books | rebeccapopova

July 21, 2021August 5, 2021

What influenced my story “I am Becoming a Woman”

Recently, I have been analyzing a lot of what exactly gave me the impetus, what exactly motivated me to write my story “I am Becoming a Woman”.
The novel “Christine” (1952) by English woman writer Pamela Hansford Johnson is one of those books that, since having been read by me many times in my youth, influenced some part of my life after that – for example, what I was like in my 17-18 years old. Thus, the reasoning and behavior of the Hansford Johnson’s heroine influenced indirectly the heroine of my own novel.

Now, when I decided to re-read this novel in order to find out how much echoes of this text can be found in my own story “I am Becoming a Woman”, I was surprised to see a fragment from the novel “Towards Swann” by Marcel Proust as an epigraph to “Christine”, including such words:

“all this was not only experienced, thought out, kept by me for a long time, but … it was my life and it was me myself.”

Yes, I was really surprised because it was Marcel Proust and his literary style who gave me the idea of writing my autobiographical novel, and thus both names – Marcel Proust and Pamela Hansford Johnson – turned out to be indirectly related and, so to speak, “the circle has beem closed” in a way.

As we recall, critics initially found the style of Proust’s first novel unusually confusing, especially when it comes to the chronology of the events he described. Life events, sometimes rather chaotical and unpredictable, emerged in the memory of the protagonist, serve in Proust’s book only as material on which endless analyzes of “elusive sensations” are built. In his text, Proust gives very little development of the plot in terms of the amount of “action”, but at the same time, a certain impressionable young man with a fine mental organization was chosen as the main character of the novel, who perceives these ordinary and unremarkable things that happens to him in a rather sharpened manner. Therefore, on the pages of the novel, we come across literally “kilograms” of the author’s reasoning on general themes and an analysis of the elusive feelings of this young man. And all this is held together solely based on the unique recognizable author’s style and on this very analysis of the smallest sensations, plus on not too banal – and sometimes, on the contrary, even on a little paradoxical – reasoning on general topics.

As for the literary cycle “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh”, then as for events retelling, it is built much more linearly, although from time to time I am also quite a bit distracted from the main narration – well, I am doing this like in some play the actor sometimes utters next remark, addressing not to his partner, but turning conspiratorially to the theatrical auditorium.

In my immodest opinion :), the events of my youth were much more exciting than the measured life of the hero of Proust’s novel, and besides in my reasoning I stand on the position of a person familiar with the much later and more sophisticated fruits of intellectual achievements of human civilization than Marcel Proust used in his reasoning.

As for the novel “Christine”, this is a very interesting reading, first of all, for connoisseurs and lovers of the Clapham area and Clapham Common park in London – Pamela Hansford Johnson “dilutes” the diary of her main character Christine with numerous nature descriptions in these places at various times of the year… Besides this novel is interesting as a reflection of that distant era when pneumatic mail was used in London, and electric lighting was installed in houses for the firt time… The era of popularity of Hawaiian guitars, when young people first were eager to dance in clubs of London suburbs, and later were eager to drink cocktails in bars in Mayfair …
But, of course, the novel is interesting not only for researchers of the habits of Londoners in the early thirties.

Now, after many years, it was really touching for me to discover unexpectedly in the novel text those passages that I once carefully reread and which have become part of my personality. Of course, I have remembered for the rest of my life the final phrase of the novel “A stranger here, I was free,” it marked how the heroine is pleased to realize that she had long since escaped from the oppression of endless thoughts about her past.
The image of Christine in some way reminded me of the very image of a girl that looms in my own cycle “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh.“ Most likely, I became just what I was because I repeatedly re-read the novel “Christine” in my adolescence.

So, Christine is looking for her love, not knowing yet what kind of the chosen one the fate will send her.
Of course, in your youth the idea of the future is imbued with an alluring foreboding of love, since all songs and books say love is something special, and the body is excited by the anticipation of something sweet and forbidden. Love longing is precisely what allows sometimes complete strangers to enter your life and sometimes even become a part of your life.

Pamela Hansford Johnson writes about the sexual side of Christine’s emotions with caution, noting that at that time (late twenties and early thirties) young people were still very innocent, and even in English there was no corresponding expression “to make love”. The author exquisitely compares the excitement of the heroine at the thought of sexual intimacy with “the fluttering of a flower in the close shackles of a bud,” and Christine, inspired by reading some love stories, imagines her wedding night in a dark room on the seashore, full of aromas flowers.

