Publisher Irina Prokhorova 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, Irina Prokhorova, publisher, literary critic, editor-in-chief of the magazine and publishing house Novoe literary review, shares her stories about favorite books.
I am often asked what event in my life predetermined my current profession as a publisher. According to the canons of the autobiographical genre, it should be some kind of secret text that fell into my hands as a child, or a shrewd person who opened my eyes to my destiny, or, at worst, a rich home library with a lot of secret forbidden books. Alas, nothing like this romantic upbringing novel happened to me.
At home we had a standard Soviet library, consisting of subscription editions of Russian and translated classics, as well as a set of adventure literature, which I, like most of my peers, read in my adolescence. No Virgil, pointing the way to self-improvement, I also did not meet at a tender age, and I discovered real literature, including the forbidden one, only at the university. Perhaps this long isolation from the intellectual world, the inaccessibility of high-quality knowledge for an ordinary person of the Soviet era, prompted me to choose a profession.
I never cease to be surprised at some acquaintances who indulge in sentimental nostalgia for the past, especially for academic people who, in their old age, delayed a song about the great Soviet science. I still cannot forget the gravity of the ideological chains that shackled humanitarian thought, and I shudder at the recollections of gloomy book tombs - special library storages, where books could only be used by special permission.
Add an information blockade, when knowledge of intellectual trends could only be gathered from INION review collections under the sign "Criticism of Bourgeois Views", where the "vicious" ideas of Western theorists were described in detail. Since I was engaged in the history of English and American literature of the 20th century, I was doomed to Aesopian language and eternal criticism of the "decaying West." By the mid-1980s, I realized the complete futility of serious scientific activity in Soviet conditions, but perestroika broke out and new opportunities opened up for the application of forces.
Then I faced a dilemma, brilliantly formulated in the book of Hermann Hesse's “Game of Beads”: to stay for a lifetime in Kastalia, that is, to continue the career of a cabinet scientist, or go into the world - into active social life. I preferred worldly life, but did not close the door to Kastalia forever, as I devoted myself to the publication of three humanitarian magazines and intellectual literature. May the reader forgive me that the conversation will continue on the books of my publishing house. But I publish only what I consider to be advanced humanitarian knowledge and a carrier of new ideas for understanding the past and the present - and I advise everything that I lacked so much during my youth.
Oleg Voskoboinikov
"The Millennial Kingdom (300-1300). Sketch of the Christian culture of the West"
Comparison of the modern world, especially the Russian reality, with the Middle Ages has become a commonplace in the public sphere. Usually this metaphor is used in a negative way - as the onset of a new era of barbarism and obscurantism. But researcher Oleg Voskoboinikov is trying to show that in fact the Middle Ages is the cradle of modern civilization. On this path, he follows the outstanding medievalists: Pyotr Mikhailovich Bitsilli, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Aaron Yakovlevich Gurevich, historians of the famous French school "Annals" Mark Block, Lucien Fevre and their followers Jacques le Goff, Pierre Nora and Roge Chartier.
For the Renaissance and the New Age, the rejection of the preceding historical period was of fundamental importance, since both epochs built their self-consciousness on the criticism of old prejudices. We also worship the idol of authority and tradition in culture; Scientists explaining the models of the universe to us are still looking for the basis of the universe, that is, the "divine mind"; The logic of the work of a journalist for the selection of material differs little from the chronicles of the fifteenth century by order of the abbot, the king or the duke.
Medieval historians laid the foundation of modern historical science, combining the search for a causal relationship of events with records in the chronicles. The Paris and Oxford mathematicians of the XIV century, four hundred years before Newton, came close to the law of world wideness, and the Gothic architecture gave the architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no less than Renaissance and classicism. In the book of Voskoboinikov, the Western European Middle Ages is the primary source of almost all spheres of modern life, be it parliamentary democracy, banking, or technical progress.
Andrey Zorin
"The appearance of the hero: From the history of Russian emotional culture of the late XVIII - early XIX century"
The history of emotions is a young humanitarian discipline that arose in the 1980s: it claims that human feelings and their manifestations are not given to us from God, but culturally and historically conditioned. According to the formulation of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, "our ideas, our values, our actions, even our emotions, as well as our nervous system itself, are products of culture": all societies develop emotional standards that constantly change over time, not just differ in the space of different civilizations. The focus of the book by Andrei Zorin is the short tragic life of a young aristocrat of the end of the 18th century - Andrei Ivanovich Turgenev.
