Director and producer Vera Krichevskaya 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 producer Vera Krichevskaya talks about favorite books.
There have always been books in my life. We lived in the Moscow district of Leningrad: I remember that more than once the pope took me "to a thousand apartments" for cosmonauts, there was a "flea market" there. Middle-aged people sold, resold, exchanged books and collections. We collected waste paper “for a foreigner”, “signed up” for Tolstoy, stood in a queue “for a new Chekhov” - the parents “grabbed” only half of the meeting, I, being a student, found missing volumes in the basements of the Liteiny basement. Albums and books on art, the Wanderers, the Hermitage’s heritage was “taken” on the Moika, on the corner behind the Literary Cafe. In adult life, I met the son of a book dealer with Moika. They left for California in the 80s, thirty years later we found out that our fathers knew each other "in the workshop" and walked along book paths alone.
Since then, parent meetings have been wandering with me, moving from city to city, from one country to another. Soviet poverty and the endless lack of books and thoughts accurately formed a cult. Twenty-two-volume Tolstoy, brown with cheap gold embossing (the names of the novels could be determined by the erasure of the roots without looking inside), black with red stripes Shakespeare, brown of a small format, academic Pushkin, dark-dark, also small Hugo, darkly brown Dostoevsky always with me where they are and there is a house. What will happen to these books after me - I don’t know, my children almost don’t read on paper, and it’s difficult to read in Russian.
The first sensible voluntary reading was Soviet fiction - that was long before Harry Potter and Tolkien. I don’t remember how and where, at twelve years old, I came across a book with the name of George Martynov on the spine, but then I read all his books and utopias about flying and organizing life on other planets. In the same "thousand apartment building" was a district library, in which there were many books of this Soviet science fiction.
The school program flew by unnoticed, I don’t remember anything about it. But I remember when the book first began to change my life — and this process has been going on ever since. For me, there is no book apart from my life. I remember the circumstances under which I read, I remember the actions that I committed immediately after reading, it always was and is an interaction, penetration. It is impossible to choose the books most dear to you. But you can remember the turns of life dictated by books.
Lev Tolstoy
"Anna Karenina"
The first time it happened at about fourteen or fifteen, I was sitting in the country, reading "Anna Karenina." I remember that Levin was the most empathetic then, closed the book, got on the train and went - I still don't understand why - to the journalism department on the First Line of Vasilyevsky Island to find out if there are any preparatory courses for schoolchildren. This impulse is a mystery.
I reread "Karenina" every five to seven years, always in a new way; for the last time - after the magnificent “Escape from Paradise” by Pavel Basinsky, Tolstoy’s biography, which gave me a completely new look at the writer. There was a feeling that I finally met him and understood so much about his characters.
Fedor Dostoevsky
"Demons"
The second big novel with the book happened a little later. For the final exams at school, I already knew that I would take a free topic in literature and would write on Dostoevsky's “The Demons”. It was the year 1991-1992, and free thought, political circles and movements, revolutionaries completely captured my head. I am writing this and I think that it is necessary to open the "Demons" and try on each character (usually negative) on the political fighters of today. I thought a lot about them, reading Zykhara Prilepin's Sankyu, I read avidly - sometimes it seemed to me that this is the second part, a continuation of this book a hundred years later. As I can judge about political thought at the turn of the 20th century, according to Besam, I can try to understand our time in a hundred years from the Sanka.
Returning to Fyodor Mikhailovich, for some reason I never wanted to re-read, I would say that for me the personal way, growth, from Stavrogin to Alyosha Karamazov, is the main possible man-made miracle and achievement of a person, such a real churching.
Edward Limonov
Kharkov trilogy: "Teen Savenko", "Young scoundrel", "We had a great era"
In the late 90s, I did not meet for a long time with one of the employees of the then cult publishing house Vagrius, and this led to great changes in my life. For a month or two, I swallowed Ulitskaya, Pelevina, Lipskerova, Petrushevskaya, I read the layout of “Generation P” before the book was published and I felt attached to something very important. I inserted microtsitats from a future bestseller at meetings on NTV, infected everyone around with the word “positioning”, and so on.
But most of all at that moment I was worried about the writer Limonov with the Kharkov cycle about childhood, adolescence and youth of the writer Savenko. I never visited Kharkov, and it seems that I still remember his geography. Since then, the book has become more than a movie. The state of happiness is with a book on the couch.
