Director Marina Razbezhkina 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, Marina Razbezhkina, director and head of the Documentary Film and Theater School, shares her stories about favorite books.
We always had a lot of books. First, in a communal apartment, where my mother and nanny occupied one of the largest rooms, sharing it with a piano and several bookcases, then - in a spacious one-room apartment. Mom said she lost several libraries in her life. The first was when her, a young aviation engineer, was sent to a “civilian” in camps near Omsk, where aviation designers already sat and where she lost her first child. In Russia, life is nomadic, although it pretends to be settled: somewhere else, other libraries were lost when moving. Mom was from a peasant family, where they hardly read a lot. The books helped her to move from one social circle to another, where she could talk on equal terms with brilliant new technocrats. I remember she was proud that at the age of six I wrote the word "intellectual" without mistakes.
Once, when I was three years old, a nurse brought me from a walk. There were several unfamiliar men in the room, they rummaged through books, and then threw them on the floor. They scattered, the nurse howled - she knew how to expressively, in prison, to suffer - I picked up and put on the shelf, put things in order. Then my mother was taken away, the nurse was screaming again - I remembered this search by her screams. Mom was returned two days later, by that time the books had already been wiped with a dry cloth and stood in the ground. What it was, I never learned. But I remembered that books should not be torn and thrown, - they should be read.
In two and a half years, I read on the Nekrasov Christmas Tree, "It is not the wind that rages over the forest." The poem was long, but no one could pull me off the stool until I read it to the end. When I was five, I was sick a lot and screamed in delirium: "Turn around in a march, it’s not a slanderous verbal word, quieter, comrades, your word, Comrade Mauser!" I don’t know what was more there: the love for Mayakovsky or the rhythm of the verse was so fascinating.
The nurse considered the books harmful and cursed with her mother. In some ways, a nanny saved me from a flawed book life. She and I took part in fights for a place in queues for groceries and movies, we were taken to the police, and one day my mother caught me at a crossroads, where I, with inspiration and speech variety (thanks to books), asked for alms. As a teenager, I began to read a lot, but meaningfully. Early she took on Thomas Mann, then Faulkner, of ours she loved Chekhov and the Silver Age, which then abruptly fell out of love, - still wary of people who confuse life and the scene.
In a separate apartment, where my mother and I moved, there was more room for books. But not enough to accommodate 8 thousand volumes of very different content. The guy who was called in for repair, on entering, immediately declared: “I don’t work in libraries,” and disappeared. I then began to collect literature on mythology, deciding to do it when I retire. These long-term plans did not come true - I left Kazan for Moscow, taking with me only a small part of the family collection. Now I read only non-fiction, letters, diaries - they explain to me about life more than their artistic counterparts.
I have several books that I reread. This is Fyodor Stepun "From the letters of an ensign-artilleryman", Robert Kapa "The Hidden Perspective", Glenn Gould - his favorites in two volumes, Gaito Gazdanov and Faulkner, Chekhov, Tolstoy. I do not read new fiction at all, although I know the writers by their names and even know some of them. I am so fascinated by real life that there is no time for fiction. Thank you nanny, with whom we fought in the queues.
Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky
"In the forests" and "On the mountains"
When I was 16 years old, I had a question about how life works, and I went into the woods - not as part of a tour, but all alone. It was a powerful experience for an urban girl, whose classes were mainly in reading books. I left for a reason, nowhere, and paved the way for Melnikov-Pechersky’s book In the Forests. Then, after a couple of years, I went on the route of his other book, On the Mountains. Why I, at the age of 16, read it precisely, now I don’t remember. The schism, the Old Believers - there were no religious people in our family, but in Old Believers there was a resistance force, and it was close to me. I announced to my mother that I was leaving for two months in the dense forests. She let go.
These two months were for me the time of the first and absolute freedom. I went astray, walked along the gatyam, and drowned in a quagmire, until I finally reached a secret island, where they lived in the four remaining Kerzhak huts. The ancestors of these people came here during the schism in the 17th century, and their descendants — three old men in thick beards and five old women — never went beyond the boundaries of this land and knew nothing about the XX century. The young ones were no longer with them - they left and never returned. The old people lived poorly, they prayed, read old books, spoke a language that I did not quite understand. They said that I was the first stranger whom they had let into the house. I well remembered the details: how they ate, how they combed their beards, how they sat silently for hours. I spent a week with them and looked back when I left: a bowl hollowed out of a piece of wood flew after me - I still remained a stranger to them.
Maksim Gorky
"Vassa Zheleznova"
"Vassa" is connected in my mind with strong and imperious Russian women, and it doesn't matter at all what class. This “Accept poison”, said Vassa to an unhelpful husband, could well have been uttered by my grandmother. I saw her, grandmother Pelageya Mikhailovna, when I was ten. She was sitting in an old crumbling chair in the same old country house. They brought me to her, she peered sternly and asked how she clarified: "Jewish?" And without waiting for the answer: "Tease in the classroom?" And then the advice: "Beat it right away!" She did not know my father, and her six children (out of 11 born) who were left alive by that time were not particularly interested. She worried about the world around, politics and a sense of justice.