This seemingly private history turns out to be for Zorin the most important marker of the profound social changes in Russian society that arise as a result of the penetration of new European ideas and "feelings" into the country. The cult of romantic love, individual experience, autonomy of personal life and individual dignity - all these new emotional registers. The behavioral practices generated by them are actively imported into Russia through translated literature and through the efforts of Russian cultural traders, primarily Karamzin.
In his famous "Letters of the Russian Traveler," he introduces readers to the emerging romantic emotional culture that enlightened noble circles are beginning to follow. The tragedy of Andrei Turgenev, according to Zorin, was that he turned out to be a kind of “pilot instance” of a man of the romantic era, who could not bring his life and personality into line with the samples for which he was raised.
Robert darnton
"Poetry and police. Communication network in Paris of the XVIII century"
Robert Darnton is the largest contemporary cultural anthropologist, eighteenth-century French historian, specialist in print history and European book culture. I am proud that the most famous book, The Great Cat Carnage and Other Episodes from the History of French Culture, was published in UFO in 2002. His second book in Russian is devoted to the largest police investigation in the history of France of the XVIII century - the search for authors and distributors of seditious poems directed against the royal court and Louis XV personally.
Darnton shows how naive and illusory are our ideas that before the invention of new communication technologies (printed book, telephone, TV and the Internet) the world existed without an information society. On the basis of archival documents, the researcher shows that the dissemination of information took place through several channels: literate Frenchmen copied poems on pieces of paper, some dictated poems to each other and learned by heart.
A particularly popular technique was the use of music: poems superimposed on popular melodies and were widely distributed among the urban population along with wits, riddles and rumors. Reading Darnton’s book, one involuntarily recalls the information experience of Soviet society: jokes, memorization of forbidden poems, samizdat and very similar communication channels.
Olga Weinstein
"Dandy: fashion, literature, lifestyle"
The history of fashion is a young humanitarian discipline that arose along with the history of emotions in the 1970-1980s. The concept of fashion is not limited to the semiotics of clothing: it includes the changing canons of physical beauty and harmony, hygienic standards and symbolic body language, principles of organizing personal and public space, changing aesthetic styles and transforming the urban environment.
Fashion and culture historian Olga Weinstein explains how the emergence of dandyism as a cultural movement in the person of its founding father, the famous British champion George Brummell, opened a whole epoch in the development of European culture - the period of the formation of modern urbanism. Dandyism arose as a forerunner of urban democratic culture, where a dynamic society with a fundamentally new means of social identification is replacing the traditional estate structure. Appearance and behavioral practices become a means of self-affirmation of the person, a symbol of a person’s autonomy from state repression and tradition and a sign of the expansion of the public sphere.
From the beginning of the 19th century, European cities began to take on the appearance of a modern metropolis: public parks and pedestrian promenades, public theaters, museums and libraries appeared, streets were paved and street lighting was held, and the struggle to improve sanitation began. Thus, the dandies have become the conduits of the new urban lifestyle, which is dominated by personal qualities and virtues, broadcast by means of appearance and behavior.
Alexander Rozhkov
"In the circle of peers: The life world of a young man in Soviet Russia of the 1920s"
"Studying grandfathers, we recognize grandchildren, that is, by studying our ancestors, we recognize ourselves," wrote the historian Vasily Klyuchevsky in 1892. "In a circle of peers" examines in detail how the younger generation of the 1920s was formed. This dramatic experience was reflected in the biography of each contemporary of those years, as well as on the fate, value orientations, hopes and delusions of their descendants. Reading the book, you understand how far we still exist in the coordinate system laid by the turning generation of a century ago. As the writer Yury Slepukhin rightly noted in his time, it is easier for a simple person to live in "quiet" periods of history, and in the years of volcanic social activity, the life of an inhabitant becomes unbearable with pharaohs, caesars and dissolute papas (this list can be easily continue up to the present day).