Of course, in my novel, I pay much more attention to the physical component of love than in this novel of the early 50s.:) My first book describes the habits of Russian youth in Moscow in 1987-1989.

The heroine of my novel, like Christine, is always very attentive to what exactly her boyfriend is telling her about his other women.

Following the young Christine, my heroine is sometimes vain and is fascinated by men’s age and status – indeed, what girl does not dream, for example, of an overseas prince who will take her away to the castle in his country? She is waiting with patience when, finally, cavaliers with their own cars will appear in her life.
The third part of the cycle, entitled “Flirting over a Cup of Coffee”, describes the love affairs of my heroine with mature, respectable men almost 30 years older than her.

Christine feels being in love and charmed by the male charisma of the boyfriend caring for her, despite her boredom already on the second date with him and realizing that the two of them will have nothing to talk about.
Later, Christine tries to convince herself that, probably, there is nothing special in the love and attitude of women towards her husband, and probably everyone has known this for a long time except her.

I will quote here the clever words spoken to the heroine of my story by one of her men about the selection of her future husband:

“Regarding vital precepts оf a wise knowledgeable man, addressed to a girl“ considering her future living ”, he advised me in any case to marry a man with a”lofty”education (he used not”high “but namely”lofty”as a joke), otherwise we would have nothing to talk about in the evenings of our future family life. “

Christine tries not to take to heart the fact that her chosen one is indifferent to literature close to her in spirit, and his ear pathologically does not distinguish melodies, although for Christine herself the power of music and memories of the melodies she has ever heard is of very great influence.
For comparison, I will give a quote about the meaning of music for my heroine:

“At that time – however, and now too – my ecstasy from music was so great that as the highest form of interaction with a guy I liked I was dreaming about joint listening to my favorite music.
This obsessive desire of mine is somewhat similar to the idea of the Marcel Proust hero, who was eager to admire the Gothic castles together with a beautiful girl, so that her presence would enhance his aesthetic pleasure of the beauties of ancient architecture. “

Inside Christine’s thinking there is some internal struggle all the time, and sometimes she even gets angry with herself because of feelings that go out of her mind control.
In building relationships, inexperienced Christine acts intuitively and sometimes makes mistakes, which brings her a lot of problems with her boyfriend.
Here’s what I write on this topic in my novel:

“When I still had no experience in dealing with men, then, finding myself in some situation together with them, I acted as some kind of instinct told me. And It seemed that this was exactly what the men expected from me.
Most likely, I behaved like this according to some woman in me who existed separately from me and who had lived much longer than me. Maybe she lived by some life of my dreams and wishes or continued her existence in the memory of previous generations – in a word, it was an “archetypal woman” in me. “

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September 2, 2020September 7, 2020

What can a reader find in the book “I Am Becoming a Woman”

Probably all of us have ever heard the phrase that in the same book, each reader finds something of his own. In fact, everyone reads his own individual book, because something in the text leaves him completely indifferent or even irritates him, while other fragments of the text evoke a strong emotional response or an influx of associations and memories in his soul. That is why the reviews about the same book are often so contradictory – readers simply have different backgrounds – both in life and in reading, different life experiences and different taste preferences … Even two brothers, two inseparable friends, or the husband and his wife who have lived together for a long time may have diametrically opposite tastes in some matters, because the inner world of each person is a kind of his whole universe, somewhat similar to the virtual world of a computer game, and not each of us is a filmmaker to embody his ever-changing phobias and fatazia in such a form that he can show it to other people. (haha, and besides, by the way, some of us are writers who are also capable of embodying phobias and fantasies of their inner world, but in this case they do it not using the camera, like a film director, but with a help of great and mighty art of words).

Of course, several of my acquaintances – my beta readers – have already read the book and told me about their feelings from reading. And I was surprised at so various topics for discussion that we had with them after reading. In fact, the text of my book turned out to be something like a litmus test for the inner world of my friends.

One guy – a writer – read the text from a purely professional point of view, but at the same time he was extremely sensitive to all sexual aspects as a man. Having his own Jack Kerouac stage in life driving around America in a cheap car, he was more impressed by the second part of the Cycle – “Serious Relations”, at the beginning of which some rampant alcoholic revelry is described. (By the way, let me remind you that “I Am Becoming a Woman” is the first part of the whole series “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh”, and the next part – “Serious Relations”, which I am planning to release approximately in three months – there are some much more frank details.)
Another writing guy (to myself, I call his literary tastes typically mid-American) treated the text as a classic romance with personages and characters. At the same time, I think he remained rather indifferent to my style and did not notice my irony, while I myself consider the literary style to be my main merit (“A person is a style,” said one extravagant Russian political guy-writer, just after communicating with whom I began writing a lot, which is described in the fourth part of my epic entitled “Belle Epoque or the Age of the Live Journal”).
The third man found the text as to the author’s slightly ironic view of the events of his past life (and, I confess, this his perception is something similar to my own).
People closest to me in spirit paid attention not only to the sexual component, but also to all numerous details that occupied my thoughts and gave an idea of life in the USSR and in Russia at that time. People far away from me in their spirit demanded more eroticism in the text and less descriptions of specific places in Moscow, but at the same time they were doing justice to my style…

