Literary critic Galina Yuzefovich about favorite books
IN BROKEN "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, literary critic, teacher of HSE and NES, and Medusa columnist Galina Yuzefovich shares her stories about favorite books.
Perhaps the most intimate and at the same time characteristic story about me and the book dates back to the time when I was about nine years old and we lived with my mother in Tbilisi. We moved there shortly before, I terribly missed my father and grandmother, who stayed in another city, I didn’t like the new school, the new apartment, and, frankly, it wasn’t the most fun time in my life. Sometimes it turned out that I had to spend the night at home alone: my mother's work was connected with traveling and that's what I was afraid of more than anything else in the world. It was not even a matter of just going to bed: first I watched the TV all the way until the programs were finished (the tuning table for me and today is a symbol of abandonment and longing), and then I began to practice sorcery. I laid myself a blanket on the floor in the middle of the room, put a pillow on it, and built a protective circle around my favorite books — put them in spines upward, so that a small wall was made: “Winnie the Pooh,” “Three Musketeers,” Gerald's books Darrell, Zhukovsky's ballads, English poetry in Marshak's translations, "Yankees from Connecticut at the court of King Arthur" by Mark Twain ... And only inside this magical abatis I could fall asleep relatively calmly.
In fact, I still live like this today: any external discomfort, any pressure of the environment, I “sit out” in books, hide there like a snail in a house. For example, I contrived to simply not notice the "dashing 90s" - that is, I remember everything perfectly, and black lack of money, and how I worked in a TV program of criminal news, and Chinese down jackets (green with purple or purple with mustard, nothing uglier in life I saw), but in fact I was studying in the classical department at that time, I read Plato, Lucian, Thucydides, Virgil and Propertias, and this was the main thing in my life. This was life, and everything that happened in the outside world, worried about the same as the rain outside the window. Well, yes, from time to time you have to go under this rain - but nobody will be seriously killed because of this, because shelter is always at hand.
Generally, if we talk about books more objectively, then the foundation of my personality, some kind of foundation of foundations, is, of course, antique literature. I think if I had come to an uninhabited island with a good library of ancient authors, I would not be bored for a minute - in fact, there is everything that I love and that is important to me. It still takes my breath away from Homer - it is physically painful for me to read, like Odysseus meets his dead mother in the realm of the dead. My eyes get wet from Sophocles: "Oedipus-king" is some kind of incredible emotional tension and goosebumps, I start to cry when I simply scroll through this text in my head, even reading is not necessary. I remember by heart a good half of Horace's ode and regularly declare them to myself. "Attis" Catullus shook me at one time, like no other text in the world, either before or after, and I can not imagine anything more refined and flawless than the dialogues of Plato.
In addition to the love of the subject as such, training in the classical department taught me the skill that determined my professional fate: my teachers, philologists Nikolai Grintser, Olga Levinskaya, Nikolai Fedorov, Grigory Dashevsky, Boris Nikolsky, Igor Makarov taught me to actually read. I have been reading from four years and, as they say, everything in a row - as the nanny of my children says, everything that is not pinned down (I remember, at twelve years, I read Frazer’s Golden Branch, Envy and Olesha’s Parma Monastery for a week and nothing, somehow everything was learned). But as soon as I started reading the original authors in the original, I realized that I really don’t know how to read - I take off the foam, I read some one level, and I’m stupid to skip the rest and manage this process. During five years of studying at the university, I learned to read at different levels: I can dig deep into the text and take it apart on a thread, I can slip on the surface on fast skates, I can read it as a historical source and in a dozen more ways.
Actually, it was this skill that predetermined my choice - to become a book critic (if in this case it is appropriate to speak about some choice - it came out like this): I can read best of all that I can do, this is my only superpower . Now, of course, my relationship with reading has changed: becoming a professional reader, I do not read like in my youth. Rarely something punches me to tears, I almost stopped resorting to my husband in pajamas and reading something out loud to him, as happened earlier - now that I could not breathe directly from the book, it should be Mikhail Shishkin's "Letter" or " Stoner "John Williams, or" Little Life "Chania Yanagihara. But now almost any book is interesting to me - it is a much cooler, more relaxed feeling, of course, but no less profound. With the same pleasure I read some thoughtful science non-fiction, and Russian novels, both translated and child-teen. And this is also a reader's happiness, of course, although a bit different is not as sharp as before, but more stable: the difference is approximately as between the first phase of falling in love and a happy marriage.
Now I read three or four books a week and I look through another heel: I save something for the future, I throw something in the middle (if I understand that I still won’t write about this book), I just get acquainted with something. I read books for the most part before the release - the publishers send me first announcements, and then a layout of books that are being prepared for publication, so I don’t have to specifically run around the bookstores and catch something there. Right now I read Susan Hinton's “Outcasts”, which were supposed to be released just a few days ago, and Mikhail Gigolashvili's new novel, due out in early February, and on vacation I expect to read the remaining three parts of Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante and The Story of a German "Sebastian Hafner - I had long anticipated both, and then, and finally, their hour has come.
