Writer Alisa Ganieva 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 writer Alisa Ganieva shares her stories about favorite books.
I remember that I also loved Anderson's "Thumbelina" in my pre-alphabetical era: adults read it to me in Russian, translating into Avar to go, so that I could understand the content - I hadn’t yet spoken in Russian. I clearly remember myself with a book already at the age of five. This is a simplified edition of Tolstoy's “Buratino” with Leonid Vladimirsky’s illustrations forever imprinted in the brain. I always read lying on my stomach, putting a pillow over it due to congenital scoliosis. I remember how in the text "Buratino" for the first time I came across the word "sold" and did not know what it meant, pestered with explanations to the parents. At the same age, she read out the children's memoirs of Mikhail Zoshchenko “Lyolya and Minka”. It was a yellow book with illustrations by Pakhomov, which replenished my vocabulary with curious words like "marshmallow". An inaccessible pastila hanging at the very top of Minkina of the Christmas tree made me absolutely fascinated, and I was delighted to imagine her magical taste. It was the ninetieth year, and getting the real one for tasting was not easy, but when I finally succeeded, I was crushed by disappointment: the pastila seemed disgusting to taste.
Parents had hundreds of books, a huge library, which over the years of our wanderings in Makhachkala apartments, was either packed in boxes, then sent to relatives ’cellars, and there it was eating and disappearing, then it was referred to sheds and garages. Entirely in close Khrushchev books did not fit, but also those that were placed in the house, was enough. Day after day, friends and relatives, especially students, came to us, as if in a library, and took books to read. Many publications never returned. While searching for one of the series of “Literary Monuments” for one of the endless mats, I even bumped my nose into the corner of the glass door and earned a barely noticeable scar.
I myself very early attacked Shakespeare's eight-volume works. It was read by translations of his plays from eight to ten years, naturally, not understanding even half. But it was a pleasure for me to represent my classmates on the spot. In the eighth grade, I even adapted Romeo and Juliet for contemporary Dagestani realities, and my cousins and I played the drama in a home play. The variability of love was compared not with the moon, but with Clinton’s love for Lewinsky (it was ninety-eighth year), and the Duke of Verona was replaced by the mayor of Makhachkala, who now sits, is famous for his bloody crimes. The phrase "remove the corpses from the square" gained new connotations.
Another special author for me is Leo Tolstoy. When I was eight, I was inseparable from his “Childhood” and “Adolescence”. "Youth" was much worse, although I tried to overpower her. One of my childhood phobias was orphanhood, which is why I was particularly struck by the theme of mother’s death and the image of a cadaveric stain on my arm. The second scene that struck me with a butt was the shame of a Tolstoyan hero in love at a children's ball. I myself often dishonored and felt the shame of Nikolenka as my own.
In adolescence, I was turned over by the Decameron and one of the whole host of Zola's novels The Joy of Life. I remember reading the last in the summer, in the village of Gunib, where an interesting library had also accumulated in the house of my grandfather. True, having opened this novel a few years later, she no longer found anything special in it. In the same place, in Gunib, at the age of eleven, I read a book about the historical roots of the Bible. In particular, I was struck by the real background of two myths - about the manna of heaven and the burning bush. Now I don’t even remember her name.
In Moscow, where I moved after school, I hardly kept any books at home, except for a stack of modern prose and poetry. Yes, and travels followed one after the other. Sometimes in a rented apartment I ran across the host library. One of the landlords, for example, kept a whole closet of painting albums and books about artists. I also took books in libraries, and ten years ago I started downloading books to an electronic reader, including rereading familiar books in the original — saving space, easy carrying. I read, as in childhood, several books at once, from fiction to scholarly writing. I also don’t remember the names, I forget what I read - only individual images, fragments of phrases, undigested emotions remain in the memory. I tried to get rid of home books quickly: it was more expensive for me to drag them to a new place. But something still kept: "Moscow - Petushki" with comments, a collection of Scandinavian Edds, Plato and books written by friends. Yes, and at work, in the editorial book review "NG-Ex libris", we live with colleagues, and eat, and almost sit on the books.
Mikhail Zoshchenko
"Lola and Minka"
This book (as well as a little later the book of Leo Tolstoy) instilled in me a painful habit of thinking about whether I acted badly or well, lied to, or dealt with temptation. A kind of non-silent inner confessor. Thanks to Zoshchenko, my vocabulary has been replenished not only with “pastila”, but also with the words “junkie” and “scrofulous”. In life, they are, however, almost not useful. After meeting Zoshchenko’s “adult,” and especially with the circumstances of his life, this writer for me split in two, but the first one, a child’s, with ice cream, galoshes and an extremely fair dad, remained closer to his heart. And when in high school in the collection of the poet Ivan Nikitin, I stumbled upon the poem “A month shines brightly over the village” - the very thing that was once asked to teach Minke, I was glad to see him as my own.
"The Book of a Thousand and One Nights"
In my childhood I was struck by how blood shed briskly in this medieval monument, as a frivolous attitude toward slavery and women. And how rapid are the transitions from misfortune to happiness and vice versa (what Aristotle called peripetias). But most of all I was interested in Scheherazade’s phenomenal memory. I also wanted to remember all the read and heard stories - what could be more beautiful? But, unlike Scheherazade, I forget most of what I read. Sometimes I come across "reader diaries" that I tried to keep either in school or in college: countless titles and brief retellings in beaded, almost indistinguishable handwriting, and almost no familiar name. But I read all these books.