To be honest, I still do not have many responses from women, although I am sure that it would be especially interesting for them.

Today, August 17, 23.59 PDT is the last day of the free downloading of the book.
Immerse yourself in the Russia perestroika era life and compare the heroine’s first sexual experience with your own experience!

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August 25, 2020September 10, 2020

Reading Promises or How I Feel About the Goodreads Reading Challenge

The American friend of mine, a regular reader of The Atlantic, sent me a link to an interesting article on the so-called Reading Challenge on Goodreads.
(In fact, I must say that regardless of participation in this very challenge, the Goodreads site, in addition to the possibility of writing book reviews and other interesting services, automatically calculates the number of books read per year for each law-abiding user).

I remembered at once that Donna Tartt, in her book “Little Friend” about the 70s in the American province, describes how an ambitious teenager heroine, for lack of a better field of application, joined a school competition to read as many books as possible over the summer.

Now imagine that adult “uncles” and “aunts” report to themselves at the end of each year – well, or to a dedicated reader site: I’ve read this many books this year and I pledge to read this much next year.
Does this remind you of anything? As for me, it reminds me very much of the so-called “socialist self-obligations”, the system of which was widely used in Russia during the Soviet era.
It seems to me that it is precisely our long-suffering Russian people that over the decades have developed something like rejection in relation to an obligation imposed by someone.
Although I can admit that sometimes I see such public plans in the feeds in the field of sports, and in the area of restrictions on the consumption of harmful products, and so on – right up to promises to shave the head if some incredible event occurs, such as a successof the Russian national football team at the championship of high level.

In general, in this desire to set some strict goals for oneself, such as reading a certain number of books, I see something Protestant – well, it always seems to me that regardless of the specific religious affiliation of certain social groups, the logic and mentality of Protestantism significantly influenced the rhetoric of American society in the whole.

Undoubtedly, one can only rejoice at such a positive focus on cultural leisure in its highest manifestation and at the popularization of reading traditions, which science fiction writers have been predicting an imminent death for many decades ago. And, probably, that is true since once, while buying stationery in a bookstore in a shopping center, while in line at the cashier, I heard a young man who accidentally wandered in there, feverishly thinking where he had got to, and looking dumbfounded at the visitors, he noticed to his friend that, as it turned out, paper books are still bought by someone.

And now, in conclusion, a few words about your humble servant: I never set a goal for myself to read many books ibecause, firstly, I consider reading as a spontaneous pleasure, the need for which I suddenly feel somewhere inside myself – this is really a pastime that stimulates my brain activity, it is immersion in some pleasant virtual world inhabited by other people’s fantasies, ideas and … vision about how exactly books should be written and what exactly can be called a book.

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August 24, 2020September 7, 2020

What should be the author’s biography on the book cover?

Recently, once again I became convinced that the eternal desire of readers to identify the author of books with the fictional characters by him often serves as a reason for jokes … Or, more precisely, it is about the fact that readers regard a fascinating writer biography as a part of the very book product that they are to acquire.

Here’s a conversation I stumbled upon recently in Two-Thirds of a Ghost by Helen McCloy between writer Amos Cottle and his girl friend and in conbination – the wife of his publisher:

“You never told me about your past”.

“But it’s written on the cover of my novel book,” Amos said, and tossed the book to her.

Phillipa laughed. “I know how Tony writes things like that.

“But I gave him the facts,” Amos retorted sharply.

Philippa sat down on the bed and began to read – for the umpteenth time! – a biography of Amos on the cover of The Passionate Pilgrim.

Amos Cottle was born in China in 1918 to a Methodist missionary family. After finishing school at the mission, he entered Peking University. Life later became a rich source of plots for Cottle. Cottle changed many professions, was a sailor, bartender, reporter in Hollywood, cowboy, chemist, construction worker. During World War II, he served in the Pacific. Memories of this period of his life formed the basis of the novel Never Call to Retreat. Thinking, Philippa put down the book. Smooth, banal phrases told her little about the real Amos. He never spoke of his childhood in China or his wanderings.

