Interview editor-in-chief Alyona Doletskaya 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, Interview editor-in-chief Alyona Doletskaya shares her stories about favorite books.
My family was incredibly reading. Both parents read all the time; we had a classic Moscow intelligentsia library: complete works of Russian classics, recent translations, ZhZL, Akademiya publishing house. Of course, parents wrote out literary journals, in the house there were always piles of "New World", "Friendship of Peoples" and "Science and Life". Both parents spoke Polish, so they wrote Polish magazines with comics. Both doctors, surgeons, they created at home an atmosphere in which reading was something natural, everyday — the need to read was not discussed, but assumed.
At the checkpoint between dinner and tea, Mom asked Dad if he read Nekrasov and what he thinks about him. Parents sent me to reading, but I, as an independent child, often stole books from the upper shelves and read under the covers. Probably, the same thing is happening now, when children climb on sites that their parents hide from them. Suddenly, quite recently, I remembered that when I was little and lived with my parents, almost our entire library was located in the corridor. And now I understand that in my own apartment I did everything the same way, absolutely unconsciously.
At the university I came to spite my parents. Honestly, not so consciously, as it is now, it’s customary to choose higher education. Oh, you do not want me to go to the medical? So, what else do I like? I love to read, The Beatles, and I generally like all English-language music. Here and go to the philological.
Once sorting things out at home, while still living with my parents, I stumbled not in clothes in the linen closet, but in Zinoviev's book “The Yawning Heights” and “Fatal Eggs” of Bulgakov - and was shocked by this find. This, of course, was samizdat, brought from somewhere in an illegal manner. I was surprised that one Bulgakov was in an ordinary bookcase on a shelf, and there was another Bulgakov, hidden among the shirts. These were brilliantly written books about what was never said openly at home. It seemed that the hero was Professor Persikov, and my dad was also a professor, and the book at first produced the impression of something family. By the end of the "Fatal Eggs", I was shaking from horror and cold.
Independent reading began at my age of 17-18 years old, during the first courses of the institute. In general, the parent circle influenced me, even when I had already fluttered out of the nest: the opinion of their friends and colleagues was always interesting to me. If Mitta said to the pope: "How, Stasik, this must be read immediately!" - I also urgently ran to look for the book he named. When I started living my life, my husband and our mutual friends were already influencing the choice of books. For me now there is a close circle, the conditional five of friends, with whom we read the same books at the same time.
Of course, I often re-read. I had an incredible meeting with the "Forsyte Saga" - I did not re-read it, but just literally sucked, swallowed. With such pleasure, with what you can, forgive, my God, only eat freshly brewed strawberry foam. We are terribly lucky with foreign classics and Soviet translators, thanks to whom we can feel the language and rhythm of this literature. Galsworthy is now read like a modern writer: if you change the carriage by taxi, a letter to an email, and a visit to the house is a call, we read a book about here and now.
I like to read both new and old at the same time - this is important for me. Balance is generally important to me in reading: when I feel that I dive into junk, I start looking for a new book in a couple. I am interested in the very movement of literary skill and literary thought. In what is said and written, we, probably, always subconsciously look for a person about today, with whom we can speak as much as with a writing contemporary.
I have favorites - those writers whose books I read and laugh out loud, but this happens very rarely. This also applies to life: I incredibly appreciate people over whose jokes I can laugh out loud. And this department, of course, includes Daniel Kharms, Sergey Dovlatov, the early Pelevin, whom I read in galley before publication. I remember flying in an airplane, sorting through the sheets of the "Generation P" manuscript and laughing at the entire salon. My other close authors are those in whose language I bathe. I can get stuck in one paragraph and reread it four times with the feeling that I hear music. For example, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is buzzing, every page rumbles in my head after reading. From such books the internal speech changes completely. Delightful Pushkin sounds inside always. Evgeni Vodolazkin, who wrote "Laurel", on the one hand, is surprised by his lace philological mastery - this is how he dragged me into reading his novel. On the other hand, he is surprised by the fact that he is not light, stingy and far from simple.
With age, I realized that everything that beat us on the head in the school curriculum was completely wrongly imprinted in our head. Probably, a lot has been said and written about how bored books at school seem incredible in adulthood. An extra person, a small person, a family thought - all this is a cliche, with which you cannot read literature. Coming to books through yourself, your life choices - this is a real pleasure.
Michel de Montaigne
"Experiments"
I have this book in duplicate, with it we have been together for about twenty years. At the institute, I studied in the German department, and everyone who is connected with philology knows that the romans go deeper into the romance literature, and we read our Germans, British and Americans - sarcastically looking at each other, we dig each our own tunnel. Every time I enter this book from any page, I am always amazed that this author is not born in 1980. It seems to me very modern, because it is uneven. To the naked eye, one can see that it literally sausages: now power, now relationships with friends, now love, now a profession. Like each of us now. Montaigne is my soul mate. Wow, dear, I understand you so! He likes to be smart, getting into ancient philosophers, and I want to pull him up. Enough already, wasted me with my Plato! That is, I have such a relationship with him, very close.