"In a circle of peers" describes in detail the most difficult living conditions of people of the 1920s, exhausted by civil war, domestic hardship and complete breakdown of the usual way of life: young people felt themselves thrown into a new life without the support and support of the older generation. The book on the basis of the richest material on the daily life of the era shows how in the process of growing up and socialization (school - institution - army) the young generation of the 1920s formulated a new system of values: sexual and gender relations, the idea of class (non) equality, interethnic interactions and ideas of law and justice.
Lyubov Shaporina
"A diary"
The history of man in the 20th century has not yet been written, and it is extremely difficult to create it. Especially big problems for the historian are the fates of the people of the Soviet period, since official sources, as a rule, falsify or embellish the true state of affairs. The most invaluable documents of the epoch in such a situation are the memories and diaries that in the Stalinist era were carried out with risk to life by some brave souls. In most cases, detailed and candid records belong to women: it is enough to recall Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Chukovskaya, Lydia Ginzburg and Emma Gershtein.
Lyubov Vasilyevna Shaporina kept a diary from 1898 to 1967, tracing the tragic fate of her generation: it entered into life with utopian hopes for the reorganization of society and completed its path with complete disappointment in the ideals of youth. Shaporina was a highly educated and creative person (artist, translator, creator of the first puppet theater in Soviet Russia), and Anna Akhmatova, Alexey Tolstoy, Dmitry Shostakovich, Maria Yudina, Nikolai Tikhonov and many outstanding people of that time were among her acquaintances and friends. Her diary is an encyclopedia of Soviet life, where there are reflections on religious persecution, mass repressions, hard life, the blockade of Leningrad, as well as an intense literary and artistic life and a stubborn struggle to preserve human dignity.
Here are fragments of Shaporina’s diary from different years that I want to quote:
April 1935 (Shaporina describes the mass references of native Petersburgers to Central Asia and interrogations at the NKVD): “You should speak skillfully with the NKVD, how to play in the pods, and most importantly, do not be afraid. You cannot say those names, but you can; you can because you know perfectly well that these people are very close to the NKVD, although they take beautiful position in the theatrical world ... In general, it is best to have a silly-secular look and tone. "
August 31, 1941: "We deserve the right to disgrace" - we do not even feel disgrace. We are slaves, and our psychology is slavish. Now, like Negroes of Uncle Tom's time, it never even counts that Russia can be free that we, the Russians, can get "free." We just, like blacks, dream of a better host, who will not be so cruel, who will be better fed. "
March 13, 1955: "I am infinitely touched by the utterly shamelessness with which our communists convincingly call white what half an hour ago they also called convincingly black ... And these people look you in the eyes with a crystal clear look."
May 16, 1963: "Ehrenburg, an active member of the World Council, respected by all, was subjected to the brutal attacks of Khrushchev, Ilyichev and other barrens. On what basis? All this Khrushchev demagogy was caused by the savage envy of old writers and artists with Stalin’s broken lines to the new, young, A talented and courageous growth. Witty writer O. Bergholz yesterday in the Writers' Union pleased me: "We live in an era of unenlightened absolutism" ... Autocracy corrupts. "
Natalya Lebina
"Man and woman: body, fashion, culture. USSR - thaw"
The book by Natalia Lebina is actually the first study devoted to the problems of the relationship between men and women during the de-Stalinization of Soviet society. Lebina introduces the people of the 21st century with the realities of the Soviet gender structure of the 1950s and 1960s. The first aspect is connected with the rehabilitation of physicality: more free sexual practices, changing courtship rites and marriage rituals, more effective individual birth control, more frequent family breakdown.
The second block is connected with the language of the Soviet fashion, which recorded changes in the mutual relations of the sexes in the post-Stalinist society. The book deals with the new canons of the appearance of men and women, about how the survival strategies of "Soviet mods and fashionistas" were invented in the conditions of a planned socialist economy. And the third perspective of research is the reaction of culture to the transformation of society and the search for a new language to describe the changed reality. Lebina writes about the scandals and campaigns initiated by the government against the gender emancipation of the younger generation, and the most important books and films that legitimize the new behavioral standards.