Once (and they threw me into the village all summer), when we sat nearby and read, it was Trud, and I, of course, Alexandra Brushteyn, The Road Goes into the Distance, heard a rustle behind the door, and fell into the house a man with a woman, both with bruises on his face. Grandmother strictly ordered me to leave, and what happened next, I did not see, but I imagined that she had whipped the drunkards with a whip that always hung on a nail in the corner (my grandfather was a blacksmith, he worked at the stable, probably it was his whip). Visitors crawled out of the hut backwards, bowing and mumbling: "That's thanks, Mikhailovna."
Later I read Vassa, and now for me the heroine is always with a grandmother’s face — an arrogant beauty in her youth and an old woman with black hair without a single piece. My grandmother did not poison her husband, but kicked him out of the party in the late 20s: she was the chairman of a collective farm, and he misunderstood the party line. Grandfather was in love with her, and he did not care about the party. I do not reread Vassa, but I always look at the theater, jealously comparing the actress with my grandmother.
Boris Savinkov
"Pale Horse" and "Black Horse"
I do not remember when I had an interest in terror, - fortunately, exclusively theoretical. We were on the "potato", we burned a fire from dried potato lashes and played a guessing game: who would you be in the XIX century. Everyone wrote on the paper about a neighbor. All about me: I would throw bombs at kings. Then I collected books on Russian pre-revolutionary terror, and my favorite was “Pale Horse” - the romantic image of a Russian terrorist, a fair knight, ready to die for the happiness of others, was the very ash of Klaas, who pounded not only in my heart.
In addition, there were rumors among relatives that the Razbezhkin family had just awarded the fugitive criminals who had created a commune village in the Bashkir forests. Who they were - tati or noble robbers, today no one knows. I have always preferred reality to myths. At first Azef appeared in my world, then Gershuni, then I learned how ardent revolutionaries behaved in the royal exile - they put fissils in the pots of their party comrades, and sometimes put razors there. The lofty idea did not withstand the tests of a communal communion, the mythological images were blown away in my mind, I left the terror without joining it with my foot. But I keep reading books on it.
Fedor Abramov
"Brothers and sisters"
By the time I was 20, I was a populist in my head and I read poetry writers. The people were beautiful, existed only in the village, I had to be ashamed of my well-being and sympathize with the peasants. Fortunately, the reader's scent allowed me to highlight the best, and, after reading Abramov's Brothers and Sisters, I went to the Arkhangelsk village of Verkola to see the space and the heroes of the book. I was lucky, I immediately became friends with Dmitry Klopov, one of the prototypes of "The Brothers ...", and with his beautiful mother Varvara Trofimovna, who allowed me to sculpt lips together with my granddaughters gibbons (pies with mushrooms) and to old Russian songs.
We sat and sang: an old woman, five little girls-daughters of Klopov and me. And then we went with the owner and his seven-year-old daughter Irinja to ride around Pinega in a dugout boat, and Iriña called the names of all the birds that flew over us and all the herbs we went through. The world had names for it. We went around all the houses and all the people about whom Abramov wrote. In the evenings, bedbugs were cutting from the spruce root of birds of happiness, and I sat next to me and tried to understand how a bird is made from a solid piece of wood. Then I went further with the raftsmen - the molar alloy was already banned, but according to Pinega, the forest was driven, rolling logs, standing waist-deep in water. We corresponded with Klopov for a long time, he sent me a wooden bird in a large cookie box. Now I don’t regret my young poetry at all.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl
"Supernatural in primitive thinking"
Lucien Levy-Bruhl's book "The Supernatural in Primitive Thinking" was published in Moscow in 1937 in the State Anti-Religious Publishing House, suggesting, apparently, that it is theomachistic. I found it in the library of the Tatar village of Izmery, where I went after university to teach children the Russian language. It has not yet been read by anyone, and, having left there, I took Levi-Bruhl with me. My collection of books on mythology began with him.
Much later, this fascinating story of the supernatural in the primitive became for me a peculiar guide when I decided to remove the "Combineer" (the final name is "Time of Harvest"). Having re-read Levi-Bruhl already at a mature age, I realized that primitive thinking had not disappeared anywhere, that it was characteristic not only of nomads, but also of people who were proud of their cultural achievements. Human nature has not changed much over the past few millennia, and we still feel the craving for the supernatural. For me, this is not very pleasant knowledge, but that is what it is.
Yuri Lotman
"Culture and explosion"
I went after school to philological, because I loved to read, and not only artistic books. My first idols-philologists were Shklovsky and Tynyanov, and then I fell in love with Lotman forever and for a long time injured Kazan University with the requirement to invite Yuri Mikhailovich to give a lecture series. Nobody listened to me. Then I myself went to Tartu with some kind of innocent task from the university newspaper Leninets. In fact, I wanted one thing: to meet Lotman and sit at his lectures.