Undoubtedly, we all know that a person with a rich life experience can tell the so-called “hunting stories”.
I involuntarily recall an episode from the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, when the administrator of the dating site invites the hero to write something unusual about himself, so that women would become interested in his profile and the number of winkings would increase.

And in “Fifth Business” by Robertson Davies it is no longer about a writer, but a magician, but nevertheless the idea of inventing a life story to increase interest from the audience still remains the same. So, for a magician who has become famous, his producer invents the writing of a special biography … And ironically, this is entrusted to the very person who knows the magician from childhood and spent the first years of his life with him in a small, unremarkable town in Canada.

“Every magician publishes his autobiography for sale at the theater and elsewhere,” Lisle continued. “For the most part, these little books are absolutely terrible, and they are all written by someone else’s hand – by ghostwriters, if I do not confuse the expression”.
“Well, then think about what you are asking me. This is not just a biography, the book must be completely spinned out of nothing . I hope you don’t think the audience will swallow, without choking, the sophisticated gentleman born in the bear’s corner of Canada into the family of a Baptist priest … “

We agreed in general terms that he is the son of snowy expanses, fed by gnome-like Lapps after the death of his parents, polar explorers, possibly Russians, perhaps aristocrats.
People who in their lives did not devote even an hour to hard work read excitedly how young Magnus practiced his card and coin tricks for fourteen hours in a row, bringing himself to such exhaustion that he could not even eat later, but only drank a huge glass of cream, flavored with brandy. When Isengrim perfected his natural hypnotic gift, his every look, even the most casual one, was so charged with energy that beautiful women fell in bundles at his feet, like unfortunate butterflies, irresistibly drawn by an incinerating flame- and how excited the people, who knew love only in the most dull, uncomplicated manifestations of it, were to read about it.
I wrote about a secret laboratory in an old Tyrolean castle, where he designed equipment for his rooms, casually hinting that there were cases when a not quite well-oiled installation malfunctioned, seriously injuring one of the charming assistants; of course, Isengrim went to any expenses to fully restore her health. I painted him like a monster, but a charming monster, not very monstrous.”

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August 23, 2020November 27, 2020

Julio Cortazar and … the sky of Paris

The name of Cortazar entered my life a long time ago.
This is what I write in my history “Serious Relationship” from the Cycle “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh”:

“These names of Latin American writers were a kind of cultural code for us, a sort of secret Masonic greeting, by which we recognized a member of the inner circle. It’s no accident the urban myth existed that Phystech students used to seduce the girls as follows: “Didn’t you read Cortazar? Go to bed! Didn’t you read Borges? To bed!”

Long time ago when I first learned about the existence of Cortazar, this luminary of 20th century prose seemed to me such a classic figure from the past that it never occurred to me that somewhere in pre-youtube reality his color videos were being carefully stored.

But then Cortazar fan from western hemisphere sent me a link to a video of Julio’s color interview from 1980.
In principle, a lot of what he says in this interview, I read many years ago in printed Russian interviews in the prefaces to collections of his stories. But it so happened that the video footage of Cortazar, walking in bell-bottomed trousers near the canal, and then riding a bus along the Seine embankment with a panoramic view of the opposite bank in the window made me feel nostalgia for Paris and remember one completely Parisian story of Cortazar – “Another sky” – ” El otro cielo “.
In this story, Julio does what I love most about him: he shuffles the points on the map and different eras. The hero of the story goes through the Pasaje Güemes gallery in Buenos Aires to the galleries of Paris,

“into a small world that has chosen the near sky, where the glasses are dirty and the plaster statues are holding out a garland for you”.

To be honest, I was racking my brain a little trying to decipher this story.
The first and most banal thing that comes to mind is the so-called notorious escape from the everyday reality of Buenos Aires since the end of the Second World War.

But then over time more and more insistently during the descriptions of the main hero’s wandering through the Parisian galleries, the author draws our attention to a certain “American” who seemed to be deeply in some of his dreams and did not want to interrupt the hero and his company,

“And while she was talking, I looked at him again and saw him paying for absinthe, throwing a coin on a lead saucer, and looking at us (as if we had disappeared for an endless moment) with a careful, empty look, as if he has stuck in dreams and did not want wake up!”

Then the “American” dies in that Parisian reality, which seems to be parallel to Buenos Aires’ reality.
“I found out how he fell on one of the streets of Montmartre; I found out that he was alone, and that a candle was burning among the books and papers, and his friend took the cat, and he lies in a common grave, and no one remembers him.”

