Opera singer Alexandra Dyoshina 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 opera singer, a graduate of the Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an independent film distributor, Aleksandr Doshina, shares her stories about favorite books.

I didn’t start to read consciously very early, and, unlike many of my acquaintances, I really loved what was asked at school. But reading was not the center of my inner life, my secret place where I could hide, experience and dream - like music. Really, I discovered reading only at the university: it piled on me in a hundred times volume, which caused delight and surprise. A delightful hodgepodge of authors swirled me with a wild whirlwind, which I did not immediately learn to cope with, but then lined up in beautiful connections - from Levi-Strauss to the novels of magicians, from Bart to Sophocles, from Mozart's letters to his father - to Jung.

In the first year in Smolny, I got to the general course on Western European literature to Andrei Astvatsaturov, and in the second year to Fedor Dvinyatin, where we read a pile of Latin American prose. Here I completely disappeared. I then firmly fell in love with the literature that grows out of the ground, and began to understand something about myself in this regard: I was born and raised in Yakutia, where the main value of people is their land and traditions. My family was there by the will of the Soviet distributions, and Russian culture had little overlap with the Yakut one. But when I began to read Mexican Juan Rulfo and Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, I realized that I was much more from the Yakut land than I used to think.

I still love the game from the game of classics of Cortazar, to which I return from time to time as a kind of meditation. According to her rules, we must try to remember the most insignificant things from the past, secondary images, smells, small details. Memory miraculously saves everything and populates in one cell the delight of the first meeting with the Atlantic Ocean and the smell of my mother's spirits, which for some reason became brighter when we went together for the first time backstage at the opera house. This game helps a lot to clean up my head - well, or to make a small permutation.

I do not like self-help-books - this is a very artificial form for me. They helped me a lot more when I reworked, devastated and could not do what I liked, Patti Smith's memoirs “Just Children”. And the book of dialogues with Stravinsky or Schoenberg letters is generally the best literature for me on time management and motivation, however, as well as on skill, to fend off sharply. Now I mostly read books about music, theater, art, memories, letters and fiction. I don’t watch TV shows, don’t turn on the background music and don’t go to the cinema for blockbusters: to unload I need silence, silence and a walk in the forest with my dog.

I always carefully choose what to read: I don’t know how and don’t want to learn everything. Many books I can not read to the end and put it off, most often forever. The right book can change accents in life circumstances - I always try to listen to how what I read resonates with what is happening to me. And I am no longer surprised when I read the work of Heiner Goebbels on the subway, but when I went outside I accidentally find myself at a meeting where he speaks to me and turns out to be the most interesting conversationalist over the years.

Fernando Pessoa

"The Book of Unblocking"

I was really looking forward to this book, but when she came out, I did not read it avidly as I was going. Instead, I had a rare experience of slow and enticing reading. Her hero is one of the heteronyms of Pessoa, assistant accountant Bernardo Soares. To his authorship, Pessoa gave his pessimistic reasoning, written on a set of notes that were not stapled in a single order, scribbled on pieces of paper, on the reverse sides of office forms and on napkins in the taverns of the Baixa district of Lisbon.

This autobiography without events is composed of parts: from phrases and aphorisms to a detailed parable. The book does not create a feeling of fragmentation and fragments at all - within itself all thoughts are finished. This prose is very dense, like poetry: Pessoa wrote it for twenty years and, of course, did not finish - this work ends with life. This text, like meditation, plunges into the very heart of the existential uncooperative, not anxious and feverish, but liberating.

Jose Saramago

"Memories of the monastery"

A few years ago I first came to Portugal and got to Mafra, where the famous monastery stands. It so happened that Memories of the Monastery became the first book of Saramago that I read. Levak Saramago very ironically and in tenacious details subscribes to the construction of a monastery, the whole absurdity of the state machine, which at the cost of tremendous sacrifices creates a symbol of exorbitant ambitions and tyranny, and snatches many bright little stories.

But all this seems to be understandable and read to Saramago. He completely disarmed me with others — by how, against this background, he wrote the very heart-piercing love story of a soldier with a hook instead of the hand of Balthazar's Seven Suns and the wizard Blymundy Seven Moons. They are like people who existed before other people and circumstances and loved even before they invented the fall. They built Passarola - the flying ship-bird - and, so that it flew, they collected in a special vessel the will of many people, because it is more volatile than a soul.

"The Age of the" Holy Spring "- the age of modernism"

I am terribly glad that there is this book on my bookshelf, this is my pearl - I allow it to be flipped, only by washing my hands. It became a bibliographic rarity even at the time of publication, I managed to buy it during the festival in the Bolshoi, dedicated to the centenary of the "Spring of the Sacred" Stravinsky, in 2013.

Sacred Spring is the main text of the twentieth century musical theater: I was fascinated by this ballet from my first acquaintance and partly under the impression from him decided to write my bachelor’s diploma about Stravinsky. In a luxuriously printed book, in addition to rare photographs and sketches of the scenes from performances, there are many texts very valuable to me. From the manifestos of Bezhar and Mats Ek, excerpts from Stravinsky and Cocteau, the evidence on which Nijinsky's choreography was restored, to an essay by theater critics and musicologists about the spring productions and their meaning.

Pierre Guyot

"Parenting"

I began to read Guyott precisely from this book: she then appeared in the publishing house Kolonna publications. In the autobiographical "Upbringing" Guillot talks about his childhood in the south of France against the background of the Second World War, and then the war in Algeria. In the book in the forefront of the emotional knowledge of the world as a child, a very detailed chronicle of his intellectual and sensual impressions. The author has a fantastic memory: he tells about himself from the age of one.

