Writer and journalist Anna Nemzer 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, Anna Nemzer, writer, journalist, presenter and chief editor of the Dozhd TV channel, shares her stories about favorite books.
Having received the task to compile a list of ten books, first you are very happy and rub your hands, and then inevitably fall into a stupor. Is this ten favorite? What I think is great? The ones that formed me? Now, if I was asked about my favorite series, I would not hesitate to call two - "Friends" and "Interception": here all the indicators come together - your favorite is equal to great. In "Friends" there is such a dialogue, which I have already quoted wherever:
- Rachel claims this is her favorite movie.
- "Dangerous Liaisons".
- Correct. Her actual favorite movie is?
- "Weekend at Bernie's".
- Correct.
This is very apt. Who formed you: a genuinely beloved Faulkner, who thoroughly plowed you up, or a book about Slovak pioneers that you accidentally found in a country house in a barn? This is a difficult question, a frank answer requires courage. Many years have passed since the days of the dacha, the shed, the Slovak pioneers, many accents during this time were set, I quite famously learned to draw these boundaries, especially not disagreeing with the general conjuncture, having just in case the reserve “Yes, great, but not my ". But the questions about "my" have not gone away.
At twelve, I was obsessed with war and became an exhausting teenager, able to speak only on one topic. First of all, I was interested in World War II: my grandfather and many friends of my grandparents were front-line soldiers and I tried endlessly to understand what the war consists of - what is on the front, what is in the rear, what does it mean, how do you feel how it happens technically. I couldn’t get an answer from one of my informants: they talked a lot about the war or were silent about it convincingly, she was a centimeter away from me, but seemed to flow through my fingers.
It so happened that at that moment I began to read "Gone With the Wind" - and received all the answers to the questions I was interested in, even though the war was not there. In the package with the traditional - and, by the way, very, in my opinion, good - love story, Mitchell talks about the confrontation between the North and the South - exactly so as to give a complete picture of the mechanics and inner nerve of war. This book was the subject of my fierce disputes with those friends who opened it, on the very first page they read about the green crinoline in the color of the heroine’s eyes and on this closed it forever. I swore at their snobbery and said that this was a great work about the war. Since then, books that grasp this very nerve of war have hit the sore point. In this strange series next to Mitchell are both Vladimir Vladimirov and Afgan by Rodrik Braithwaite, and my friend’s book that has not yet been published, which describes the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ido Netanyahu’s work on Entebbe.
Well, well, if not only war? How to draw these boundaries of "my" and "not mine"? How do writers compete in your mind? Here, my mother draws my attention to Levin’s conversation with Kitty about disputes, this is some kind of joke about Frou-Frou and her speech apparatus — and Tolstoy turns out to be the main writer for me: with combat, but still more important than Dostoevsky. Although Dostoevsky is doing ruthless experiments that need to be given their due: from the first lines, no matter how you resist, you are being dragged into the funnel of inevitability. Re-read, for example, "Idiot", and every time I do it again: well, don't talk to them, don't get acquainted with Rogozhin, don't go to the general, why did you even come here?
Goncharov for some reason turns out to be more important than Turgenev. Because of which? Because of the “Cliff”, which at the age of thirteen taught me to rebuild boundaries and once and for all resolved issues relating to gender, Goncharov would have had such an interpretation, but how it happened. And I remember the acute moment when Orwell and Zamyatin, beloved in different ways, gave birth to a firm faith in me: oh, no, like Zamyatin, there will be no pink clouds. It will be like Orwell’s - a tray with a gravy and room 101. I remember another internal competition in the same delusional logic: because of Marquez, I could never fall in love with Cortazar.
My list is an attraction of heightened honesty, and I deliberately do not avoid mentioning the books of some friends and relatives here. Honesty so honesty. This is a pretty crazy selection of "my", which I really stitched.
Venedikt Erofeev
"My little Leniniana"
I do not know who it occurred to me to give this book for the nine-year anniversary. It seems to someone from parental friends: she was brought from France, in Russia she came out later. Thin bright red brochure. Quotes from letters and documents — Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Inessa Armand, Krupskaya, Kamenev, Zinoviev — the author says almost nothing, only quotes and laconically comments on them. Not that I had any illusions about Soviet power by my nine years. But one thing is the general idea that during the revolution many mistakes were made, the other is this.