And right after the death of the “American” our hero stopped falling into another dimension,

“I broke away, like a flower from a garland, from the two deaths, so symmetrical in my opinion – the death of an American and the death of Laurent, – one died in the hotel, the other disappeared in the Marseille, – and the two deaths merged into one and were erased forever from the memory of this local sky.”

Still, I have a serious suspicion that the second – Argentine – reality is also not very … real, and the hero has long died, and only his ghost in the form of an “American” has been walking through the galleries for some time.
Indeed, here is the phrase, confirming this version, at the very beginning of the story:

“Even now it is not easy for me to enter the Guemes gallery and not to be moved a little mockingly, remembering my youth when I almost died.”

And it turns out that all these Parisian characters are just flowers on a dead garland, which a plaster statue gives the ghost.

“We were, as it were, woven into a garland (later I realized that there are also funeral garlands)”
“But gradually, slowly, from there, where there is neither him, nor Josiana, nor the holiday, something was approaching me, and I more and more felt that I was alone, that everything was not so, that my world of galleries was under threat – not, even worse – all my happiness here is just a deception, a prologue to something, a trap among flowers, as if a plaster statue gave me a dead garland “

Really, we need not to forget that Cortazar is very fond of “juggling” characters. For example, he has the story “Clone”, where he came up with 6 characters and the relationship between them, simply based on the parties of different instruments in a particular piece of music.

Then I found a short video with another interview with Cortazar in Paris, where it is about Julio’s special places in Paris.

He talks about the notion of “place of passage”, and then calls Paris “a mythical city”. As the first such special place, he calls “Pont Neuf next to the statue of Henry IV and the lamppost – an absolutely lonely corner with a sense of mystery and inevitability. The second place is the Paris Metro, where time flows in a completely different way.”
And – attention! – at 4.45 he talks about … Parisian galleries.

“There are also absolutely magical and mysterious indoor galleries and haunted places. This is what I call mythical” – at this time, the galleries Galerie Vivienne and Passage des Panoramas are shown.

Galerie vivienne

Passage des Panoramas

Oh, and if you are interested to find out what I personally think about the surroundings of Pont Neuf, then this is written in part 5 of my Saga “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh” , which describes my own night wanderings along Paris:

“The most memorable sight in Paris for me was the night dark Seine, flowing its waters under the bridge to the music in my headphones, and the flow of cars on the freeways on both sides of the river. Unlike the endless sea, the dark expanse of which is also bewitching in its own way, an alluring way to the other side was opened to me, where something truly remarkable seemed to be happening … There, on the other side, I spotted the floating restaurant “Jardins du Pont Neuf” – “Gardens of the New Bridge” , to visit which sometime in good company has become an unattainable dream for me – so it is the highest life point of the type “Life is Good” for me so far… “

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August 21, 2020September 3, 2020

Danny Fischer’s unfulfilled dreams

Just like the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk writes in his collection of essays “Other Colors”, I also feel a need of a “well-written book” almost daily.
“Nothing gives me so much happiness and nothing binds me so closely to life as reading a passage from some rich, deep novel about the world that I could believe in ” – Orkhan Pamuk writes.

A few days ago, the Russian friend mentioned to me the name of American writer Harold Robbins (author of “The Carpetbaggers”) as an example of fascinating storyteller – however, later it turned out that my friend had read this author 25 years ago, – and then I decided to try all these excellent epithets given to this master of the word.

So I have read the novel “A Stone for Danny Fischer” by Harold Robbins.

First of all, I want to dwell on the time and place of the novel action since each book is usually a journey through time and space, although sometimes the world of a book can be completely fictional, and the hero can move to a kind of future that did not yet exist in human history.

In general, there are 2 features regarding my perception of books from modern foreign reality.
Firstly, as a person who grew up behind the Iron Curtain and therefore for a long time was deprived of quite the usual joys of capitalism such as trendy music, lawn mowing in adolescence, visiting McDonald’s and so on – which can easily be seen from a careful reading of my book “I Am Becoming a Woman” https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CXYPPW3/ – I, out of old habit, still draw attention to these minor details in the books about western life.
Secondly, it is always interesting for me to make sure that those elements of infrastructure that are described in the text of the book – cafes, concert halls, museums, and so on – really exist in real life.
In general, books often become a kind of guides to those real places where the action inventedl by the author took place – so Dan Brown’s Inferno is a guide to Florence, Pamuk’s Black Book is a guide to Istanbul, a series of Jo Nesbe’s detective novels about Harry Hole – Oslo guides and so on. Earlier, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch had become my virtual guide to several New York neighborhoods, and The Time Traveler’s Wife – to Chicago.

