Playwright Sasha Denisova 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, prose writer, chief dramatist of the Meyerhold Center Sasha Denisov tells about his favorite books.
As a child I had little contact with my peers, and the books were my only friends. A grandmother with the surname Van der Reut (Flemish roots - Til Ulenshpigel responds to my heart as part of his own genealogy) had, as they say, an extensive library, but with publications until 1917. So at first I learned to read with yatyami - I looked at them in textbooks at school, but without success. Grandma secretly taught me to read when I was about five years old. I was deprived of kindergarten (colds, unsociation) - why, when there is a Flemish grandmother, rewriting biographies of remarkable people from the hand in a notebook? One day my mother came home from work, and I thoughtfully leafed through a book. Mom got angry, thinking that I was pretending, and made me retell the plot. It was "Little Prince" - and I told him. Of course, it was necessary to become a writer with such a background.
The main reader’s fracture, aside from what was read in childhood (Stevenson, Defoe, Boussinghard, who cultivated the pursuit of adventure, English novels that inspired pride and prejudice, and the books about the partisans standing apart - the Strong in Spirit and the Young Guard, - reinforced the craving for heroism ), happened at the university. In the mid-nineties there was a boom of translated books, and the Russian classics in my mind were pressed out by Marquez, Borges, Cortazar. Russian literature was the “food minimum” in Maslow's “pyramid” - there was nothing to be proud of the Russian philologist: well, they read it according to the program. But there was poisoning because of Umberto Eco, Joyce's snobbery, Kafka's mysteriousness. What can I say - in the room hung a self-made poster "Pruss from Proust."
Because of Sasha Sokolov, I changed my name from full-flowing Alexandra to chamber Sasha. Interesting of the Russian authors were only the "returnees": Platonov, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Oberiuts. The thesis "The text as a linguistic and pragmatic phenomenon on the material of the novel" The Gift "was never written - it decided to engage in their own creativity. Then, however, Chekhov still came back to me through Rayfield’s biography. The first years in Moscow, too, everything seemed to me that I was “selling by line”. But there were good people who pushed me into the theater, as if into an abyss - and there are actors, rehearsals, passions, shouts, cries, a narrow circle of benevolent colleagues. So I changed the profession and in it again fell in love with Chekhov.
But American literature "made" me. My mentor, a prominent Americanist Tamara Denisova, killed for not knowing Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Vonnegut and Delillo. New novel and new journalism - Wolfe, Mailer, Capote, Thompson - became for me a guide to action. And the play "Hotel California" in the 1960s Center of the World History of America (in which I have never been) is a reconstruction of events and language according to the American literature that I love. I miss the documentary speech in Russian prose, which I was so used to in American literature and in the documentary theater. And now Tart, Cunningham, Yanagihara are much closer to reality: in the traditions of the “fat” novel, they describe a very small life with all its details. Modern Russian literature is not yet following this path: a large stock of documentary material is needed for such an approach. Americans have been doing this for a long time and well, and we still live in Russia with a candle that was burning on the table.
Now in my main ration are books by American coaches on screenwriting skills, new Western novels and books about the brain. For several years I have been writing a book about my own brain - in dialogue with it. In non-fiction about productivity and efficiency, which I absorb in tons, it is often necessary to write the purpose of life on a piece of paper: every time I gather, but something distracts, so that efficiency has not been accumulated yet. What impresses me in these books is the facts about omega-acids or the functions of the prefrontal cortex, which create the illusion that life can be changed by creating new neural connections.
Four times a week I teach and feel like an audiobook. If we go on the screen version of Nesbyo, then that means that my students have just read Nesbe, they have everything at hand. We are no longer ready to kill for books: we live in a supermarket, where thousands of products are on the shelves and everyone can be used - tomorrow he will work for you.
John steinbeck
"Traveling with Charlie in Search of America"
Steinbeck sits in the trailer with his frightened poodle and travels incognito. In adulthood, he is trying to rediscover his country, he is faced with the secrets of cooking turkey in Texas and fully automated restaurants - note, in 1962, already. A calm description of the trip, envious of envy, because the Russian writer, even if he had gone somewhere, would hardly have received such a blessed work at the exit. As I am writing a novel about the 60s in America and about young people in today's Russia, for me both this and the next book are references.
Andy Warhole
"Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and vice versa)"
There are several brilliant books left from Warhol, and they give an idea of his paradoxical and at the same time calm logic. Sex and love courses, buying a tape recorder as the end of emotional life, ordering something like frog legs to lose weight - behind his maxim is a portrait of a man who is very independent in his artistic philosophy and very lonely. Even the one who built the concept of armor, is mortally vulnerable. In the TsIM, Andy enters the stage with documentary monologues about how she loves her chosen America from the senses and works. What a beautiful theater - a favorite book you can turn into a living Andy on stage.