Meir Shalev
There are authors whose new novels I’m waiting for, and I envy everyone who hasn’t read the old ones yet. Meir Shalev for me is a soul-writer, a nature writer: I can feel the warm wind and the smell of anemone. Each of his novels, with the exception of "Esau", is similar to the previous one, and I have no complaints about it: it just prolongs the minutes when goose bumps run down my skin, tears flow and pages fly.
I remember reading all night just translated by Nudelman (and this is a separate happiness) "Like a few days ...", I finished around eight in the morning, got into the car and drove to the department store on Neglinnaya. I stood on the side of the road and waited for the store to open, to find myself a blue scarf, the same one in which, with my head held high, each time harnessed a cart to drive through the whole moshav, Judit, for the paternity of her only son, three local men claimed at once. I had the opportunity to tell Shalev himself about this stupid act, he laughed. I like the blue scarf very much.
Amos oz
"The Tale of Love and Darkness"
The fascination with Shalev led me to Amos Oz, his "A Tale of Love and Darkness" will always be one of my most important books. Amos Oz, in whose mother old Agnon was secretly in love, led me to Agnon. Red poppies that come out of the Jerusalem stone remind me of favorite writers every spring.
Salman Rushdie
"Farewell sigh of the Moor"
Salman Rushdie I could not read in English in the original. Tried and failed. It’s not easy for me to read it in Russian: it's such a tangled tangle with the smells of Kerala, the sounds of Mumbai, political plots, rock, history, secrets and a phenomenal dictionary. After the “Farewell Sigh of the Moor”, I rushed to search for a synagogue with blue icing on the edge of India - and found it.
Every time I walk past Camden Hill Square to Notting Hill in London, I look at the door of the house of the writer Pinter, where Joseph Anton was hiding, I can drive by car twice a day past Bishop Park in Fulam and try to guess every time where was the last shelter of Rushdie after the fatwa. I read so many of his novels, so many interviews and lectures. And I know for sure that I would never want to meet him in my life. All the time, does not leave the feeling that the genius - evil.
Edmund de Waal
"Hare with amber eyes"
A book that I gave to my friends for three years in a row - a couple of years ago it was translated into Russian. Family saga Efrussi, such a brief history of Europe of the XX century through one family. The history of European art of the beginning of the 20th century, the history of the fall of the Habsburgs, the history of the prototype of Swan - the only hero of Marcel Proust. The story of how life changes in one second. I read this book in Oxford. The proximity of Paris, Orsay, where pictures from the Ephrussi collection, Vienna hang, where the SS came to their house on the Ringstrasse right after the Anschluss, directly stifled me.
I rushed first to Paris addresses and appearances, then reread Proust's Svan, already realizing that he wrote him in Paris in the yellow chair of Charles Ephrussi (the son of a grain seller from Berdichev) surrounded by Japanese netsuke and drafts of the monograph on Durer. Then with friends we went to Vienna, with a book in hand, the heroes came to life ... We did not find only the headquarters of the SS - the hotel in which it was located, the authorities of post-war Vienna decided to demolish.
Valentina Polukhina
"Brodsky. Interview Book"
Joseph Brodsky is not my poet, he is difficult for me. Reading it is hard for me, I love listening to it. But here's a collection of Valentina Polukhina "Brodsky. An Interview Book" I can read from anywhere, many times. For me, this is a poetry and literature textbook. This book is one of those that always move with me.
Hannah Arendt
Collection of lectures
Another my textbook, last opened it after a trip to Hiroshima. The formation of a national myth, the existence or non-existence of national responsibility, a common unifying sin are topics that I really care about.
Jonathan franzen
"Freedom"
Justin cartwright
"The Song Before It Is Sung"
In recent years, the novel "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen helped me make peace with myself, and "The Song Before It Is Sung" by the English writer Justin Cartwright introduced several amazing stories and names: Adam von Trott, a big official of the Third Reich, executed for attempted murder of Hitler, and with his fellow university student Isaiah Berlin - and led to Oxford. In the history of von Trotta and Berlin, I discovered the diary of the Russian aristocratic Maria Vasilchikova, who worked for Hitler's regime and preserved the most valuable artifacts of time.
The most interesting and unknown to me, intriguing - these book chains, these networks that arise from each new book. You do not know whom you will meet around the corner and where this someone will lead you. I love and look for these labyrinths, these new rapids and turns; I am waiting for them with every new book, with every new name.