Gender expert Irina Kosterina 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, an activist, coordinator of the Gender Democracy program of the Shevchenko Fund, shares her stories about favorite books. Heinrich Böll and a specialist in the North Caucasus, Irina Kosterina.
In Soviet childhood, parents had few good books: mainly patriotic writers "about the war and the feat of the Soviet people", "Roman newspapers" or very grown-up and very boring Frenchmen were on the bookshelves. The school curriculum was often either terribly ideologized, or inaccessible to children's understanding: I still consider it to be madness to force sixteen-year-old children to read War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. Fortunately, there were a lot of people in my environment who gave exceptionally good books for birthdays. Her favorite piano teacher regularly gave or gave to read the poetry of the Silver Age and Spanish poets, a great-aunt — a primary school teacher in a village school — first supplied beautifully decorated books of fairy tales and adventures, and then Russian classics, which went beyond the school curriculum.
So for many years I became fascinated with poetry and began to write poems myself, imitating Tsvetaeva and Garcia Lorca. But, to my shame, non-classical poetry, such as the New York poetic school, I discovered quite recently and now I read with great pleasure: if I knew that I could write freely, without thinking about the rules, I should not be a slave to rhyme, then I would make a poet.
From the age of sixteen, the period began when I began to clearly understand which books I like, what I expect from them: I could not endure texts with an open end or a dramatic hopeless ending. After reading Leonid Andreev's Life of Vasily of Thebes, I was depressed for several weeks and did not understand how it was possible to write such a terrible story that knocked the ground out from under my feet (then the movie “Breaking the Waves” produced a similar effect). For me, books have been and remain a source of inspiration.
Since I began to engage in sociological research, books are increasingly associated with the profession. At some point I discovered that I read almost exclusively academic texts: monographs, articles in scientific journals, reports. But then there was a turning point in my reading biography: in 2011, I bought Kindle and since then ninety percent of the literature has been reading exclusively on it. Now on my Kindle there are about two hundred books, which I grouped into categories: for example, there are special books for vacation and airplanes, and there are books for the metro or for home reading in the evening. The only thing Kindle lacks is the visuality, the ability to remember the cover, the weight and volume of the book, and pour coffee on the page.
Fazil Iskander
"Sandro from Chegem"
This is the case when you cannot read an important book for many years, and then it seems incredible that you lived without it before. After the death of Iskander, I saw how people from the North Caucasus, with whom I worked, discussed this book on Facebook. Now for me this is one of the "resource" books about the Soviet era: very sunny, kind, funny, ironic, where even the horrors of Stalinist repression seem only temporary turbidity in the fate of the main character, who will always find a way out of the situation.
Sandro is an eternal mythological sanguine personage who knows how to live strongly and happily: he as if draws a resource from the land where he lives, and therefore this resource is endless. Current historical events and a juicy description of the life of a small Abkhaz village intersect with the adventures of the main character. Iskander himself defined the book as a rogue novel, but for me it is read quite differently: it is a historical drama that tries to pretend to be a comedy. The protagonist, a rural peasant who has rather conservative views on many things, managed to be both a dancer of the ensemble (and even deserve Stalin's praise), and a master of ceremonies, and a lover of a noble princess; the background is the recognizable and dramatic events of Soviet history: war, revolution, repression, the next war. To me, as a person who loves and studies the Caucasus and works in this region, all the images, smells and sounds seemed incredibly alive and real.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"To live, to tell about life"
"Sandro from Chegem" reminds me of the book of the author, whom I read endlessly: I will finish one book, reread another. Recently, “Live to Tell About Life” was translated into Russian by Marquez — an autobiographical novel written in his usual genre: where the reality ends and the myth begins — it is not clear, and the author himself becomes the hero of his own work. I read all the major works of Marquez, but his earliest "USSR: 22,400,000 square kilometers without a single Coca-Cola advertisement!" and the last one reveals something special to me in my favorite author: you can see where his impressions came from, what influenced his images, his manner of writing, language, how reality events turn into phantasmagoria, a fairy tale.
The real events of youthful life are described as if endless sleep with a lot of plot branches. As usual, the abundance of bright names of the main characters (Marquez's relatives and friends) soon merges into a single stream, where it is impossible to remember who is who, and this is also an important author's idea: so Marquez shamanizes and twists the reader, enveloping him with a magical cloud. The book also begins in mythology: the mother comes to the author, whom he does not recognize, to ask him to go with her to sell his childhood home. In many of the events described, people, places over time, the outlines of "A hundred years of loneliness" begin to appear, and Marquez's main novel becomes, as it were, a mirror image of the author's life, where reality flashes at every turn.