Kendra levin
"Odyssey of the writer. How to find inspiration and keep deadline"
Another adaptation of Campus's Thousandsome Hero is on a par with Christopher Vogler, who wrote a guide for Hollywood screenwriters. Here the archetypes of the hero's wanderings are transferred to writers' torment. Who bothers you to write - dreams about the red carpet (this is the guardian of the Rakshasa threshold, drawing empty dreams), the Dodger, who enters the writer into a stupor, or the Shadow (the ghost of the party, which warns ominously that everything that you write is bad and no one needs )? It turns out that the stages of writing are divided into "seasons" - so if you are not writing a damn thing now, most likely you have a "winter" and you just need to relax. Valuable allowance, strengthening faith in yourself at the desk, where it is so lonely, constantly something seems (a candle that was burning) and the main battles with yourself take place.
Peter Aroyd
"Shakespeare. Biography"
Akoyd, whom we love for historical authenticity and fictional ease, as well as guide novels, London, Istanbul, John Dee and Hitchcock, wrote a weighty and categorical thing, ending with the question "Was it or was it not?" Why were there no notes in the manuscripts? What did two thousand spectators of “Globe” nibble at and spit at the actors if they didn’t like the show? Why in the plays of Shakespeare such a magnificent herbarium? Where is the desire to buy houses? What was the name of his dead son and, most importantly, where did such a flow of eloquence come from? Shakespeare as a product of the Elizabethan era, competition, borrowing, the late Renaissance, passions, politics - and alive, thanks for being alive.
Heiner Goebbels
"Aesthetics of absence. Texts about music and theater"
While we were fighting in the theater for at least some intelligible, truthful presence on the stage, Goebbels, whose performances appeared in Moscow (first at the Net festival, and now he puts them on the Russian stage - at the Electro-Theater), wrote how to achieve "absence", summarizing his experience in the theater. I still remember the magic of his performance "Eraritzharitzhak": the actor leaves the stage, and the camera watches him already on Tverskaya, he enters the apartment, and there the string quartet, people, scrambled eggs fry - and suddenly it all happens under your nose , in the illuminated house-scenery on the stage. It was at this moment that Goebbels abandoned the basis of the theater - the presence of the actor. Next - the lack of aesthetics.
Michael haig
"Hollywood Standard. How to write a script for movies and TV, which will buy"
In addition to Robert McKee, who is beloved by Russian scriptwriters, there are many other excellent coaches. For example, in the book "The Hollywood Standard," Haig teaches simple principles with structural principles (how to create a plot with one sentence, how a three-structure structure is arranged), and also offers useful tables that take into account goals, motivations and conflicts. Drama and screenwriting skills - the ability to tell stories, based on centuries of experience, manipulation of consciousness and craft. If you do not own a craft, do not start.
If you do not know how to evoke sympathy for the hero, why write? Haig lists techniques that help experience empathy for a character: in the first place is the unjustified cruelty to which the hero at the beginning of the film is exposed, risk, humiliation. Then comes the love of loved ones - family and friends, skill in business, and just when the hero himself is sympathetic with something, even if he is a hired killer.
Michael Cunningham
"The night begins"
Cunningham is close to me all - from a late start in the novels to the approach to the language, where each sentence should have a sound and syntactic expressiveness. This novel (although I am a fan of all his novels) is more like a play. The last event stuns: deciding on a fatal passion, mentally changing life, the forty-year-old hero faces the last paradoxical ruthless blow - the love of his life has disappeared, and his wife serves for divorce.
Helen fisher
"Why we love. Nature and chemistry of romantic love"
Along with Rolan Bart's "Fragments of the Love", this book also explains a lot about love. True, not poetically, but from the point of view of neurobiology. Love is the product of a straight walk. Having descended to the ground, doomed to carry offspring no longer on their backs, but on their hands, the first people were faced with the need for monogamy: neurobiologists found in the ancient bones additional DNA segments indirectly responsible for consistency. It is known that it takes twenty-one days for the brain to create a neural connection — it’s scary to imagine how everything has evolved over millions of years. And speech, and thinking, and love have become a common property of the brain. A divorce, unfortunately, remains from Paleolithic times: a woman needed a man for the time of growing offspring, and then he, the bastard, slipped into new relationships to leave offspring with various genes. Here, too, millions of years so far against us.
Rick Hanson, Richard Mendius
"Brain and happiness. Mysteries of modern neuropsychology"
Among dozens of books about the brain, I like this, perhaps, the inclusiveness and combination of the materialistic and the metaphysical. Why do we experience panic in the office, although the tiger does not hunt us? How not to overload the prefrontal cortex — the relative young brain region — with Facebook news on an empty stomach? What is the function of the hippocampus, how are the neurotransmitters arranged? And most importantly, how to use all of these to make life more efficient, not to worry in vain, to become detached, like a Buddha, and to know that there is a giant force inside you - a brain? If this is not a soul, then this is a perfectly equipped room for it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
"Terribly loud and extremely close"
Favorite recent book, filmed by my favorite British director Stephen Daldry, the subject of my envy (I should have written it). Another "monolith" among the novels about the boys, next to Salinger and Sokolov. An amazing hit in the archetype (the son is looking for his father, even though he died on September 11); modern language, boys' vile theories, a magical journey through New York, the mythologization of family history is all that is terrible and beyond in our lives, which is why we pity and love people. Now I'm already sitting with the new novel “Here I am” by Foer, which I advise you.