He then talked with students about "Eugene Onegin". His knowledge of the subject was almost redundant - each line from the Pushkin poem threatened to turn into a book, overgrown with Yuri Mikhailovich’s inconceivable knowledge about the environment from which poems originate, about the time and place of their dwelling. He created a new world, no less artistic than that of Pushkin. I spent the whole week illegally at his lectures and no longer tried to drag Lotman to Kazan University - I didn’t want him to belong to many.
His last lifetime book, Culture and Explosion, was correctly guessed by the publishers as a pocket book (this is my first edition at home). She should be carried all the time with her — to think not only about why Sobyanin covers Moscow with tiles. There is one danger in reading this, as indeed other Lotman's works, he writes so simply that you may not notice the discoveries that generously arise on almost every page. Do not pay attention and easily pin down these thoughts about the fool, smart and crazy. "Fool" has less freedom than normal, "crazy" - more.
Ingmar Bergman
"Laterna Magick"
I was once struck by the sensuality and uncompromisingness of Bergman’s children's experiences, which he told about in the film “Fanny and Alexander” and in the first chapters of his “Laterna Magick”. His hatred of Protestantism was a hatred of unconditional order and submission, impossible for an artist and an emotional child. The frankness with which he talks about his childhood and the existence of his parents in his life destroyed all taboos in conversations about the personal and intimate. The early years are not as a wonderful memory, but as the terrible world of a child, who is caged in socially approved rules. The book of Bergman freed me from the clips that the moral imposes on the memories of the most sacred in your life - childhood, parents and other root foundations. I would offer this book as a psychotherapeutic manual for neurotics.
Luis Bunuel
"Bunuel o Bunuel"
One of my most favorite directors, whose irony in relation to the world is equal to the irony of himself, which is rare. His book is the best tutorial on directing, because it is not about victories, but about mistakes. I like it when the work on them is offered as a household process and quite affordable. It inspires neophytes. Several generations of students listened in my retelling of Bunuel's story about how he and Serge Zilberman, his producer, solved a complex film problem with the help of the martini Extra Dry. After that, all the wine stocks in the neighboring shops usually disappeared, the martini in unimaginable quantities splashed in the stomachs of my students, but did not fulfill its role. And all because we, the loons, cannot enjoy the battle of life. We would have everything with tears and suffering - martini helps only those who have no fear. Bunuel re-read often.
Velimir Khlebnikov
At first, I became interested in Khlebnikov as a countryman-poet — he studied at Kazan University, then assessed the fearlessness of his language and began to gather material for scientific work: for some time it seemed to me that I would become a philologist-scholar. She called the future book cool: "The philosophy of reflections, mirrors, doubles". For a long time there were wooden library boxes with quotations and extracts lying around the whole apartment. It still seems to me that Khlebnikov needs to be read in school to understand what language is, how wide his possibilities are, how poetry can describe what is rarely given to an ordinary word, and catch the elusive. Another amazing property was in the poems and prose of Velimir: his space easily coexisted with such a category as future tense. He was a witch, a soothsayer, he had knowledge of what had not yet come.
I was so carried away by Khlebnikov that one day I left Kazan for Moscow to meet with May Miturich, the artist and nephew of Khlebnikov. The real purpose of my arrival was reconciliation with my father, whom I had not seen for seven years and suddenly unbearably wanted to meet. But without having decided, I came to Miturich: we were sorting through old photos, his huge black cat was sitting on my lap. "This is a sign of the highest location," - said May and gave me copies of photos of Khlebnikov from the family archive. I never got to my father, but when I returned home, I saw a note in my mailbox: "Father died yesterday." Yesterday - it was that evening when I was at May and thought at the same time about Khlebnikov and my father, but more about my father, and he was dying at that time, and everything was tied up in me into one. I did not become a philologist and gradually stopped collecting cards about mirrors and twins. Sometimes I look at Khlebnikov.
Lydia Ginsburg
"The man at the desk"
After reading Ginzburg for the first time, I realized that the word saves, even if it is not a novel that is made up of it, but just a line. Lidia Ginzburg, intelligent, selfless in observations of life and literature, did not write anything big. But she herself became the heroine of her small paragraphs, which, better than artistic prose, created a picture of the world around her, in which there were not only Pushkin, but also besieged contemporaries. The line is working. More notes from Lydia Ginzburg are wonderful because she guesses you in your sorrows, victories and sufferings. Open the book Ginsburg - and you are no longer alone. I look constantly.
Paul Cronin
"Meet - Werner Herzog"
The number one book for those who are involved in cinema, especially for documentary filmmakers. Herzog is not my favorite director, I watch him very selectively. He calls our way of shooting bookkeeping, for me he is a mythologist, and I don’t understand at all why to multiply myths, calling them reality. But his book is so close to me that sometimes it seems that I wrote it.
For example, Herzog’s belief that a person walking beyond measure on foot saves not only himself, but also someone else dear to him. I, too, was a great walker once. 40 километров в день были счастьем, дорога смыкалась с подошвой моих ботинок, и я становилась частью не только этого пути, но и мира: вот она, вертикаль, при всей моей любви к горизонтали.Herzog is so inspiringly convincing in his stories that makes you get up off the couch and hit the road, with or without a camera, but with a camera is better. I read this book constantly, from any page.