Vasily Rozanov
"Apocalypse of our time"
I was fond of Rozanov in high school. Particularly struck the passage from the "Lonely": "I cut off the scythe, because I do not need it." I then wore a long braid, and I was afraid to lose it. Rozanov (still, of course, “Fallen Leaves”), Mariengof’s “Cynics”, Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy — all of this motley decadence suited my decadent teenager moods. According to Rozanov, I still wondered for some reason, although something eschatological, private or philosophical-political always fell out. I remembered from him the phrase that the writer must have constant involuntary music in the soul, otherwise he is not a writer. Now sometimes I think: here's how to understand if I have music or not? And how involuntary?
Viktor Shklovsky
"Hamburg account"
Admiration and envy - that's what I felt for Shklovsky at the age of seventeen. I wanted to write about the most difficult as easily, and still live the same long, full of adventures and adventures life. While not very successful. For the last three years, I have been conducting summer creative writing courses for one of the international programs of the University of Iowa in the USA, and of course I can’t do without Shklovsky’s articles. At the end of the program, students travel to their home states and countries, learning the new word "defamiliarization" ("estrangement"), and gladly flaunt them in the comments on Facebook. Shklovsky is still fascinating to read as a theorist of cinema, because he wrote in those years when the cinema was just emerging and our art was at the very forefront. It's amazing how things have changed.
Fedor Dostoevsky
"Teenager"
Dostoevsky, I mastered the age of ten. I remember how, going from school, I told my cousin that I read “Humiliated and insulted”. She burst into laughter, the name seemed so absurd to her. Dostoevsky immediately subdued me, but he invariably depressed me. Only in more than twenty I finally matured to him. "Teenager" was already read with incomparable pleasure. The concentration of blackmailers and swindlers on the page was off scale, a slim font broke my already myopic eyes, and it was impossible to break away. Approximately in the same narcotic passion I was reading a class in Dumas' fifth fiction. And since I was not allowed to indulge in a lot of books not in the case, I did it secretly, at night, under a blanket, highlighting for some reason a real candle. The matter ended with a strand of hair burned to the roots. Mom came to the smell of burning, but I unlocked to the end and dodged the punishment.
Nina Berberova
"Italics are mine"
Memoirs, filling a strange mixture of sadness, enthusiasm and feelings of inferiority. Confessions of a female terminator who survived the most ardent shelling of the era, the most dizzying acquaintances. When I read, I thought all the time: "And I would probably have given up." In some places the author / heroine annoyed me. It seemed to brag a lot. Has the right, but still. But, it should be noted, in my youth ("Italics" was read at twenty), and even more as a child, I basically was an irritable reader and was tearing and throwing about unfortunate litpersons. At eleven years, like many girls, Natasha Rostov could not stand, despised Turgenev’s young ladies and revolutionaries, but Vera Pavlovna from “What is to be done?”, Strangely enough, I liked it, and at fourteen I even dreamed of arranging my own life in the same way. If we marry, then live with her husband in different rooms and refer to each other on "you." The dream came true, and I conducted my short matrimonial way like this. Yes, Berberova is always inspiring to talk about life.
Francoise Sagan
"Hello, sadness"
In this light but dark novel of young Sagan, what I love is united: jealousy, crimes, remorse, vice and summer. For some reason, this book in my brain is on the same shelf as Paul Bowles’s Moroccan tales, Ian McEwan’s “Cement Garden”, and Nabokov’s Other Shores. Apparently, this is a matter of subconscious associations: in all these books there is forbidden love, youth, nature, and overflowing greedy ecstasy and the desire to live, be and feel. This bohemian element is so far from the one in which I grew up, and the shamelessly monstrous heroine of the novel is so brilliantly unlike me that I could not but be enchanted. However, apart from this debut book, I didn’t find anything for Sagan myself.
Victor Pelevin
"Blue Lantern"
Favorite, along with the "Yellow Arrow", a collection of Pelevin. I was sixteen when I found it on the endless parental racks - perestroika, Alpha Fiction series. The compilation itself was lost, but I still re-read the stories from it online. I began, however, from the novel “The Recluse and Shestepaly”, which was included in the same edition. At first I gave a neighbor to read the desk, and she recalled it colorfully to me. Then, in especially boring lessons, we were engaged in drawing on exercise-book exercise books with dumbbell chickens in the fields. Pelevin was one of the first to make me think more deeply about the subjective reality, the unreliable narrator, and everything that is somehow connected with the brain-flask mental experiment. Better than the "Matrix" and "Twin Peaks". However, it is incorrect to compare.
Lawrence Stern
"The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, a gentleman"
It is still surprising how Stern managed to write a postmodern novel two hundred years before postmodernism. Reread, however, still does not pull, because from stubbornly dodging in the direction of the plot lines begins to feel dizzy. Yes, at the first reading, the fact that the narrator comes to his own birth only in the middle of his autobiography, terrified and delighted, but at the second this whole compositional katavasia already slightly irritated. I really want ten years from now, if I’m alive, take another throw. I'm sure the sensations will change in many ways. By the way, the hero, who needs a whole year to present just the first day of his life, and which, I must say, did not bring his story to the end, is an image in which I recognized myself as a child when I tried to keep a diary. Life is so fast, and the facts reproduce so inexorably that it is simply impossible to embrace and organize this entropy. It remains only to surrender.
Salman Rushdie
"Midnight Children"
The best, in my opinion, Rushdie's novel, not comparable with the more scandalous "Satanic verses". A real modern classic. I read it quite late, only five years ago, which coincided with a turning point in my life and three months of writing residence in America. At some party I talked about this novel with a young Pakistani prose writer - it turned out, “Midnight Children” is his favorite book. On this basis, we firmly became friends, and I even ruled the manuscript of his first book, for which I was honored in the preface. In addition to the language in this novel, I am especially fascinated by the overwhelming number of coincidences in the life of the characters. Absurdity is absurd, but there is something mathematically attractive in it.