Guzel Yakhina
"Zuleikha opens her eyes"
The highly acclaimed debut book by Yakhina tells the story of her family, who suffered from collectivization, dispossession of the kulaks and eviction to Siberia in the thirties. Many books have been written about the difficult everyday life of the dispossessed, but this one - about a very vulnerable man, an illiterate young woman from a small Tatar village who did not make any decisions in her life, did not have the right to vote and not even a bed in her husband’s house (or rather her mother-in-law ) and was under the wheels of a soulless, brutal machine of Soviet collectivization. I, as a person engaged in the rights of women in traditional culture (I constantly meet at work with early marriages, forced marriages and violence from husbands and mother-in-law), it was especially difficult to read the first part of the book, although the author perfectly managed to convey the memories of my grandmother life, local beliefs, rituals.
The second part - the construction of a settlement on the Angara from scratch, where all conditions resemble the life of a caveman (hunting and gathering), only with a rifle set to your head - is written in a slightly different manner, and, frankly, a love line that occupies an essential place seems to me extra. The book does not have a happy end; the author rather tries to stretch the thread of memory to his ancestors, to recall his roots and to outline the picture of his identity.
Michelle Welbeck
"Submission"
Every novel of Welbeck is controversial, but in the case of “Obedience” it turned out to be just an ominous coincidence: on the day of the novel’s release Charlie Hebdo published a caricature of a writer on the front page with the signature: “The predictions of the magician of Welbec: in 2015 I lose my teeth, in 2022 I observe Ramadan "; On the same day, the editors attacked Islamic terrorists, and among the dead was a friend of Welbeck, the economist Bernard Marie. “Submission” is not about sex and the existential crisis of European middle-class intellectuals who go crazy with boredom. This is an attempt to dystopia with different scenarios of the political development of France. The future of Welbeck came up with a not very distant - only 2022 - and among the actors, along with fictional characters, there are real politicians: Francois Hollande, Marine Le Pen, Francois Bayrou.
This book caught me not only by the mood of a routine dystopia. The reader is immersed in the intrigue of acute elections: who will win - the ultra-right headed by Le Pen or moderate Muslims, and which of these elections will be better or worse for France, for democracy, for Europe? As a result, the winning candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood carries out mild but radical changes in French law: it carries out Islamic privatization of the university, legislates labor discrimination against women, and legitimizes polygamy. Critics of Uelbec blamed him for Islamophobia, but the book is not about that at all. For me, the most important thing in it is a slow and passive conciliation with all the undemocratic changes that the state has initiated, passivity, opportunism, and ultimately - submission.
Stephen D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
"Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance"
"Free Economics" is a series of two books in which the authors - an economist and a journalist - have gathered funny facts from different sciences and found unexpected correlations between them. In the first book, the most amazing idea for me is how abortions are related to crime. Referring to individual studies, the authors say that the restriction of abortions in the United States in the seventies led to the fact that in the nineties, the very generation of children who did not want, but were forced to give birth, grew up. As a result, parents were not particularly invested in their education and upbringing - as a result, this generation became the source of a powerful criminal wave, which ended in the next generation, where there were fewer children, but at the same time they were wanted.
In the second book, insane facts are even more: for example, drunken walking is worse than drunk driving, and horses on city streets are more harmful than cars. I also found very interesting stories about altruism and social non-indifference and apathy. The topic was developed by many authors, the last one that I read was the book “The Predictable Irrationality” by Dan Ariely.
Mikhail Zoshchenko
"Before sunrise"
We are accustomed to consider Zoshchenko a humorous writer who, in an ironic manner, illuminated the early Soviet life and philistine customs. Zoshchenko himself considered this autobiographical novel to be his main work. This is a complex and honest story about an attempt to understand the deepest fears, states and neurosis that haunts the author, a story about how he tried to overcome melancholy and the fear of life.