Say-Sonogon
"Notes at the head of the bed"
This book is deceptively looks like very outdated, but in it I once completely failed. For me, it is important to combine accurate description of life, which you will not find anywhere else, and the customs of a certain environment. This book is an open attempt to evaluate how to live and feed yourself in the life of a court to an intelligent, delicate, beautiful and gifted woman.
Thornton Wilder
"The Ides of March"
The book, to which today I returned three times, brilliant. In the epistolary genre, Wilder gave us the opportunity to see completely lively emotional and well-thought-out considerations of the people behind whom the story stood. This is a great skill. I also love this book because I really love to read and write letters. I think this is a genius of genius: a very frank, unhurried and having a fantastic potential to reach the heart of man.
Art Spiegelman
"Mouse"
I am not a regular comic reader, but Shpigelman shook me by telling me about fascism, not exploiting the image of a man, but inventing mice. This is a courageous choice and a strong move by notion in order to tell about what hurts you and at the same time get sick with all those around you. To the story of a person who is not shown to you, you are experiencing colossal empathy - and this is a very powerful idea.
Nikolay Gogol
"Dead Souls"
Gogol can be re-read endlessly: he creates both fiction and satire. This is a great romance novel, MMM, a fraud that is bought for despair, greed, or stupidity. People who bustle around Chichikov’s venture are amazing in riches of types. We know that Gogol is a gloomy man by nature, tormented by his passions, but he writes incredibly fascinating and tasty, forgive me for this word. His detailed sketches of what will be the bridge, and on the bridge the women will sell bagels - and I will know all of us today. As we sit, we tongue, we invent meaningless things that do not change anything. For each image, in exaggerated form, there is something that we are all tormented with: to dream for nothing, and to recalculate and shift money. Gogol divided one big man into all those hieromerically funny sins. I love him very much for this - you are not standing on the opposite bank and giggling at the characters, but you look in the mirror and sadly smile at the recognition.
Maria Golovivska
Pangea
Maria Golovanivskaya - my longtime close friend with philology and eternal opponent from the French department. We became friends in our youth. "Pangea" is not the first novel of Mary, which I read. In my opinion, it was in this book that she climbed the heights where she hadn’t climbed in her previous novels: she appeared in Pangua as a serious real writer. There is a lot of controversy about this book about Russia or not about Russia. For me, it is about that relativity of morality that we are looking at today. The book is about the danger of power, if you are not ready for it, and about retribution for negligent behavior on earth. It sounds wildly pathetic, but it reads like a fantastic thriller.
Tatyana Tolstaya
"Light Worlds"
“Light Worlds” seemed to me a very joyful and pleasant book compared to “Kysyu”, which I could not manage. Through "Kys" I have to get through, and sometimes it is not at all joyful to read. And yet this book was here, because there are two or three essays in it, over which I laughed, as if undermined. Feelings from them are similar to the feeling that you feel when you roll in the mouth bones from cherry jam. You can not stop, they are still sweet, and you can not suck them to the end.
Michio Kaku
"Physics of the impossible"
Despite my humanitarian background, this book got accustomed to me very easily. When I launched Interview magazine four years ago, we understood that we were going to write about pop culture, but today even pop culture magazine has to do with science. And science began to enter my life as if anew - the future became interesting, close, alluring. Genetics, cloning ethics, Interstellar suddenly sneaked into our lives. When I meet with close friends, and among them there are great scientists, a portal opens, a funnel: half of what they tell it sounds as if from another planet, and I sit with my mouth open, as if enchanted. Kaku became one of such pools for me: the physics, according to which I have always been threefold at school, has become close, important and interesting.
Alexander Pushkin
Poems
If I ever distribute all my books, I will certainly leave to myself the complete works of Alexander Sergeevich. Just because I can take any volume, open it on any page and read what will illuminate me. For me, he is a bright genius, a sun king and a writer who has never slipped anywhere and has never broken himself. You can open the last volume of the collected works and see the postscript to one of the many letters to Natalya Nikolaevna. You see, in the postscript, perfect little things were usually attributed, "here's what." And in his “one more thing” mode it is written: “I kiss the tips of your wings, as Voltaire said to people who did not cost you”. He even ingenious extras.
Korney Chukovsky
"High art"
The work of translation and the talent of the translator. A man with the ease of a butterfly rolls into the asphalt of Comrade Nabokov’s butterfly lover, especially without straining himself - just through comments on the translations. This is an important and delightful book for anyone who wants to write beautifully, think and speak Russian.
Ivan Shmelev
"Summer of the Lord"
On the one hand, Shmelev quenches my thirst for writing. On the other hand, he quenches the soul of any gourmet - a person who loves to buy food, eat food and cook. The first time I read the chapter "Summer of the Lord" in the "New World". There is a brilliant chapter in the book about Lent, the saddest time of our calendar in the culinary sense. Shmelev, obviously a believer and traditionally well-bred, talks about lean markets and laid tables, that you understand how he valued the ability to rejoice at any moment. He speaks of cucumbers from Lukhovitsy not as a bon vivant, a gourmet and a sinner, but as a real big man who, like all of us, is required to enjoy every minute of our lives.