Peter Gulyar
"The Forgotten Kingdom"
This book appeared in my life relatively recently, and when I read it, there was a completely fabulous, rare feeling: you envy yourself, you are afraid that it is almost over, and you still cannot bring yourself to read more slowly. Our compatriot Peter Gular - from the first wave of Russian emigration, only he emigrated not to Europe, like the others, but to China. There he became interested in Taoism, and even (which is much more surprising, in fact) got a job in the Chinese civil service — in an office dedicated to the development of cooperation in the deaf outskirts of the Middle Kingdom.
As her emissary, Gulyar spent seven years in the ancient Lijiang district, in the foothills of the Himalayas, driving around the most distant corners of his and making connections with the most unusual of his inhabitants. Exotic tribes, strange customs, strange local flavor, exciting adventures - in “The Forgotten Kingdom” is everything that should be in an ideal book about long-distance travels, but for me it is primarily a story about tolerance, goodwill, about openness, about feeling self-esteem and thoughtful, respectful interest in a foreign culture - and most importantly, about the amazing fruits that such an approach to life brings.
Vladimir Korolenko
"The Story of My Contemporary"
Memoirs of Vladimir Korolenko (everyone knows him from the tears-down story "Children of the Underground", which are held in school) - from among those books with which I live all my life, I check, come back, reread, talk. Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko may not be the best writer of the last third of the XIX century, but definitely one of those righteous who hold the world, the most noble and bright representative of his generation.
“The story of my contemporaries” is the autobiography of a person who always, under any circumstances, makes an ethically impeccable choice, and not as a result of some kind of difficult and painful internal struggle, but simply because it cannot be banal, cannot do otherwise — he is arranged. The book of Korolenko gives me a very comforting feeling that everything in the world can be good and right, that absolute good really exists and is quite capable of fit inside a particular person.
Alexander Grigorenko
"Mabat"
This book was recommended to me by my father, the writer Leonid Yuzefovich: we largely disagree with him, but there is one type of plots, in front of which we are equally unarmed - these are epic plots, from the French “Song of Roland” to the Indian “Mahabharata” or Latvian ” Lachplesis ". And Mabet of Krasnoyarsk Alexander Grigorenko is, of course, a real epic, for nothing that is written today.
The story of the favorite of the gods Mabat, based on the northern Nenets material, is an existential drama of incredible strength and sharpness, built with some kind of almost impossible skill and precision. Every detail here is not accidental, every word in its place, every event we see twice - first with the eyes of a happy and arrogant person in his happiness, and then with the eyes of a doomed person and everything lost. Nenets, tundra, Malitsy, wanderings and camps - at first it can push away, but after twenty pages you completely forget that we are talking about some strange, alien to modern man things, places and concepts. All the husks are crumbling, and before you remains a powerful and piercing, sorry for the pathos, the story of the human soul, purified from all external and alluvial.
Mariam Petrosyan
"The house in which ..."
There are books that somehow do not want to read: you resist them, put them aside and “for later”, almost forget, and then suddenly you open - and that’s all, disappeared, you come up in a week, gasping for breath and in complete confusion. This is exactly what happened with Mariam Petrosyan’s “House in which ...” novel: a boarding school for children with disabilities, a thousand pages, and even fantasy like - no, thanks, thank you.
However, when I managed to overcome myself and began to read, it turned out that “Home” is not even literature, but rather witchcraft and sorcery: you turn the first page, enter the world invented by the writer and suddenly stop hearing sounds outside, as if closed the magic door behind you. For me, it was a new, vivid experience of falling into a book, like a wormhole, and at the same time a slightly humiliating experience of my own critical helplessness: seven years have passed since then, but I still have not learned to explain what Petrosyan is so wonderful with. You just have to take my word for it - this is a real literary miracle, and if you have not read "The House in which ..." before, I can only envy you.
Thomas Edward Lawrence
"Seven Pillars of Wisdom"
Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, one of the leaders of the famous Arab uprising during the First World War, is a cult figure in the English-speaking world, but we hardly know him, except for the main role in the classic film with Peter O'Toole. An intellectual, an eccentric, an adventurer and an inventor, at twenty-seven years old he became the head of a huge army of Arab nomads, at thirty, at the head of British troops, defeated Damascus from the Turks, and died at forty-six, riding a motorcycle.
Between these points, he wrote a book of memoirs with the pretentious heading "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" - mannered, complex and elaborate, but with all that fascinating. Lawrence is a classic unreliable narrator: he lies, keeps back, then tries on the role of a romantic hero, then ascribes other people's feats to himself, then distributes his own achievements with a generous hand to others - and all this is in a dizzying, archaic, artificial and pronouncedly beautiful language. I read this book for several years in a row, excitedly, I tried to translate it (rather unsuccessfully), I literally raved about it - in short, one of the most fascinating reading adventures in my whole life.