Influenced by the works of Pavlov and Freud, Zoshchenko tried to identify and analyze early childhood fears, to overcome difficult memories and to cope with tragic events. At the same time, the book is about the spirit of the times and the choice of the Russian intellectual of the transition period. The heroes are fellow writers - Alexander Blok, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Olesha, Sergey Yesenin, Korney Chukovsky, - who in the book of Zoshchenko look really alive. For me, this book is a manifestation of human will in the pursuit of happiness, the desire to free oneself from the pressure of incomprehensible constraining forces, honest confession and, as Zoshchenko himself believed, an attempt to make life easier and search for a way for his readers.
Martin Seligman
"New Positive Psychology: A Scientific View on Happiness and the Meaning of Life"
One of my first scientific books about happiness. The essence of the Seligman method is that he proposes not to focus on the "negative" manifestations of the psyche and neuroses (as traditional psychology and psychoanalysis do), but to focus on the most important human skill - the ability to be happy. For many years as part of his research, he studied what it is worth living for. Now this book seems to me too simple, but in 2014, when it came to me, it was a kind of map on which to move.
The most valuable thing for me was the observation that happiness can be of different kinds, and the most complete and lasting is possible only when a person focuses not on his needs, but on an altruistic (and often spontaneous) desire to help others. This fills life with a deeper meaning, allows you to feel the course of things and makes the psyche more stable. The Seligman approach is based on three directions: first, the study of positive feelings, second, the identification of positive character traits, and third, the study of phenomena and institutions in society that contribute to the development of the best human qualities (for example, family and democracy). Positive psychology helps to find a way out of any situation, even when it seems that it is not there.
Laura Van Dernip, Connie Byrne
"Caring for Others While Trauma Stewardship"
A very important book for people of "helping" professions: doctors, rescue psychologists, social workers, community activists. The symptoms of burnout caused by many emotional upheavals from work and “compassion tiredness” are well known to all people involved in the lives of others. At some point, the person helping becomes insensitive or even cynical to the problems of the people whom he has to help, and this interferes with him and his work. Lipsky proposes to practice a conscious attitude towards his work: to be able to stop in time and not burn to the end. So, she cites sixteen common symptoms for burnout: for example, the feeling that we never do enough, hyper-responsibility, a decline in creativity, a sense of guilt, anger and cynicism, a feeling of "if not me, then someone" and other harmful emotions. She leads exercises that help to deal with the symptoms.
For me and many of the people I work with, the craze situation is a constant reality: working in the North Caucasus with regular violations of the rights of women and LGBT people, at some point you stop sympathizing with everyone, and you start to hate everyone in extreme degree. It is very difficult to recover from this state, and some activists do not even return to their activities. The book Lipsky offers us the path of "conscious" or "sustainable" activism, where caring for oneself is a necessary part of caring for others. In psychotherapy, there is a principle used in safety instructions on airplanes: first put a mask on yourself, then on the child. I very much hope that this book will soon be translated into Russian and it will help many specialists and activists who, in conditions of diminishing possibilities, work on their last gasp.
Oliver Sachs
"Anthropologist on Mars"
All Sachs books are an amazing story about how complex and striking the human brain is and what kind of bad jokes he can sometimes play with us. I was very touched by the history of the artist, who, as a result of a physical injury, lost his "color" vision and as a result began to see and paint the world in a black and white color scheme. But the most important for me were several stories of people with symptoms of autism - this is a complex and hitherto unexplored phenomenon that Sachs investigated. Being rather an extrovert, I often had difficulty communicating with people with autism. The Sachs Book helped me to better understand them, to feel how important it is to observe their boundaries, and to find new ways to interact.
Karen Armstrong
"The history of God. 4000 years of quest in Judaism, Christianity and Islam"
A rather thick book, which, in my opinion, should become a must-read for modern people. Religions have become very politicized ideologies, most people on earth believe to some degree or another. Therefore, Armstrong's book is an irreplaceable encyclopedic work based on many years of research by the author, while fascinatingly telling about many discrepancies in the development of religion. Why are religions based on similar, but different principles? Who and how determined the nature of God in canonical texts? What role did the human factor play? Where was the line between mysticism and dogmatism?
The history of Armstrong is also quite amazing: she left the path of a Catholic nun and became the world's famous historian of religion. I was lucky to meet her last year in Moscow, where she came to the NOW festival with a lecture, and I absolutely fell in love with her - a very strong, integral and wise person. She is a brilliant speaker, deeply and subtly explaining complex processes, on TED.Talks there are several of her excellent lectures.