InLiberty project director Anna Krasinskaya about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask heroines about their literary preferences and editions, which occupy an important place in the bookcase. Today the director of the InLiberty project Anna Krasinskaya talks about favorite books.
This is a very banal idea, but I am one of those who are poisoned by the school - especially not lucky with a teacher of literature, and I had to get rid of this poisoning for quite a long time. The emphasis was, of course, on the Russian classics, so the way back to it was especially long. Dostoevsky, for example, I can not open until now - I can not physiologically. Therefore, in her youth, in spite of everything in school, she avidly read something different, unlike me, she read everything from Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the like. True love for books came later, and with it immediately a feeling of confusion: you are standing in front of a huge mountain, constantly growing, of everything that you really want to read - and it’s understandable that you don’t have time for even a small part in your whole life. And to something it is necessary to constantly return - Tolstoy, Nabokov.
Now I read more non-fiction: from the last one that made a huge impression on me - Andrei Zorin's book, The Emergence of a Hero. Under the guise of a scientific study of the Russian emotional culture of the end of the XVIII century, she gives a real electric shock. And it does it so gently that you don't even notice right away. The key story for me is connected with the love story (and dislike) of the poet Andrei Turgenev. This is the story of a young man entangled in his own feelings, who, loving one woman, makes a proposal to another, her sister, and even has to make it, based on the logic of his own ideas about what should be. Turgenev suffers endlessly, explains his own actions with innate composure and suddenly dies from hypothermia (!). Ruthless analysis of the plot and the reasons that led to the personal catastrophe of the hero and those who loved him, the cultural context in which all this is possible - reading this, you understand something about personal, about a person who cannot integrate into his time.
From the well-known well-known Alexander Chudakov - "The haze lies on the old steps", a magic book. This is a feast of charm and wit, and at the same time memories of the family exiled to Kazakhstan during the Soviet era. Terribly touching, terribly binding: I want to be equal to all of this, not to lose the most important thing, not to let despair change my own way of life, to see what matters, and to remain free.
Reading today is definitely a luxury for me. Managing to read is not enough, and for this you need a special moment: it is difficult to withdraw yourself from the daily working race, put everything aside and read something. Therefore, reading has become something of a vacation. The best time and place is a plane. I read both on paper and in electronic form indiscriminately - although there is still a separate tenderness for paper. If the book is written in English, I prefer to read the original. Now I read Thomas Wolfe "About time and about the river", after all, is very partial to American prose. Recently reread "Treasure Island", what an impossible pleasure.
Winfried Georg Sebald
"Emigrants"
Reading Zebald today is something like a good tone. In Russian came the great "Austerlitz" and "Saturn's rings". “Emigrants” is another book that is not yet in translation. I read it in English and love it more than anyone. The work consists of individual short stories that tell about the life of German immigrants in different parts of the world after the Second World War. As always with Zebald, there is no exact distinction between fiction and reality, but this is not so important. The themes of memory, death, experiences of catastrophe, memories and life after them - all this is hard reading, but producing some healing effect: you understand more about yourself, although there is not a word about it.
James scott
"Good intentions of the state"
We used to live surrounded by familiar social institutions: we have two passports - for internal "identification" and for travel, we use the same money and weights, each has a surname and TIN number. These are all so familiar things that no one pays attention to them. This is all partly convenient, but we don’t really think where it came from. This book helps to see the same picture from the back: someone came up with what should be so, and for some purposes. James Scott, a star anthropologist at Yale University and an anarchist, describes familiar phenomena from the point of view of state logic: it suddenly turns out that the main goal is standardization, because we have to be comfortable to manage. Does anyone think of their last name in this way?
Nikolay Nikulin
"Memories of War"
The most honest (and also, probably, well-known) book about the Great Patriotic War: the memories of a person who went to the front are almost a student. It helps to quickly get rid of generalizations in the arguments about the story. You read - and you yourself are in a trench, it is not clear what to do, it’s wet, dirty, cold and scary, it’s unclear what is happening and when it will all end. Another of the series of my favorite creepy books, another one that changes the outlook on the world forever.
Vladimir Fedorin
"The Road to Freedom. Conversations with Kakha Bendukidze"
I watched this book literally in the process of creation, so I have a very personal attitude to it. For me, this is not even a complete book, but a living person, her main character, Kakha Bendukidze, is a biologist, reformer, statesman, educator, incredible intelligence and charisma, one of the main meetings of my life. Kakha is no longer with us, and he continues to live in the book. The Road to Freedom consists of dialogues: some very abstract, others summarize the experience of the most recent and, probably, the most successful post-Soviet reforms in Georgia.
It seems to me that it is interesting to read about it, because it is about our present life and about common things that we constantly face and struggle with: the enormous burden of the Soviet legacy, the lack of concordance of principles and values that we would like to actually live, the individual and the state, about how difficult it is to change the spoiled, how the environment creaks and resists, about responsibility, when you personally have to rebuild the life of the whole society, about the victims and the winners. I come back to her constantly and all the time I find something useful in her (or even soul-saving). Besides, she's just very witty.
Marina Tsvetaeva
"The Poem of the End"
I love all of Tsvetaeva, but the “Poem of the End” especially. It is really scary to talk and write about poetry in general: it's all nonsense that you need to know or understand something to love poems, but every time I feel some insecurity and lack of preparation. I do not understand exactly why I love what I love, and I do not know how to explain. Tsvetaeva is a special poet for me. This is the main poet for my mother, and I grew up with it. I read the “Poem of the End” a lot and, as much as Tsvetaeva, I understand everything and I know it intuitively. You read the pain and you know what it is.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
"Night is tender"
Retelling the plot does not make sense, it is familiar to everyone. A very personal book about love that must fight with life all the time and does not always win. Declaration of love, said as it is.
Sergey Dovlatov
"Reserve"
I do not know if there are people who have not read at least something from Dovlatov. I especially like the "Reserve", I can re-read spontaneously - and every time, as at first. A sense of humor and a type of letter that makes it ideal to study right at school, mixed with the late Soviet reality — everything responds somehow painfully, but I want to find myself close to it more often.
Mansour Olson
"Power and prosperity"
I am a politicized and even ideologized person, and this is directly related to my book interests. Everyone who is interested in politics and the structure of society is well known to this book and its central hypothesis. I knew about it for about a hundred years, but for the first time I read it quite recently. In a very succinct form, Mansur Olson explains where the state comes from, and proposes a theory of "stationary bandit" - the origin of the state, as we know it. Olson describes the process of the emergence of the first states, when the nomadic armies grasp the benefits of a sedentary lifestyle, settle in a certain territory and change the taxation system. In the process of this transition, the incentives change: it becomes advantageous for these first states not to rob their own wards, but leave them some amount so that the territory under their control becomes rich and more good can be collected from it. Nothing changed.
Ernest Hemingway
"Fiesta"
When I was very young and read Hemingway for the first time, it amazed me that absolutely all the heroes of all his books could not find the strength to talk to each other - be it in love, friends or almost strangers. It seemed to me that this is something very artificial: you know how you feel - say it. Then I grew up and realized that this illustrious style of short sentences and missing words is the most truthful about people's attitudes, which generally happens.
Mario Vargas Llosa
"Conversations in the" Cathedral ""
Latin American drama from personal and public, corruption and power, loneliness, frustration, despotism and persecution of others - from talking in a bar. It’s like Peru in the 1970s, but very familiar.