Archaeologist Varvara Busova 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, archaeologist Varvara Busova shares her stories about favorite books.
My parents are very educated people associated with the underground culture of St. Petersburg in the 90s. At the time of my growing up, our living room has always been a library. I will not lie, I went my own way. While my parents were raising culture from morning to evening at Pushkinskaya, 10, I, as a classic child of the 90s, chose the most accessible fantasy world of television - I did not go to kindergarten, and my nannies did not see anything wrong with that. In the fifth or seventh grade, I watched the series “Charmed” and by the final season I realized that I did not have enough knowledge in matters of magic, so I decided to involve all possible sources. Dad advised books. Then I read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and fell in love with Behemoth or Woland. Only in high school did it become clear that it was not an instruction how to talk to cats and fly naked on a broomstick.
Before school, when my dad decided to urgently take on a Mowgli girl, education took place with the help of radical methods of locking in the room — resisted as best she could. The books about Peppy Longstocking spent many evenings with me, but upside down. And the true love of reading came to me after the seventh grade, when the authors of the end of the XIX century - the first third of the XX century appeared in the program. Then it came to the realization that you can read not what they force, but what you really like.
Later, having surprised my parents, I went to science, archeology, and since then the main type of books that interests me is scientific literature. A completely different method of reading works here: you don’t read from cover to cover, but take a certain article or monograph, find a specific place in the text and pull out the information you need. Each highly specialized scientist should equally pay attention to two other activities (this only works in Russia): the fight against insane officials who are trying to drive thinking people under the ground, and the popularization of science. In England, for example, it is not customary to talk about the popularization of science, this is obvious. When I talked about this as part of my report, my listeners, and then the interlocutors, pretended that they had not heard me.
It seems to me that two characters influenced me the most: Sergey Dovlatov and Vasya Vasin from the Bricks group. And "screwed" me all the same Venichka Erofeev. In my opinion, the most important thing in your favorite writer is a Jesuit sophisticated sense of humor. How else to live in Russia and take all the tricks of fate? Only by abandoning meaningful goal setting.
Most of all I like to read those books that my friends advised or gave me. It seems to me that there are no doubts about advice when you love a person, just like with music. I love my parents, secretly in love with all my friends and, if they say: "Read this book, it influenced me," I take it as a direct guide to action. How else can you unravel the object of affection?
There is such a terrible habit of XX-XXI centuries, as reading in the subway. But, really, nowhere so readable, as under the ground, in the noisy stuffy gut of this metal snake. In Moscow, all my travels in the subway are limited to ten minutes. In St. Petersburg, I walk only on foot. It is good to read in the village behind the whitewashed window sill, on the plane, on the train, on Sunday morning, in the queue, in the tent or in the expedition’s camping chair. And the rain incredibly enhances the desire to read.
I have enough nomadic lifestyle. A year and a half ago, I moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In the apartment on Galernaya Street, my mother and I have a large, complicatedly constructed shelf for books around my bed. There was a queue of unread books which, at the time of naive attempts to systematize their lives, were marked with colorful flags: books on archeology, fiction, art history, science books. Every summer I leave for an expedition for 2-3 months, and the places of my deployment often change, so I promised myself not to overgrow with belongings. The first thing I did when I arrived in Moscow was to buy a Dagestan carpet in Izmailovo and seven books in Tsiolkovsky. After a year and a half there is a carpet and an overgrown shelf of books - this is the most difficult thing that is in my Moscow property.
Sergey Dovlatov
Prose collection in three volumes; illustrations by Alexander Florensky
The collection was collected by volumes from my father and then returned. I remember how I started reading Sergey Dovlatov and decided that I wanted to read everything he wrote. About five years ago, I organized, together with a friend, composer Mitya Holtzman, a public reading evening accompanied by piano at the Gallery of Experimental Sound (GEZ-21). As I remember, it was a "compromise". I often illustrate many everyday moments with the help of Dovlatov's stories, and since they are already described in the text, it means, “we saw, we know.” So live easier.
