Trend analyst Lyudmila Norsoyan 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, Lyudmila Norsoyan, a cultural scientist, fashion theorist, founder of the NORSOYAN knitwear brand and the Fashion Factory School educational platform, shares her favorite book stories.
Up to four years old, I grew up in a mountain village with a great-aunt — a school teacher. I was brought to classes, planted in a drawer by the pulpit, and all day while classes were going on, I sat and absorbed the world around me with a mouse. By the time I was four, I could read and write in Georgian — a rudimentary knowledge that occasionally allows me to suddenly read something. When I was four years old, I was brought to Buguruslan, and here, for the first time in my life, I saw snow and loved winter forever, the steppe and the Southern Urals - in a matter of weeks, as a young child needs, completely rebuilding to love for a new homeland and new language.
Buguruslan is a tiny barrack town with several orphanages and boarding schools, the former place of exile for all dissidents in a long Soviet history. Here I was surrounded by people with a brilliant education, exiles and teachers of the old school - apologists of good Russian language and literature. There were about a dozen libraries in a city with 20,000 people. I was recorded at everything and disappeared there from morning till night, read avidly - of course, in those hours when my children and I did not climb the underground passages left over from merchant times, and did not run into the steppe in search of traces of the Civil War battles . At night, we observed flashes of lightning: in the not too far Baikonur we launched space ships and satellites.
Reading was encouraged by society and the school. They read everything and in any circumstances, they drove me out of school for reading under the desk. Children read excitedly, in the hunt for books went from house to house, collected waste paper, handed it over and at night stood in line to record and purchase good publications. The literature was the highest standard: not only a classic, but also an excellent, up-to-date children's one, translations of a foreign woman - right up to Ian Fleming. It was impossible to subscribe to the magazines "Foreign Literature", "Youth", "Roman-gazeta" - they were handed over and read to holes.
In turn, book and magazine publishing houses were overwhelmed with manuscripts by novice authors from across the country. In 1973, a coup d'état happened in Chile, and I, an impressed and indignant pioneer, wrote and sent poems to the Pioneer Truth about the death of Salvador Allende - and they were even published! Soviet teenager, I plowed and educated myself on the "Tale of a Real Man", "Partisan Lara", "Two Captains", "Report with a noose around my neck" and "Fifteen-year-old captain".
After finishing school, I immediately got to work in our barrack library - they let a goat into the garden. My unrestrained reading could now be given round the clock completely officially, because it was my work - and also the salary was paid. The happiest time of my life! The library had a lot of rare editions and a lot of forbidden literature. Every six months, the order for the destruction of publications on the lists came - the right signal that the book should be read. In particular, it was the works of Sakharov, who was in my area tested a hydrogen bomb in 1954, the same Fleming with novels about James Bond, the work of writers who fled to the West - Solzhenitsyn in the first place. And also came magazines, on which they joked that they should be “burned before reading” - on issues of history, philosophy, and religion. Immediately, on a receipt, they were given to the city party committee, but, of course, I managed to stick my curious nose! And books really blazed on fires.
I am a book drinker, and no matter what happens in my working life, nights have always been given to books. Of course, reading excitedly and indiscriminately led to the fact that by the age of 20 I was just stormy: I enrolled in universities, ran to classes and threw them, being fascinated by something more interesting. Only the other day, passing by the Literary Institute, I remembered that I had left it too.
The book became for me a teacher, an interlocutor, an escape from reality and the flag of my personal resistance to vulgarity. Circumstances demanded: conquer or fight. So, with a certain literature, I have a very special relationship. I absolutely can not read the novels of Dostoevsky, I just die with every letter of his texts. Suddenly you find out that, together with Raskolnikov, you are beating in the grip of poverty and pride, you are drowning in the abominations of life with Svidrigailov, and you break your heart with Alyosha Karamazov; that Dostoevsky’s heroes have the names and destinies of your neighbors. You can not escape from the universe of the writer and die in each of his heroes. Today he is more authentic than reality itself and is present in everyday life here and now. I saw enough dostoevschiny and destruction, to prefer to respect him vuchuzhe.