In this book, the protagonist Danny Fischer first lives in the newly built-up area of Brooklyn, and then moves to Stanton Street on the East Side.

As for era, the novel A Stone for Danny Fischer describes a colorful stage in the history of the United States – 1925-1944. The reader meets many interesting everyday details from the life of people of that time – for example, prohibition and clandestine shipments of scarce cigarettes during the war.
An interesting detail: this book was published in the same year – 1952 – as the novel of Harry Gray that became the model for the iconoc film Once Upon a Time in America by Sergio Leone. And it was exactly this film that came to my mind while I was reading describing of the teenager life of Danny Fischer on Stanton Street in the East End, where all the inhabitants existence was subordinated to some representatives of a clandestine business like bookmakers and so on with their luxuriously furnished apartments against the background of universal destitution.
When it came to taking shelter from bandits on Coney Island Beach, I remembered Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” (2017).
The powerful Italian mafioso is also mentioned, without which not a single issue was resolved in the City Hall of New York.

As far as Harold Robbins’ writing style goes, I can’t say I as a reader really like this literary manner, but it’s probably a pretty good option for this kind of events he describes.
Momentary feelings are described interspersed with how the hero looked somewhere, what he saw, where he put his hands, and so on.

The main hero Danny Fischer sometimes appears to be damn noble and has a touching affection for his childhood home in Brooklyn.
He doesn’t want to remain just a part of a faceless pover crowd. Constant need in money forces the guy to become exactly what life makes him become, although sometimes something good in him resists this.

In general, it seems that modern literature much more fits the tastes of sophisticated сontemprorary reader than literature of 50s.

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July 25, 2020September 3, 2020

Goodbye megapolis and hello summer cottage!

This is the usual Friday dilemma of what I love more – the cool air-conditioned rooms of the city with the scent of cappuccino and intellectual conversations, or that kind of universal silence when you are alone in the evening with the stars to the sound of radio waves, and the brilliance of sunny lawns the next morning.

Every Friday evening I think with horror why we need this summer cottage and why go there, but on Sunday evening I am tormented by the question of how to make sure that I do not leave the country house, and I do not believe that some time after arrival I will again adapt to Moscow and I will forget about the dacha as a kind of some nightmare. During my stay at the dacha, I merge in such ecstasy with the inviolability of nature and with the quiet simple rules of life in an old log house that those intervals of time when for some reason I’m not there seem to be some kind of annoying and unforgivable mistake.

From the car window I see all these pictures, imbued with golden sunset light, so reminiscent of all the highways of our our European travels.
Here I am in the country.
As usual every step on the floor, every sound of a slammed door is thundering in all the house.
Unlike the times of my childhood, nowadays in the air you can sometimes hear the bell ringing of the restored old church, which inevitably immerses you in the timeless reality of a Russian village or county town.
Sometimes, through the thickness of air, one can hear the noise of a speeding bullet train in the Riga direction with cute neat white curtains with a blue pattern, which we sometimes watched while standing on the platform waiting for our regional train.

The slow soaring of the elastic brace head of a badminton shuttlecock against a dizzying picture of a bright blue sky with the outlines of pines is the eternal magic of this game. This is no less an eye-catcher picture than, for example, the intense search for mushroom caps hiding against the background of forest soil dotted with needles or covered with moss, search that is still continuing even after you close your eyes for the night.
The presence or absence of wind, with unpredictable frequency creating air currents is an uncontrollable factor, which may be so necessary if you are going to go on a field to start a kite, but at the same time it may create certain difficulties when you are trying on to hit the shuttlecock.

Late at night, the frogs’ croaking from the swamp was heard especially clearly in the quiet air … As a child, I was friends with a girl who knew everything about frogs, since her summer cottage was located near the pond in the outskirts. We built sandy cities together with her, and then we put frogs there, watching how they would try to find their way from these labyrinths to the pond so dear to their hearts, and in the process we were creating more and more new additional obstacles in their path. Preciously decorated dragonflies swirled over the pond, the contemplation of the flight path of which could drive one crazy, and I also opened up the world of water striders jumping on the pond surface …

In the forest, my young mentor told me the secret of the edibility of the friendly looking light green shamrocks of oxalis stricta, and from that time on I used to recognize happily these leaves as my good friends, from time to time checking them to taste to make sure that they were still all the same delightfully sour. And the sour forest strawberry was a degenerated wild brother of the garden strawberry.

