Philosopher Elena Petrovskaya about favorite books

IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and anyone else not about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today our guest is Elena Petrovskaya, a philosopher, anthropologist and editor-in-chief of the magazine Blue Sofa.

First of all I want to say that I am not a bibliophile. There are people who love to spend time with books: feeling them, sniffing and so on, and this is a certain erotic attitude to the book. I do not belong to such people, I have a more instrumental attitude to books in general. For me, they are related to work: when you select what you need and read based on your main interest - differently than it was in childhood. It so happened that I learned to read English before I began to read Russian: it was not easy for me to read Russian. So if there is an opportunity to read a book by a British or American author in the original, I do it - and this is not snobbery. The same applies to translations of special literature into English from other languages. Indeed, a lot depends on translation, and translators often bring in such meanings that are not even implied: for example, many humanitarian texts translated into Russian receive, despite the intention of their authors, a thick touch of poetry.

Of course, my grandfather and his bookcase influenced my reading habits, and he strongly recommended me to get acquainted with the contents of which. In the closet there was mostly a classic, there was no emigre literature there. I also for some time was fascinated by Shakespeare in the beautiful classical translations of famous Russian poets. At school I used to be ahead of the program, and so at a rather tender age I met Gogol — he seemed very ingenious and inventive to me. One of the strongest and most powerful impressions of the beginning of the institute for me was George Orwell’s 1984 book, which, ashamed now to admit to this, has largely opened my eyes to the surrounding reality.

After the faculty of international relations, I went to the graduate school of the Institute of Philosophy, and the roll in my education shifted. My interest in philosophy largely began with Plato. It is read as fiction, because it has a very thoughtful, essentially literary, organization of the text. When you first meet him, you fall under the drama of his drama and a powerful rhetorical machine. Understanding nothing in philosophy, you can get carried away by Plato as a writer. For some time it was scary to open up other philosophers.

The main illusion of youth - that the book can be opened and understood from the very first page.

There is an absolutely correct feeling that, opening philosophical work on the first page, you will not advance further. At one time I bought Spinoza's "Ethics", but I cannot say that it helped me. Each philosophical text must be entered gradually, with the help of guides, as Virgil led Dante. In order to understand Spinoza, I needed Negri and Deleuze with his work Spinoza. Practical Philosophy: without their help, it is impossible to get the key to this classic text. Deleuze's thin book is a practical guide to one of the main thinkers, and she immediately explains to you what is behind Spinoza's terminology with its specific theological discourse. If you get stuck at the level of talking about God, you will not grasp what is materialistic in this philosophy. At any age and for any reading you should have such reader crutches, because the texts of the past do not have direct access. The main illusion of youth is that the book can be opened and understood from the very first page. But the philosopher will not be able to meet the run.

I appreciated the great novels of Russian literature only with time - for example, Tolstoy. Error - to read it at school on the textbook scenes in "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina". I was very impressed with the novel "Resurrection", including the description of the problems of Russian society, about which Tolstoy speaks directly and openly. The novel tells not only about the transformation of the protagonist and the ethical dilemmas facing him. There are many critics of the abuse of the state in relation to ordinary citizens, landowners - to the peasants and the judicial system - to the accused and the prisoners. This is a very brave novel, written on the eve of the twentieth century, shortly before the revolution. And many of these problems, by the way, have not yet been resolved.

Tolstoy has another great work, the Fake Coupon, which is considered to be unfinished, but at the expense of it looks like modern literature. There are no ratings of the heroes, in whose hands the coupon falls, but there is only a plot clutch of different situations, regulated by the movement of this coupon itself, and this is a very fascinating reading without any conclusions and moralizing. With some good writers, such as Solzhenitsyn, I did not succeed in meeting. They can not be taken on the fly. According to their work can only crawl, slowly moving forward. It's hard for me to read them. Sometimes it happens that literature does not nourish a person, but feeds on it.

Past and thoughts

Alexander Herzen

"Past and thoughts" I read at school during the summer holidays, and this book seemed to me very interesting and informative. First of all, for me, this is the story of like-minded societies, intellectual circles. It was interesting to find out in what conditions the views of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia were shaped, and what influence the Hegelians had on Herzen. On the other hand, this is also a very personal story of Herzen himself - his candid and detailed memoirs describing all the vicissitudes of a life lived: departure to London, a long-awaited meeting with Europe, the publication of the Bell, a dramatic history of family relations, including confessions about some treason Speaking about the general impression, for me it was the life of people in which I wanted to participate - some kind of model or model of a possible professional environment: university professorship, meetings, disputes, conversations, discussion of burning problems.

S.N.U.F.F.

Victor Pelevin

This book has gone unnoticed, but it seems to me that it has a direct bearing on the present moment. First of all, in the light of what happened last year - I mean frenzied television propaganda, which continues today. In this book, the author, without knowing it, modeled the activities of the Russian media in Ukraine. As is often the case with Pelevin, we are offered the option of dystopia. The novel describes the bored people who live on the "offshore" - the planet, artificially attracted to the Earth, and from there watch what is happening. They are so uninteresting to live that from time to time they send their correspondents to Earth, where only the orcs remained, provoke conflicts between them and film their wars on camera to watch these records, in fact snuff, sitting in front of the screen. All modern propaganda mechanisms and their cynicism Pelevin shows very precisely.