I still draw knowledge from all sciences - for me the information field is one. Without physics and astronomy, I would not understand anything in the technologies with which I work, but without literature I could not bring my ideas to the outside world. After all, my main work is the analysis, systematization and understanding of fashion as an object of macroeconomics. Today I read everything from economic theories to nanotechnology articles. In my list there are no books about fashion, just as I do not watch pseudo-documentary films about people from the fashion world and are not interested in the sweet castrated biographies of great fashion designers. For me, this profession is akin to the work of an accountant or a physicist. If you definitely need to specify the thematic books, these will be Alexander Vasilyev’s beautiful “Beauty in Exile”, Mertsalova’s “History of Costume from Different Eras” and a series about the culture of landlord life of Raisa Kirsanov. And, of course, "Theories of Fashion".
The only thing that saddens me is that I grew up in those times, in those places and in a society where the need for knowledge of foreign languages was not even considered abstractly, so I taught English on my own - from the books of Oscar Wilde. Now books are taken from everywhere - both legally and completely unconventionally. I'm afraid I can entrust the state budget, but in no case a couple of interesting publications - I will drag and play. As usual, there is no place to store them, so the house looks more like a book depository.
Umberto Eco
"Baudolino"
Of those authors that I re-read to infinity, - Umberto Eco, my main writer and interlocutor. I would enter his Encyclopedia of Beauty and literary essays on the mandatory reading list. My passion, pleasure and relish - "Baudolino", a fantastic quest, a charade of medieval cosmogony and attitude. When I walk past the chimerical lions at the gates of the English Club, I always think that we are not so far from the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages in our knowledge of the world, there are more clever words.
Solomon Volkov
"Dialogues with Brodsky"
I love Solomon Volkov very much, especially his dialogues with Brodsky and Spivakov. He gave me the opportunity to balance my thoughts with the salt of the earth, listen to great ideas about life and death, honor, dignity and morality, because you can only grow in an attempt to reach for the samples. At the same time, I personally am absolutely indifferent to the Brodsky phenomenon: I admire Brodsky the writer and I understood a lot in myself, inwardly agreeing or arguing with Brodsky-man.
Lev Tolstoy
"War and Peace"
Lev Tolstoy is one of those favorite writers with whom I can mentally quarrel: “Why did you kill Bolkonsky?”, “Why does Katyusha Maslov like that?” For me, "War and Peace" is a history of the relationship of scales: a person and society, a private family and an era, a destination and everything that has failed. Both war and peace deprive an ordinary person of the freedom of choice in a broad sense, but leave for each of us the right and responsibility of choosing a personal one. At different times I reread War and Peace and see something else. In the era of stagnation, this is an adventure novel, in the era of the passions of the 90s - a quiet backwater of family life, today - a question to the mirror: "Are you camoured?" I can not imagine how you can remove this book from the school curriculum.
Nikolay Ostrovsky
"As the Steel Was Tempered"
Like many Soviet teenagers, I dreamed of great human feats. Nikolai Ostrovsky with the novel “How the Steel Was Tempered” about the inflexible iron revolutionary superman greatly confused me - for a long time I returned to myself real, alive, weak, and not at all steel. Soviet heroism is a unique phenomenon in the world literature, it brought up a new man, an unshakable preacher with an active position of the leader of the crowd, a merciless and violent educator of the poor and the needy. Now I have a complex attitude towards these books, but it is they who formed my personality. I have never discussed this production with anyone, I am a loner by nature, but today, walking past Tverskaya by the porch with a memorial inscription above the writer's apartment, I involuntarily think: "Who is following the example of Nikolai Ostrovsky?"
School textbooks on natural sciences
Irrepressible curiosity, the categorical desire to know everything and the patronage of brilliant teachers led to the fact that I was well immersed in the natural sciences and what is now called interdisciplinary. The school had laboratories of chemistry, physics, biology, an astronomical site, we went to the steppe and conducted geological and archaeological research. Popular science and science fiction hotly discussed the problems of flying to the stars and the possibility of a person to live up to some kind of Alpha Centauri in a century-old flight. So I was fascinated by the problems of cell aging mechanisms and subsequently received a red diploma in biochemistry.