I still remember the year when we once went to the forest for mushrooms and practically didn’t find them – our mushroom buddies always protected sacredly the secrets of the forest mycelium location – but as a consolation we managed to gather a lot of forest nuts, covered with a not yet hardened light green shell, which, after lying down for some time on the floor, turned into a hazelnut so familiar to us, which are sold in the vegetable departments of food stores ….. Needless to say, that all the following years, when we went to the forest for nuts, nut bushes disappointed us with their absolute and hopeless futility.

This forest surroundiing our summer cottage became for me a kind of the archetypal concept of “forest” in general and concealed in itself many secrets and even fears, the embodiment of which was, for example, the story “The Pantry of the Sun” by Mikhail Prishvin, in which the boy was almost dragged to the bottom by insidious quagmire of a forest swamp.

And what is the smell of freshly cut grass, invigorating the nostrils! Actually, the whole history of our long-term existence in the country side is a struggle with too quickly growing grass and a struggle for the availability of water.

Feeling touched by all descriptions of the garden, overgrown with weeds, ever read by me – the idiomatic expression “everything was overgrown by the past” was on the tip of my tongue – I found myself following obediently the recently read instruction from Voltaire’s “Candide” – “one need to cultivate his garden” … But then I felt my hands were apparently irrigated with a layer of sweat interspersed with the juice of overgrown weeds, and this, so to speak, “infernal mixture” attracted unkindly buzzing insects.

The habit of walks along the country side with admiration of the views revealed and examining at the plants along the way – this is a good and long-standing tradition of summer holidays. Marcel Proust devoted many pages of his book “Towards Swann” to describing such a pastime, and even this name of the book comes from such kind of walks.

Closing my eyelids before falling asleep, I trustfully surrender myself to the welcoming darkness of a room with a window opened to meet the freshness of the night air, shadows of foliage from the garden and echoes of distant trains, with tightly drawn curtains, which, I am sure, will save me from the annoying sunbeams of the coming morning …

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July 23, 2020November 26, 2020

In summer one should dream of the blue sea

Just think how great it sounds: “My father rented a large secluded and delightful white villa on the Mediterranean coast, and we srarted dreaming of it as soon as the first hot days of June came” …

“Hello, sadness!” – this is what young Françoise Sagan says in the title of her novel, written in 1954, meaning that in addition to unbridled fun and flirting, there should still be such moments in life when it would be nice to stop for a while and think about something not too funny.
The events of this novel about sensual pleasures and the fickle nature of love take place in the summer on the French Riviera on the Cote d’Azur.
Perhaps the intonations of this novel, after many decades, still sound bold and psychologically accurate, but over time, it also obrained an attractive retro character and became the part of French literature history.
“And in Paris I had no time to read: after classes my friends dragged me to the cinema – I did not know the names of the actors, and this surprised them – or to the sun-drenched café terraces. I reveled in the joy of mingling with the crowd, sipping wine, being with someone who looks into your eyes, takes your hand, and then leads you away from this very crowd. We roamed the streets, reached my house. There he used to carry me into the entrance and kissed me: the beauty of kissing was revealed to me. It doesn’t matter what these memories were called: Jean, Hubert or Jacques – these names are the same for all young girls. “ It seems that while reading these lines, one immediately recalls many French black-and-white films of that time.

Cecil ponders the phrase of Oscar Wilde: “Sin is the only bright smear that has survived on the canvas of modern life.” It is clear that Oscar Wilde was, so to speak, a “singer” of sin, he loved to talk about human vices and was well aware of what exactly he was talking about. Of course, in the 21st century, traditional family values are no longer as unambiguous and obvious as for Wilde’s contemporaries. But the heroine of the novel by Françoise Sagan, like a child of the middle of the 20th century, is constantly torn by contradictions between her natural desires and the idea that perhaps for someone this type of relationship is rather painful – in fact, she can be convinced of this by the example of the women of her father who suffer from his impermanence. And if Elsa – “something between a corrupt girl and a demimondaine” – is accustomed to changing partners and only her vanity is a little wounded, then the extremely intelligent and reserved “indifferent” woman Anna simply can’t handle her dissapoinment that a fickle man, who firstly obediently declared himself as her future husband, suddenly felt an irresistible desire to assert himself by making love with the other woman.
Perhaps adherents of Freudianism may think Cecil does not want to share her father with any noteworthy woman. Cecil values a lot this comfortable frivolous lifestyle she leads and is ready to fight for it … And if in the end someone suddenly suffers, then Cecil is ready that such not too frequent bouts of sadness will appear in her life.

