Curator Ekaterina Pavelko 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, Ekaterina Pavelko, the curator of the Fashion School of Design at the Higher School of Economics, shares her stories about favorite books.
I began to read late, and it was not that I liked this process. After the “Wizard of the Emerald City,” the situation changed: reading no longer seemed like a boring and necessary exercise that all adults around me practice. Then everything was quite fascinating: "Tom Sawyer", "Treasure Island" and "Heather Honey", "Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece", after which I enrolled in the club of young librarians, where I had to repair bookbinding and I could dig deeply in the Scandinavian epic in the department "History".
I grew up in a period that now, fortunately, is already difficult to imagine: books were scarce. The house was full of books, but to buy new ones, my dad and I collected waste paper to get a ticket for some cool collection of works: its value in my eyes greatly increased, because I knew how difficult it was to get it. This was reflected in the unsystematic nature of my reading: I could just like the blue with the gold binding of Theodore Dreiser’s books or the cover with the characters in checkered suits and Jerome K. Jerome's dog.
A vivid adolescent impression was "The Captain's Daughter"; after the Songs of the Western Slavs, I read the whole of Prosper Merimee, after the Chronicles of the Reign of Charles IX, I decided that I would study history, which eventually led me to the history department of Moscow State University. The last two years of school I spent in the humanities class, where in addition to the Russian classics, we studied foreign literature. I read a ton of everything, not always having to be aware of what I read. In the tenth grade, I got the essay "Adulterer's theme in the French and Russian novel on the example of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary" - fortunately, I don’t remember what I wrote, but I know for sure that I appreciated Tolstoy much later, after reading it in years thirty.
The university had an incredible amount of literature, and now I don’t understand how I managed to read something else. Then Vladimir Sorokin and Truman Capote were distracted from Latin, the book "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis and Ed McBain detectives were very disturbing to prepare for the exam in Ancient Rome. At senior courses I studied at the Department of Ethnology, was fond of social anthropology, but even there from Mircea Eliade and Levi-Strauss I was distracted by English magazines. The Face was the main and unsurpassed among them: it cost wild money at that time, I read it from cover to cover, and it helped to understand that fashion really interests me.
Heinrich Böll
"Through the eyes of a clown"
I came across various books about good guys in trouble, but this was somehow my mother gave me very, very timely. The main thing in this book Böll - very accurately captured feeling, as if the whole world was up in arms against you. It is familiar to any teenager, as well as the general defense mechanisms are understandable, when it is so bad that it remains only to joke. My fifteen years this novel strongly brightened.
John dos passos
"Manhattan"
This book was so strongly advised to me by my husband obsessed with cinema, that after such recommendations it was impossible to pass by. Dos Passos was a great innovator: the novel still looks like a film script, assembled from a heap of plot lines, with a very real atmosphere of the city and the mood of its inhabitants. In this New York, I was much later - and found little in common with the one described in the novel. That Manhattan sensation from the book has long been living in my head, without demanding a reality check.
John Updike
"Let's get married"
I took Updateik in the summer, when I often went to the children to the country and back, and there was a lot of time to read along the way. I didn’t understand at all what was waiting for me: there was some kind of frivolous American picture in the spirit of Norman Rockwell on the cover. “Let's get married” turned out to be a story about an ordinary love triangle, prepared very cruelly and subtly. While reading the final, I cried right on the train and then all summer I plunged into the Updike novels “Rabbit, Run,” “Eastwick Witches”, “Married Couples” and “Centaur”. All of them do not fit into the usual stylistic and genre frameworks: Updayk's recognizable reality turns into a fairy tale without effort, and everyday writing, with subtle and deep psychologism.
Antonia Byette
"Have"
I love detective novels (like Stevenson's), Victorian novels (Austin, Dickens, and Thackeray) and novels in letters (Dangerous Liaisons, Shoderlo de Laclos and Say-Sogonagon, Say-Syonagon) - all came together right away. The history of the relationship between the two fictional poets of the Victorian era and their contemporary researchers turns into a beautiful labyrinth, from which you don’t want to go out, yes, in general, you will not be able to quickly. Six hundred pages of pure pleasure.
Elizabeth Wilson
"Dressed in dreams: fashion and modernity"
As usual with people without specialized education, it is necessary to gain the necessary knowledge all my life. A good share of academic character in the series "Theory of Fashion Magazine" library has long bribed me: I am a regular reader of it. "Clothing is one of the most loaded attributes of the material world," - Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at London College of Fashion, explores the formation of fashion as a cultural institution, a means of expressing ideas and attitudes of society. Wilson writes about how clothing reflects the present moment, and that regardless of whether we think about it or not, we tell the world a lot about our appearance.
John berger
"Art to see"
I used to understand that visual perception is closer to me, but the work at the HSE Design School greatly enhanced this feeling. Berger’s study of the nature of art and visual perception was first published in 1972 and was no less important to culture than the essay “About Photography” by Susan Sontag. Berger’s reasoning turned out to be prophetic: he predicted the emergence in the era of the reproducibility of images of a new figurative language, super important, in my opinion, for understanding modern culture. There are seven essays in the book, and three of them are illustrations without a signature: a real hymn of visuality.
Kerry William Purcell
"Alexey Brodovitch"
Glossy magazines, as we know and love them, invented and made a Russian emigrant, graphic designer Alex Brodovich. He was art director of American Harper's Bazaar for twenty-five years, and was considered a teacher by Man Ray, Richard Avedon, Irvin Penn and Hiro. In his story, I am completely fascinated by the fact that one person can accomplish a visual revolution - although it is worth noting that he quickly began to teach and work with students of his “Design Lab”.
His work is striking relevance now: he endlessly drew inspiration from Russian Suprematism, treated the magazine as a novel with a tie, climax, denouement. His attitude to photography and the work of his students greatly liberated me during the period of my work as fashion director of Esquire magazine.
Aleksey Ivanov
"Bad weather"
I found the nineties at a conscious age, so I don’t have the desire to romanticize this period, but nostalgia (I don’t like this word, but it’s still there) as an important period in my life. In "Bad Weather" I caught the same feeling about the nineties and so lively characters, as if you had met them once or lived with them on the same street. After the first novel, The Heart of Parma, it became clear that Alexey Ivanov was a great writer. Now I try not to miss his new books, and he usually does not fail.
George Lois
"Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!)"
To come up with something cool is difficult, to do it regularly is hellish work. The legendary art director of American Esquire has its own method and brilliant results, which I was lucky to learn when I came to work in the domestic Esquire twelve years ago. In this book, George Lois infects his absolute creative fearlessness, hatred of mediocrity and gives very practical advice: "You can not think of anything new and sharp without understanding what the hell is happening around you."
Philip Mayer
"A son"
I was advised to read this novel by a friend and colleague Philip Bakhtin - it so happened that I took Mayer with me on a trip to the Putoran plateau last summer. I read excitedly like Fenimore Cooper in childhood (yes, there are also Indians there), since nature is good, the polar day and our journey were well intertwined with the story. In general, everything coincided: both the novel and the plateau left the best memories.