Critic and theater expert Zara Abdullayeva 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, critic and theater expert Zara Abdullayeva talks about favorite books.
I'm a drunken chtitsa. It always has been. I read in my childhood everything, indiscriminately. My grandfather seemed to have all the possible collected works. I devoured the multicolored volumes one by one: from Mine Reed to Maupassant, from Dumas to Zola. And my father's library had wonderful musical literature, books about the theater. I also "loaned" them in a row, haphazardly: Lopukhov about the ballet, a book about the conductor Bruno Walter, letters from Shostakovich to Glikman and so on. But the paranoid passion was brown volum - "Opera Libretto." It is impossible to understand why I re-read this “petukhovin,” as my home teacher Boris Zhaerman would say. Yes, I'm not trying.
I wanted to enter the theater department of GITIS or filfak. Everything was decided instantly - a friend of my parents, a graduate of GITIS, asked a control question: "Well, we will attach you later in the hospital. To whom of the directors would you like to wear vodka?" So pompously, she translated a simpler and more understandable aspiration: "Which of them would you like to run barefoot in the snow for?" Then all the classics of the Soviet direction worked. After thinking for a second, I said that I didn’t want to run around barefoot for vodka to anyone - and entered the department.
I studied with Vladimir Nikolaevich Turbin - a legendary teacher and an extraordinary man. There was no routine at the seminars, nor was there any communication outside the faculty. But the theater has not gone away - I grew up in it; My father was a conductor at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater. Under the influence of Turbin and Bakhtin, with whom Vladimir Nikolayevich was close, I took up the problem of the genre - but as a fundamental concept, a genre as a type of human social behavior. The twists, adventures of the genre interest me in the so-called author's cinema. But I nevertheless defended my thesis about drama.
One of the most important people for me was Boris Isaakovich Zingerman. And after death, he still remains my main "gazebo" (his word). He worked at the Institute of Art History. He never locked himself in theater studies, wrote about art and cinema - the man of the Renaissance. I was lucky. He instilled in me the habit of going for a walk where I want, that is, writing not only about one topic, not being a "red spec." So do not get bored: get tired of something - you can roll.
My first publication in the magazine "Art of Cinema" was spontaneous, random. I do not even remember what. Now, without changing neither cinema, nor literature, I write and about theater. This turn was provoked by Colta editor Dmitry Renansky, with whom you can discuss everything about music. Now, during insomnia, I read what is “worn”, what will catch my eye in the Falanster store: from Vodolazkin's “Lavra” (there I was fascinated by a plastic bottle in the forest of the 16th century, it seems, for a century) to the “Art of Stylish Poverty” by a German journalist .
Lotreamon
"Maldor's Songs"
In the first year of philology, I was "hurt" by Lautreamon, "Songs of Maldoror". Better surrealists, which I do not like. I did not realize then that he had closed the postmodern after adapting it for himself. "Songs ..." are connected with the world literature, but this property of them is devoid of literary literature, which I hate. All the previously used words and styles. Lotreamon could shake up, but not mix. However, this passion soon passed.
Natalia Trauberg
"Life itself"
Soul-saving reading. The rarest case when memories are deprived of all the unpleasant and at the same time interesting (pleasant, merciless, and other) will take memoirs. For me, these are perfect lyrics that destroy the cliché of the genre. In addition, there are articles about Chesterton, which Trauberg (not only, of course, for me) simply and forever “domesticated”.
Lawrence Stern
"The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, a gentleman"
Roman Buff. Grand nonsense. Charming carelessness. Absolutely natural eccentricity. "Shendism" opened for me before such notions as "picassin" or "wilonit". Pioneer novel, his innovation is closer to me than "Ulysses" of Joyce. Although this is a separate conversation.
Mikhail Zoshchenko
Tales
Do not bother to return. It is amazing that every time you read Zoshchenko with the same ecstasy, the heart aches as much as it did for the first time. The closest writer in Russian literature of the twentieth century, more important than Vaginov. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled (there is an entry in Chukovsky's diary) that Osip Mandelstam many of Zoshchenko's stories knew by heart. “Maybe because they are like poems,” said Zoshchenko.
Lydia Ginsburg
"Passing characters. Prose of the war years. Notes of the besieged man"
Reading Ginzburg, you air both your own language and brains. Such a draft is necessary from time to time. It's amazing how it reproduces oral speech and turns it into a written one - yes, hearing is also obligatory for philologists. About the social behavior of a person did not read anything better. Almost nothing.
Walter Benjamin
"Illumination"
The book, compiled by Theodore Adorno after the death of Benjamin. It contains a variety of important and important texts: from the analysis of Leskov’s works to the writings, the strategy of Karl Kraus, from “Hashish in Marseille” to “Thoughts in Ibiza”, works “On the Concept of History” and others. Inspirational thinking and inspirational writing. The incomparable image of the philosopher, critic, writer. Its non-random discrepancy with the academic environment is clear - the author is out of the framework. Inexhaustible reading: you see, it would seem, his texts by heart, but this is an absolute illusion.
Boris Zingerman
"Essays on the history of drama of the XX century"
I was literally stunned when I first read. The author, about which another author writes, imputes to him (unconsciously, of course) accuracy — tempo, vocabulary, rhythm of the phrase, paragraph, and whole composition. About Lorke Zingerman writes differently than about Chekhov, Brecht, or Anuye. With all this, no imitation of the style is observed - here is a correspondence of another kind. But he always combined sensual connection to objects, subjects with the rigor of analysis. It is impossible to learn such an approach, and I dreamed of getting infected with it.
Susan Sontag
"Disease as a metaphor"
Useful thing. Although it may seem that at certain times such books are not supposed to be read. Impractical But it is not. Sontag writes about the romanticization of tuberculosis (this is the metaphor of this disease), about the prejudices associated with cancer. She calmly debunks these common places. In the end, deprives the perception of cancer melodrama. Noble.
William Burrows
"Cat inside"
Unlike Kira Muratova, who loves cats, I'm not such a fan of them. But she won the "cat" compliment from Kira Georgievna much later than the time when she fell in love with this little book. She is part of family memories. My daughter grew up, I made her some pieces. She never guessed, wondering that I see her, for example, "as a lady" - she somehow thought that I had a worse opinion about her. "Cat inside" remained our secret language.
Lev Tolstoy
"War and Peace"
Depression therapy, very reliable. Not yet let down. About other properties of this novel reported many other readers.
Peter Vyazemsky
"Old notebook"
She always lies on the bedside table. You open it on some page, read it, say: "I lit a cigar with the fire of Vesuvius at twelve o'clock in the morning" - and you feel the usefulness of life. Vyazemsky himself called it "everyday literature." And there is. Everyday and joyful reading.