When you start to read "Education", immediately grab a clear link with Proust. But it quickly becomes clear that Giyota is stepping up for modernism, when history intrudes into the life of his family of a very traditional French lifestyle — through books, radio messages, the death of relatives — and the entire outside world is a change from one slaughter to another. In Parenting, the most interesting thing for me is how a sensitive and sensitive child becomes the future author of Graves for 500,000 Soldiers.

Alain Rob-Grillet

"Revolution Project in New York"

With Alain Rob-Grillet, I did not immediately ask. I slipped his Jealousy a couple of years ago, but apparently it wasn’t that time at all, and I didn’t get involved. But just a few days ago I read his “Project of Revolution in New York” in one sitting and I am impressed. Rob-Grillet ingeniously introduces details and stratifies contexts on them, shows them with different optics.

The detective component is shifted from the plot to the method: the collisions themselves that are quite trivial for the detective (burning the house, ritual murder, invading the apartment through a broken window) would have no meaning, do not throw the author from one observation point to another. Rob-Grilier famously juggles the “I”: in the “Project of the Revolution” not only the assembly method is introduced, but the technique itself appears, justifying its appearance.

For example, a tape recorder that plays an audio recording of the murder scene, while the reader is invited to watch the girl sitting with her nanny in comfortable chairs listening to her - but then suddenly the attention switches to the murder scene, and then - behind the window of the room, in which it takes place. And, of course, everything is described by the imperturbable language of the screenwriter. This is a very ironic book, and it is a very beautiful jerk to take literature beyond the bounds of literature.

Miguel Angel Asturias

"Maize people"

Magic realism has intrigued me since the time of lectures at the university on Latin American literature, and "Maize people" is still a favorite example of the genre. This is a viscous and rich multi-layer reading. Guatemalan Asturias inhabits Indians, mestizos, villagers and the military in a syncretic space where the real and mythological worlds intertwine, Christian religious ideas intersect with the mythological picture of the Maya world.

At the same time, the novel is very politically charged: Asturias has always been an implacable critic of neocolonialism. And in the 1980s, Asturias' son even took the pseudonym of the protagonist of the “Maize people” - Gaspar Il - and headed under him the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union during the civil war.

Olga Manulkina

"From Ives to Adams: American music of the 20th century"

With Olga Manulkina, I listened to several courses at Smolny and always read her texts. I bought a book from under the printing press - this is a weighty and thorough volume about everything that happened to American music in the 20th century. Open America with these eight hundred pages has become much easier.

The book is perfectly structured, and the names appear not just in chronological order - the history of ideas is built. In this case, it is especially difficult, because when you talk about America, you always deal with a lot of “special ways” that do not want to “comb” in conditional traditions. You can read the book from any chapter: it is written in a very beautiful and clear Russian language and, I think, should not scare a non-musician - after it you immediately want to listen to music. And, by the way, that’s why it is read very slowly: it’s a pity to skip over names and titles when it’s so interestingly told about them.

Heiner Goebbels

"Aesthetics of absence"

I heard a lot about Heiner Goebbels, theater director, composer and former artistic director of the Ruhr Triennale, although I hadn’t seen his performances and installations and didn’t intersect with his music and lyrics before. At one point, I decided that there were already too many signs, that it was time to take it - and I started with a book that led me to a personal acquaintance with the author.

It is very close to me how Goebbels understands the theater - it works closely with perception: it does not translate ideas and meanings that the viewer should consider, but creates a situation in which the viewer gets some experience and finds himself alone with him and works with him. Goebbels can lead the actor off the stage fifteen minutes after the start of the performance and leave the viewer watching the empty stage and the projection of the video where the actor leaves the theater building and leaves home. Or he has a play where there is not a single actor on the stage, and the characters are a suspended piano, rain, fog, wave machine. The drama from the stage thus goes into the auditorium. I am captivated by the fact that Goebbels chooses the spectator with the maxim of his theater - this is modesty and humanity of a very high standard.

Elmer Schönberger

"The art of burning gunpowder"

The book of the Dutch composer and musicologist is a collection of his essays. There is no single object in them - he talks about the recording industry, about melody, about bourgeois touchiness, about hearing, memory, about Mozart and Mahler, about time, about writing. This book is important to me because in it I see an author who is tirelessly thinking about how he listens, how events from everyday life affect his perception of music. He feels very keenly and at the same time writes ironically, understandably, not at all high-minded or detached.

So, for example, he retells the opera of Stravinsky "Mavra": "The girl secretly drags her lover, dressed as a cook, into the parental home. The mother sees the cook behind a shave. The cook escapes into the window. Um-pa, um-pa, music plays, and the opera is over "Mother, daughter and listeners were left with a nose."

Gerard Mortier

"Dramatic Passion"

Gerard Mortier - the man who changed the face of the modern opera house. For more than thirty years, he has been the face of the European opera, from the Salzburg Festival and the Brussels-based La Monnet Theater to the Ruhr Triennale and the Paris Opera. In many ways, his uncompromising efforts of the modern opera house has become what it has become. And, for example, it was he who engaged Dmitri Chernyakov in Paris Opera.

Passion Dramaturgy is a very thoughtful book about how Mortier sees the relationship between music, word and drama in the history of opera. But he chooses the only honest position in relation to the opera - he speaks of it only from the “now” point. Recently I have been thinking a lot about how important it is to ground in the present, how important it is to understand the processes that are happening now. In the art of opera, which seems conservative to many, it is especially important to articulate why this music is performed in our time. Mortier is among those people to whom I am grateful for the fact that it is so interesting for me to live in a modern context.