Ivan Efremov
"Andromeda's nebula"
In my youth, the whole country was fond of fiction novels, they were hunted down and passed along their hands. The most famous of them is the Andromeda Nebula about the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. Of course, in the Soviet work, everything ends with the victory of our astronauts, completely in the spirit of the Hollywood blockbuster. Science fiction in the USSR was extremely ideologized, but it raised the most important issues of human existence. Now these questions are buzzing with an alarm above their heads: where do scientific advances and fantastic possibilities of technology lead? And what makes a man a man, not a cadav of consumption?
Bible
At an early school age, the Bible entered my life. I am eight years old; Baba Serafima from exiles reads to me in Old Church Slavonic "there is neither Hellene nor Jew." We are lying on a hot stove, a blizzard howls in the pipe, I feel comfortable and magical, and I absorb the voice of the past generations. I was baptized at eight years old in an Orthodox monastery in the mountainous Georgia (and recently I received news on Facebook — they remember me there), and once, in a fight, a cross was torn from me and carried to the school principal. There was an urgent line, I, a ten, publicly shamed and threatened not to take in the pioneers.
The Bible remained for me a book of books on any state of mind. It echoes you: every time you open exactly those pages and see the answers you are ready for. All the literature of the world is enclosed in it - with archetypical plots, dramas, tragedies, visionary flashes, poetry. One of the most thoughtful novels of modern Japanese literature in the title quotes the Book of Job - Kenzaburo Oe, "And they took hold of my water to my soul." Once upon a time I understood Church Slavonic, now I read the Bible in Old Russian, the language of detachment from vanity.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"The Phenomenon of Man"
The guiding star that determined the list of authors I was interested in was Mamardashvili, Gurdjieff, Kolingwood, Losev — Teilhard de Chardin became. I was shocked by the personality of a man who, at the height of the 20th century and world wars, went beyond the bounds of a respectable career as a church hierarch and thinker. At the cost of loneliness, he influenced the worldview of intellectuals and changed their understanding of the role of man in the existence of the cosmos and nature. "The phenomenon of man" establishes, clarifies and asserts the relationship between personality and the universe. It was de Chardin that brought me to Lev Gumilyov - I think the passionality of his biography and his ideas fascinated and fell in love not with me alone. In the snows of Norilsk, I recalled the diary entries of Gumilev who had been serving the camp flour there.
Jack London
"Martin Eden"
The fact that I had enough willpower and courage to leave the world of barracks and despair into the big world is the main merit of Jack London's books. I grew up where there was all. It is depressing to go home - you wander around the frozen streets; it happened and to learn lessons in the stairwell, and from an ax in one shirt minus 30 degrees in the night to jump out - such horror was considered the norm. At night, when the county got quiet, I lay clinging to a warm stove, listened to the beeps of passing trains, vaguely suspected that real life was going on somewhere, and thought out ways to escape from home — I just knew that I would not live like that.
Books saved, books were not just interlocutors and educators - they were the only painkiller, a means of salvation from reality. Until the age of 18, while I really didn’t run away from home, I identified myself with Martin Eden, read and reread the story of a simple rude seaman who, through talent, study and work, broke through to the stars. I am still grateful to Jack London and myself for this feat. Well, about how I spent the first three days of Moscow life spent the night at the Kursk railway station and the pimps fed me with sausages in exchange for stories about books — another time.
Theodore Dreiser
"Financier"
I studied business in general and business in the fashion industry based on the novels of Theodore Dreiser, the benefit of the socio-economic situation of the last decades is akin to America in the era of wild capitalism. The trilogy "Financier" - "Titan" - "Stoic" - about the creation by man of himself and his affirmation in the young aggressive civilization of primitive accumulation - helped me. Thanks to her, I began to navigate in the post-Soviet realities and got rid of the fruitless regrets about the past comfort of the era of the paternalistic empire. "Sister Carrie" - the subtlest novel about the formation of the creative soul, what Dreiser himself called the "Aeolian Harp". The book helped me realize that, as in previous eras, theater, books, cinema were the breath of society, so today fashion has taken responsibility for the possibility of small women in big cities to express their individuality and the right to be visible.