manner of matching words, with his way of working with everyday life, turning it into a suite of wonders, turns out to be absolutely modern: lively than all the living.
Persia
"Satires"
Satires are probably the most underrated and poorly readable genre of classical poetry: someone scourges someone, condemns other people's excesses. In fact, he is very much alive, it is something like a facebook with his diary entries, squabbles and snapshots of reality, swarms. Only the language of social networks offers a scale of one to one, a simple mirror - and the satirical poet exaggerated reality and, according to her, language. And if you read the satires now, putting the didactic installation behind the brackets, it turns out that this is a way to look into the keyhole - in Roman life in its incomparable equivalent - and see it as it didn’t want to show itself at all.
There is nothing more dilapidated than rhetoric, and nothing is more interesting than other people's pots, trays and togs. Because it is not a requisite, but an opportunity to see the world, as it was, and its similarity to our present. The way of life of a big city, be it Ancient Rome, Baudelaire Paris or today's Moscow, almost does not change - and satire makes it possible to verify this.
Marianne hirsch
"The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust"
This is a wonderful book that for some reason has not yet been translated into Russian - and it is important for understanding what is happening to us now. Hirsch is the author of the term post-memory, which describes a special, new kind of sensitivity. Hirsch herself is doing what is called "post-Holocaust studies". The object of the study was the survivors of the second and third generation, the same as herself: the children and grandchildren of the victims of the Holocaust.
Hirsch noted that all of them are characterized by a strange construction of personal priorities: they are much more interested in what happened to their grandfathers and grandmothers than their own history. Свои детство и юность казались им как бы мельче и одноцветнее, чем эпоха, в которой жили и влюблялись их предки - в иерархии воспоминаний то, что было когда-то, оказывалось важнее и живее сегодняшнего дня. Хирш пишет об одержимости памятью - и о том, как она влияет на наши попытки жить настоящим временем.
For me, in her book, it is not only the analysis of the Shoah injury that is important - but the fact that the term “post-memory”, this very way of relating to reality, is much wider than its initial subject. I think that post-memory describes changes in the public consciousness that in one way or another concern everyone: this is about Europe, and about America, and especially about Russia. Russian history is a corridor of incessant injuries, none of which has been completely reworked and comprehended: it is a relay race of suffering that has lasted for decades. Today’s obsession with the past (the battles around Matilda are a good example, but in fact there are dozens of such examples) is well described in post-memory categories: someone else’s story, true or fictional, overshadows its own. These burials of the past cannot last forever. Sooner or later, you will have to say goodbye to him - and do it better consciously, with open eyes.