Telegram to Saratov, Comrade. Paikes: “Shoot, without asking anyone and avoiding idiotic red tape” (August 22, 1918). Lenin to Kamenev: "For Christ's sake, you will imprison someone for red tape!" Nadezhda Krupskaya - Maria Ulyanova Ilyinichna: "Yet I feel sorry that I am not a man, I would be ten times more hung" (1899).
This was the first course of source study in my life. I did not read anything worse than my nine years and at the same time did not read anything funnier. Then Tarantino did something similar with me, but still he didn’t. It turned out that “Moscow - Petushki” and “Walpurgis Night” I read later - and of course, I loved very much. But the main text of Venichka for me was "Leniniana".
George Vladimov
"Long way to Tipperary"
And again it is difficult to explain why this unfinished, very short text became the main thing for me, and not “The General and His Army” - the greatest novel of the twentieth century (that's where the whole war crunches on your teeth, answers all the questions "how it works"). "Long way ..." remained unfinished half-documentary story: the author sits in Munich in 1991, watches on TV how the monument to Dzerzhinsky is demolished in Moscow, reads Cauline's Epilogue in the Neva. Kaverin, misinterpreting, tells how at the moment of the Zhdanov ruling on “The Star” and “Leningrad” two Suvorov boys came to support the injured Zoshchenko. One of these boys was Vladimov.
Fans of Nabokov will laugh me, but for me this book is about language - about the voice of a weary, cynical person, who casually tells an intolerable, piercing story. And just like “The General and His Army” begins with an epic crash (“Here it comes from the darkness of rain and rushes, spluttering with tires, on the torn asphalt ...”), so every extremely mundane phrase in Tipperary hits some of my sensitive neurons . “And here she is, without reading — I put my head on the cut-off, that without reading!” She took off her apron, washed her hands and neck, and put it in the political department with a book. Why? But in general, how is it born in a person: “You have to go and knock”? "
John steinbeck
"Lost Bus"
For some reason, of all the American novels, of all the novels of the same Steinbeck, I fell in love with this particular one. It was a dirty, harsh and sensual America "in the middle of nowhere", and, of course, why lie - for me this book turned out to be primarily about sexuality, about the ability to understand it and the inability to work with it, but most importantly - about its durable place in life. It seems that all the other lines - about post-war America and her society - at first, I just didn’t notice and did not return to them much later, rereading. But reread twenty times, no less.
Sebastian Japprizo
"The lady in the car with glasses and a gun"
Everything is simple: the perfect detective without a single logical failure. Rarely, in fact. I love very good detective stories, and I absolutely do not need the text itself to be called a detective story. I love logical riddles, a twisted plot and the moment when all the hooks cling to all the strings, when all the riddles are solved, and even more - to guess myself before everything is explained. That is why I liked "The Lady in Glasses ..." so much - I could not at all unravel anything at all, Japrizo turned out to be more cunning than me. And I’m much more relaxed about the “Cinderella Cinderella” trap by the same author: it’s generally accepted that this text is much stronger, but it’s hard for me to put up with a plot device when you don’t know the end of the whole truth. It's hard for me in the Brothers Karamazov - this is an example of an almost perfect detective, only there is no solution to the puzzle, decide as you like: whether Mitya killed, or Ivan with Smerdyakov’s hands, sorry for the spoiler.
Vladimir Uspensky
"Works on nemathematic"
If I say that I have read this book and understood everything, I will lie. Far from everything, even though the author is a professor of mathematics and of all the people known to me in the world, the sharpest, the most brilliant, the most malicious, put a lot of effort to destroy the senseless boundary between mathematics and the humanities. "Works on nemathematic" are reflections on philosophy, philology, linguistics, history of science, these are memories and tales, poems, humorous and serious, literary analysis and parodies of "Chicken Ryaba", as if it were written by Homer and Mayakovsky. Andrei Kolmogorov, Lewis Carroll, Timur Kibirov, Andrei Zaliznyak - this is about the scatter of the book’s heroes, and this is a world where mathematics openly opens its borders to everyone. The world of Vladimir Andreevich Ouspensky is a paradise into which the sins of adolescent arrogance and laziness do not allow me.