Mary stewart
"Hollow Hills"
It happens that the writer seems to be writing someone else's novel, intended for someone else, much more gifted and significant. Approximately this happened to the Englishwoman Mary Stewart: between a set of mediocre ladies' novels, she wrote a trilogy about King Arthur and the magician Merlin, the second part of which (actually, Hollow Hills) is truly remarkable. I read it at ten years, much earlier than it should have been (but in those days the category of children's reading was generally pretty blurred), and it turned out to be unforgettable.
I was a Soviet girl, I grew up on historical books like Lyubov Voronkova’s “Hero of Salamis” or Zinaida Shishova’s Jack the Straws, which are very good, but very realistic, and for me the very idea that you can say so about history so thickly stained with magic, became a real shock. A couple of years ago I reread Hollow Hills - and you know, the impression did not fade. It is no coincidence that the great Inna Bernstein, translator of the Death of Arthur by Thomas Malory and Moby Dick by Herman Melville, undertook to translate this book.
Ambrose Beers
"Fables and Tales"
Ambrose Beers's stories were the first book that I read in English myself: I was about twelve or thirteen years old and at first I was more proud of the fact that she was such an adult, she chose, she read in a foreign language. However, very quickly this feeling receded into the background - the texts themselves turned out to be too good. Beers wrote at the end of the XIX century, but it is impossible to believe in it - his stories read as if they were written today. Actually, for the most part, this is a horror, but it's not just the incredible horror that Beers can pump (after me, neither Howard Lovecraft nor Stephen King is afraid of me). Each text (and they are very short, ten or twelve pages) is some kind of heavenly standard of literary perfection.
Joseph Brodsky said about another writer: “It’s as if it’s not written, but cut out with a razor,” and it seems to me that it is difficult for Ambroz Birs to find the definition more precisely. "The case on the bridge over the Owl Creek" - a perfect story-dream, paradoxical and unexpected. "Fight in the Coulter's Gorge" "- a heartbreaking drama about the conflict of feeling and duty. Eyes of the Panther is the most terrible scary movie I've ever read, although there is nothing especially frightening about it. It was with Beers that the great love for the genre of the story began, which in my personal hierarchy occupies the top line - much higher than the novel.
Mark Block
"Apology of history"
I graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology, the department of history, and all the years that I studied, I had to answer the question "Why did your story give up at all?" With varying degrees of unconvincingness. It happened in the nineties, and many then believed that everything we knew about ourselves, about the past, about our common history, turned out to be meaningless, redundant, unnecessary. And then I got into the hands of a small book of the French historian of the school "Annals" Mark Blok - he wrote it shortly before his death, in the Resistance detachment, in 1941, when the whole world also thought that the story was over and nothing more makes sense.
With striking clarity, wisdom, and at the same time, with ardent passion, Blok explains why this is not so and how humanity should interpret the lessons that the past presents to it. It seems to me that the “Apology of History” is the book with which every person must take a mandatory look at the subject of historical memory, exploits, valor, glory and the like.
Nijo
Uninvited Tale
The imperial maid of honor Nijou fell to live in a strange and troubled time - at the end of the XIII - the beginning of the XIV century. Formally, the emperor still reigned, but in reality, power in Japan shortly before it passed to the samurai class, and all court life was nothing more than a sad and exquisite decoration - a sham, devoid of internal content.
Nijou wrote the autobiography of a lonely woman who depended on the men around her in everything except thoughts and feelings, as they say, “on the table,” and her manuscript was found only five hundred years later, in the middle of the twentieth century. And then around this “Unsolicited Tale” a real “nidzemania” flared up - this text sounds so recognizable, pressing and modern. It’s a little ridiculous to admit it, but at sixteen, Nijou's book became for me a kind of textbook on gender issues - it was then that I first thought about how a woman’s life in a masculine society is organized.
William Somerset Maugham
"Ashenden"
My grandmother was sick, she was in the hospital, and I had to spend the night with her because there were not enough nurses, but she could not get out of bed and go to the toilet. Before I ran out of the house, I grabbed the first book I could get into my pocket, and it turned out to be the stories of William Somerset Maugham from the cycle “Eshenden, or British Agent,” which I then read overnight without closing my eyes for a minute. У нас Моэма знают главным образом по романам "Театр", "Луна и грош" и "Бремя страстей человеческих", популярным в советское время, однако именно этот сборник, на мой вкус, бесспорная вершина его творчества.
Formally, these are spy detectives (it is no coincidence that Ian Fleming called Maugham his teacher, and his hero Eschenden as a prototype of James Bond), but in reality each of the novels included in the collection is a strikingly powerful story in which the plot outline, however flawless, serves only as a frame for a story about things much more complex, subtle and deep. Before exploring "Eshenden," I arrogantly lifted my nose from genre prose - a mistake for which I am ashamed to this day: in capable hands, the "low" genre becomes magnificent - the best of all possible instruments, and Maugham demonstrates it masterly.