Alexander Goldstein
"Parting with Narcissus. Experiences of memorial rhetoric"
Back in 1993, a shabby envelope came to the editorial mail with an article by an author I was not aware of who lived in Tel Aviv. The envelope contained a brilliant intellectual essay on the aesthetics of the underground writer Yevgeny Kharitonov. Thus began my friendship and cooperation with Alexander Goldstein until his untimely death. This collection of essays is a kind of epitaph of the Soviet empire and the literature generated by it. Goldstein uses to describe the Soviet culture mythological metaphor - the image of Narcissus, lovingly bent over his reflection in the water mirror of the empire. "It was a narcissistically intoxicated, absolutely self-sufficient literary civilization, spiritually exceptionally intense, which at some point could not withstand its own beauty," he explains the simultaneous disintegration of Russian imperial statehood and the culture generated by it.
Goldstein's talent, like any truly great writer, was in the unmistakable ability to determine the "hot spots" of culture. In "Parting with Narcissus," he revealed the painful nerve of post-Soviet civilization - the loss of cultural identity. The Russian creative environment faced a question that Elena Fanaylova perfectly articulated: "What should the modern writer write about, where should the pathos of the profession be located so that it moves on?"
Гольдштейн избрал свой особый, тихий и одинокий путь: это был великий отказ от постмодернистской иронии и возвращение к прямому высказыванию, утверждению "новой искренности". He believed that intimate speaking you can try to overcome the accumulation of conventions, falsehood, piled up over the past more than half a century in the literature in Russian. For Goldstein, the language becomes a magical means of connecting the severed connection of times and the spreading tissue of post-imperial culture.
Dmitry Prigov
"Live in Moscow"
I am proud to be the main publisher of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, the central figure of the Moscow conceptual school and the Russian artistic life of the second half of the twentieth century: several collections of his poems, four novels, two volumes of his interviews were published in UFOs. All the work of Dmitri Alexandrovich subordinated one super task - to create a modern "Divine Comedy", to describe the tragic being of a man of the past century. “Live in Moscow” is an ironic epic about the paradoxes of Soviet civilization, an experimental novel rethinking Pushkin's tradition.
If "Eugene Onegin" is a novel in verse, then "Live in Moscow" is a "novel from verses", transcribing the motives and objective world of his early poetic cycles - famous poems about the "militiaman" and the cycle "Moscow and Muscovites" into the prose language . According to the author, the Soviet cosmos is similar to the medieval picture of the world: it is overturned in mythological time, in it the flow of historical memory gives way to rotation in concentric circles of eternal ideology. Moscow is a metaphor of this universe, the center of world cataclysms, where a civilization built with difficulty is regularly destroyed to the ground, and then reproduced by a new generation of people following the same mental patterns.
Mikhail Gasparov
"Records and extracts"
The history of the creation of this book is very important to me. Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, an eminent philologist and translator of ancient authors, was a member of the editorial board of the New Literary Review since its founding and was a favorite author of the journal until his death. Somehow, discussing the next plans of cooperation, I asked if he had ready material in any genre. With his semi-ironic shyness peculiar to him, Gasparov pulled a manuscript from under the pile of papers with the words: "This is a real trifle, it is unlikely to suit you."
The text consisted of personal notes, funny maxims, ridiculous urban advertising, quotes from great people, excerpts from encyclopedias and books read, talk show fragments. I immediately offered to publish the manuscript in the journal under the heading "Records and extracts". During the year, Mikhail Leonovich regularly sent us a new batch of "Records and Extracts", which I published in the next UFO release to the joy of the humanitarian community. At some point, I realized that this fragmentary letter could make an excellent book, and asked for permission of Gasparov to compile it on the basis of a published cycle.
"Records and extracts" for many years continue to remain our bestseller. It is difficult to describe this strange and beautiful work, it is much easier to quote a few quotes from it:
FACE - Lia Akhedzhakova was asked if she felt like a Muscovite or a person of Caucasian nationality, she replied: "Those who are beaten are the ones who feel it."
FREEDOM - In the Chukchi language there is no wordfree, there isout of chain; so wrote in the local newspaper about Cuba. The poet M. Teif told the translators: "I give you complete freedom, only so that the translation is better than the original" (Rev. L. Druskin).
A LIFE - effort worthy of a better use (Karl Kraus).
ENVY - November 17, 1982 in the editorial of Pravda it was written: "The Soviet people with enviable calm met the news of the death ..."