Magic mountain

Thomas Mann

My fiction has long since shifted into reading mode before bedtime, so I can now read one book very, very long. Somewhere over the course of the year, I read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which gave me tremendous pleasure. The book has pieces that are completely outdated: many of the discussions of that time, such as those devoted to the destinies of Europe, are not read as relevant today. But there are also outstanding pieces that convey the course of the time of life and the time of illness, as well as the collision of individual experiences of time, as Ricoeur puts it, and time of eternity. The first book ends with a wonderful episode, featuring Madame Shosh and Hans Castorp, the main characters of the novel. This is such an erotically rich episode, written in half hints. Tension, an exchange of views, a direct challenge, but also evasion, avoidance — all this Mann conveys so that the reader can only guess at direct actions. We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of visualizing the text, and modernist literature serves as a fertile ground for this.

Invitation to execution

Vladimir Nabokov

The book is incredibly relevant in modern times, if we draw analogies. For me, this is a novel about finding the strength to recognize that everything around you is a decoration. For this you need effort and sometimes motivation. I read this novel of Nabokov both in Russian and in English, the impression from both books is completely different. Nabokov's English is not the most commonly used, he never walked the easy way - not when he wrote in Russian, or when he switched to English in America. He has a clear game with verbal tissue, which is very addictive, especially if you are just getting acquainted with Nabokov. Mikhail Ryklin wittily called it the "17th meaning of the word," which the writer chooses. In my biography there was a period of great enthusiasm for Nabokov, when I and my good friends read never published things and got extraordinary pleasure from this: “King, queen, jack” or “Camera obscura”, for example, absolutely wonderful works. But to the poems of Nabokov, I still have a suspicious attitude: it seems to me that they are more deliberate and calculated.

Songs solveig

Vsevolod Emelin

This is a kind of poetry that draws inspiration from real life. I have a complicated relationship with poetry: so, I believe that it is impossible to read poetry, which has nothing to do with today's problems. Poetry Emelin acutely social, and that I really like it. There is at least one more poet who seems to me just as social, this is Elena Fanaylova. It seems to me that now is their time, and their voices are important today.

Autobiography by Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein

I read quite a bit of Gertrude Stein. There was a period of fascination with her when I tried to work with Stein as an author, writing about her, acting as a critic. She was interesting to me as a modernist writer, besides gender colored. I then read many of her works, including difficult and completely opaque. For example, Stein has a “How to write” work, which I strongly advise to the non-obvious. Gertrude Stein is generally remarkable in that it breaks all possible connections in the sentence, undermines the language itself. It is difficult enough to translate - the writer deliberately did a great job of reducing her vocabulary and simplifying it. She avoids descriptions, metaphors, slang, and I really appreciate her for that. Not every translator is able to reproduce such an installation. And Stein left behind excellent lectures on literature and an amazing experimental book of poems-descriptions "Tender Buttons".

Mountain ston

Yasunari Kawabata

I chose this thing, because in Soviet times I was very fond of the Japanese: books and cinema. This is an important point in the discovery of another culture. In Japanese books, a completely different emotional order struck, other people with their particular experiences, another minimalist way of telling stories. I wanted to continue this experience and study Japanese literature, getting acquainted with other authors. Kawabata was part of what my friend Oleg Aronson calls the “Soviet intellectual recruitment”: these books were relevant for us, not something from the shelf, for which you have to go to the library.

Fairy tales

Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffman

Hoffmann's Tales was one of my favorite books from adolescence. These are absolutely fascinating stories that probably answered the child’s perception of the horror genre (as well as, of course, the works of Edgar Poe). Hoffman in the USSR published well and much. A vivid impression of Offenbach’s operetta was superimposed on the reading of “Tales”. I still remember how I hunted for "Satan's Elixirs".

Sujet angot

Christine Ango

At one time I studied with a French teacher, and we tried to read books in the original with her. Roman Andre Gide, fragments of Proust, although I was afraid that it would be very heavy reading. Together with her, we also read "The Lover" Marguerite Duras. I saw Christine Ango on the air of Arte, where she spoke (perhaps it was a film dedicated to her), and decided to buy her book. Ango constantly describes herself by telling prosaic things: how she likes to eat meat with vegetables, for example. Such details are so banal and unpretentious that reading is a very enjoyable exercise. It is a little narcissistic prose, but Ango is famous for its uncompromising social criticism, delivered through personal experiences.

L'intrus

Jean-Luc Nancy

This book occupies a special place in the work of the author: it stands at the intersection of facts from Nancy’s biography (I know him for a long time) and his scientific interests — that is, he is both very personal and not at all personal. "L'intrus" he sent me an email as a manuscript, when she had not yet appeared. Since 2000, the book has withstood many reprints. Nancy describes his experience of heart transplantation: it is a very difficult operation, which was done in an experimental mode in the 90s. I was compassionate to the author and worried about him during the operation and after it, when I read about it on the pages of the book. Without any psychology and self-pity, Nancy describes the person who survived the organ transplant as a fact, real and metaphysical at the same time. He talks about the modern understanding of identity, that identity today manifests itself through difference. Thus, the transplanted heart is different in me, that is, in what seems to be the most intimate and inalienable. Therefore, his book is connected with the topic of invasion, and l'intrus is, in fact, an uninvited guest.