Yuri Trifonov
"Old man"
In fact, not only "Old Man", but also "Another Life", and "Time and Place" and "Exchange" - but, by the way, not the famous "House on the Embankment", which always seemed to me like other novels. It is painful for me to read Trifonov, I read it with the feeling that this should be known. This Soviet hopeless firmware of all life must be remembered. And I do not speak now about Shalamov or Dombrovsky - there is nothing more terrible in life and literature. Trifonov for the most part does not work in the border area, his zone is routine, sudoki with a sanatorium lunch, an underground abortion on the day of Stalin’s funeral, an apartment exchange, which turns into a gradual internal “exchange”, that is, a deal with oneself, we are such a life. "
Leo Ospovat
"As I remembered"
Lev Samoilovich Ospovat - philologist, translator, researcher of Spanish literature. In 2007, two years before his death, he wrote memoirs: childhood, adolescence, youth and war, return from war, “doctors' case”, thaw, village school and Usievicha street, Chilean poets and “Pope, are you a Jew? Then sing me a Jewish little song "- the memories are written by the vers libre, which gives you to hear every intonation. A small book of rhythmic prose and a great life, hard and very happy, because the ability to be happy, as the poet said on another occasion, is a great step and heroism.
"Parnas on Buckle: About Goats, Dogs and Weverleans"
In 1922, three students of Kharkov University invented, as they would say, the project, and three years later a small book came out in the Cosmos publishing house: A. Block, A. Bely, V. Hofman, I. Severyanin ... appeared on the cover ... and many others pro: goats, dogs and Weverleans. " The name of the author was not. Three friends - Esther Papernaya, Alexander Rosenberg and Alexander Finkel - took several well-known plots (about a gray goat who lived with his grandmother, about a priest who had a dog) and wrote a series of parodies.
Here is a story about a goat performed by Tsvetaeva ("Yesterday I was still lying in my legs, // I looked at him mutually, // And now he ran away to the forest, // My goat, what did I do to you?"), Kozma Prutkov ("Some the old woman to the gray goat sank with love and from the presence of a goat’s presence she enjoyed very much "), here is the story about Vaerleya from Blok (" And her lovely legs bowed in her sway to the brain, // And the blue bottomless flowers bloom on the far bank "). I read Parnassus early, I was dying with laughter over it - despite the fact that I didn’t see a fair percentage of the originals. But nothing - the more I treated these originals later. True, the memory mocked me: since in childhood she was ready to learn much more than in her youth, many poems were stuck in my poor head in the form of parodies.
Vera Belousova
"Chernomor"
And one more time: first, the perfect detective story. Secondly, as in all the other texts of this author, on top of the twisted detective intrigue, there is a game with literature and literature, subjects, heroes, and echoes are somewhere in the depths of "Ruslan and Lyudmila" or "The Queen of Spades". A year ago, I listened to Mark Ronson’s lecture on sampling at TED. “I’m a fan of Duran Duran, which is probably a bit clearer in my mind. I’m in the middle. It seemed to me that the easiest way to join their music was to gather a group of 9-year-old guys and play" Wild Boys "at school "he said." I just wanted to be in the history of this song for a minute. I didn’t care if someone liked her. I liked her, and I thought I could add myself to it. " The mechanism that drives the idea of sampling is the same as that of poststructuralism, the game of classics is just inescapable love, with which you need to do something.
Ilya Venyavkin
"The Inkwell of the Host. Soviet Writer Inside the Great Terror"
I have not read this book entirely, because it is not yet finished. The author publishes a chapter once a month on the Arzamas website: a scary and exciting non-fiction series about the writer Alexander Afinogenov is created in front of the reader's eyes online. This book is about how terror invades not only privacy, making every intimate conversation in the kitchen a political gesture. It is about how terror pervades the consciousness of a hero who is trying to find hell in progress if not an explanation, then at least a description. About what motivates a person when he writes a fictional conversation with an investigator in a diary, trying to either get ahead of events, or by “anti-eye” to avoid them, turning a nightmare into words. About the attempt to overcome the inability to word. Nobody spoke about terror in such a language and with such a depth of penetration into the consciousness of the hero, and I really wish the author good luck, I look forward to the next chapters and the entire book.