Michael vic
"Sunset Konigsberg. The testimony of a German Jew"
In December last year, I visited Kaliningrad for the first time, about which I had heard a lot from my friends from Königsberg. Once there, I began to read a book reprinted in 2015 by the design bureau Pictorica. The city is saturated with such a large number of layers of human and cultural memory that it is not entirely clear what personal feelings to experience in relation to it. Honestly, the book plunged me into such total despair that I realized that I couldn’t be there for another minute. In the book of Vika, the Soviet army is described not as a liberator, but as quite a wild winner and invader. This story made me worry for another month and talk with everyone I met, only about this book, and communication with sensitive people helped to release the situation.
Maria Rolnikuite
"I have to tell"
This book was given to me by a friend when we entered into a dialogue about the work of Vic, this was her answer. At some point, it became clear that I could not read it in the subway, because it was hard to switch: for ten minutes you plunge into a heartbreaking canvas, and then you pop up somewhere in a noisy underpass where someone else plays the violin . In the meantime, this is a book about the Vilnius ghetto from the face of a teenage girl who learned all the texts of her diary to tell.
Joseph Brodsky
"Fondamenta degli incurabili. Embankment of the Incurable"
I understand that loving Joseph Brodsky in our time is a common place, but I have made out for myself this book for quotes. From a certain point before traveling to other cities and countries, I decided to read fiction related to the destination instead of guidebooks. Last year, before a trip to Venice, we read with a friend of Thomas Mann, Alexander Ippolitov and Brodsky. This book turned out to be the best guide to the city palazzo with wet floors of the first floors and fascinated us with the search for the embankment Incurable.
Vladimir Nabokov
"Other shores"
On Bolshaya Morskoy there is the house of the Nabokov family, which now houses a small actively developing museum. All navigation is made of this novel, which describes in detail the childhood and youth of Vladimir Nabokov: with all the people and all the objects, right up to what the house porch looked like on the day when Nabokov's family left them forever. I love memory and subject matter.
Andy Warhole
"Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and vice versa)"
I consider Andy Warhol a genius. He clearly caught the timely and gathered around him those people without whom the 60s and 70s simply would not have happened - well, he is a curator from a god who simultaneously drew, looked through magazines and watched TV. When in high school I was fascinated by them, I read a lot of books in detail telling his biography: they all lacked something. This book also lacks something, but since it is not an autobiography, but only an author's statement, this is forgiven for her.
Meir Shalev
"Russian novel"
A few years ago I went to Israel for a program for Jewish youth. We lived in a kibbutz and learned about his life. After that, I decided to read the "Russian novel" about the first settlers, their dreams and hopes. Many of the main characters came to Israel on foot from the Russian Empire. This is a very beautiful story, similar to the epic and stories of Gabriel García Márquez.
Sergey Rudenko
"Culture of the population of Gorny Altai in the Scythian time"
The book on archeology, published in 1953, is like a bible to me. Without looking, I can feel it on a shelf in the library of our Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences: I could not buy it in all the years of work, as it is a rare and second-hand edition. The design is similar to the "Book about tasty and healthy food", which has fascinated me since childhood with its spreads. This is the first encyclopedia on the culture of the nomadic peoples who inhabited the Altai Mountains in the 1st millennium BC. er (if to speak more popularly - Scythians), it is written in a very beautiful and understandable language, it has a lot of drawings and colored photographs, so that it suits almost everyone - not necessarily just scientists.
Alexander Pyatigorsky
"Free philosopher Pyatigorsky"
My father listened to Alexander Pyatigorsky on Radio Liberty in the 1970s, when I was not in the project. Now I have grown to the moment when these programs appeared on the Internet, and I can watch them and read a book with comments. Yes, like many, I succumbed to the fascination of the philosopher Pyatigorsky and I cannot help but express delight in his ability to clearly express thoughts. He laid the foundation that helped me pass the Ph.D. in philosophy.
Alexey Yurchak
"It was forever, until it was over"
According to the advice of my mother, who remembers the author even after Pushkin, 10, in the late 1980s - early 1990s, I undertook to read this book, especially not hoping to learn something new. The current professor of anthropology, being the manager of the AVIA group in 1987, constantly wrote down something, interviewed and accumulated invaluable material about the end of the Soviet era. Since we still reflect on it on the ruins of the post-Soviet space, this unique methodically correct work is an ideal material for all historians, anthropologists and simply nostalgic.