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July 22, 2020September 3, 2020

How to read “The Goldfinch” and get pleasure

Yesterday, while posting some of my book reviews on the Goodreads, I noticed in the corner of my eye that some readers note they do not enjoy reading “The Goldfinch”, they consider the novel written “uneven” and is perplexed about the common thrill concerning this book, especially since the protagonist behavior does not always serve as, so to speak, a role model.

I like the novel, and I’d even say there is something irrational in its influence on me.
But, of course, each of us has our own story of acquaintance with the book, on which our subsequent impressions depend – oh, this is somewhat reminiscent of meeting a new person.
I came across this book in the list of art detectives (detectives about the theft of art works). For the first time I met this title, in above mentioned art detectives review “The Goldfinch” was called no more and no less a masterpiece, and in this moment an ironic critic awoke in me for a instant.
Then I began listening to this novel as to audiobook … Do not forget that, in addition to the author of the novel, two more persons – the wonderful Russian translator and the voice actor of audiobook – contributed to the book product my ears were enjoying.
In fact, the voice actor reading the book always becomes something like your personal friend, because he seems to be reading the text for you personally in your little cozy world and, undoubtedly, he shares in all your emotions together with you.
“The Goldfinch” audiobook brought me some wonderful night hours in Berlin in January 2019, when, falling asleep, I listened to the cherished reading from my tablet on the bedside table in the hotel room.

First time we meet the main character Theo, when in Amsterdam he sees in a mirror the reflection of his beloved mother in the otherworldly metaphysical reality “where time did not exist… or where it existed in all directions at once” – I think this reminds the atmosphere in the paintings of de Chirico… And then this moment is lasting a very long time, while we move retrospectively back many years.

… I was overwhelmed immediately by a huge amount of feelings and associations while listening to the text. It happened, for example, due to such themes “flirting” with the reader like describing of the teenager being afraid his petty pranks will be revealed or his obsessive interest to random passers-by.

From the very beginning, I was fascinated by this text, iridescent in shades, details and with ever-changing points of view – the narrator either runs ahead, showing awareness of future events, then retrospectively tells about the affairs of bygone days, then returns to the current point of the plot. I like to look at such kind of text and read it.
I like the literature style of “The Goldfinch” so much that sometimes I simply can’t resist quoting some parts to have pleasure to re-read these words again.
As for the details – well, in general, frankly Donna Tarrt often characterizes her heroes by listing what brands he dresses in, what eau de toilette he uses, what dishes he used to order in a restaurant etc.

I could not remain indifferent when Theo, as if from the sidelines in despair, watched the games that his mind played independently of him. In general, I would call the main character’s stream of consciousness extra powerful. By the way, the main part of the thoughts and assumptions that flashed through his head usually turn out to be dead-end and do not receive further development.

The author often writes about possible forks of events. After returning to New York, Theo walks along one of the paths in Central Park and thinks:
“And if you turn, if you walk along such a lighted path, will it take me to another year, maybe even to another future, where a little disheveled mother, just returning from work, will be waiting for me on a bench (on our bench) by the Pond …”
Then there is a lot of speculation about some alternative picture of events, which secretly lives its own life in Theo’s head (in which his mother is alive, and so on), while he studies in his courses and works with Hobby in the workshop.
“Quite quickly, in the interval between studying and working in the studio, I plunged into some kind of unhindered doping, into a curved version of my past life in which I walked through familiar streets but lived in unfamiliar surroundings among unfamiliar faces.”
The ambiguity of possible future options is evident in the chapter about Theo’s meeting with Boris many years later:
“I used to google Boris a lot … He could be anywhere and do anything: mop the floors in the hospital, wade through some jungle with a gun in his hands, pick up cigarette butts on the streets.”

In addition to the hero’s feelings about current events, I came across several more or less non-trivial thoughts about all the futility of human life and universal fatigue.
From a large paragraph listing what useless things people usually do so persistently throughout their lives, I will quote just a few words:
“When it’s nauseous, it makes you sweat sick from the whole human race, from all human deeds from the very creation of time … and all this is just to forget where we are, who we are … It would be better never to be born – never anything desire, never hope for anything. “
I saw in this powerful passage a mention of the existential fear of death, which a person usually tries not to think about, and the eternal question about the meaning of life 🙂
So the author made a rather elegant statement on the always fashionable topic of the futility and frailty of life and at the same time – an elegant kick towards the modern consumer society.

And, indeed, at the very end of the book, Theo honestly admits to himself that despite the numerous slogans “Be yourself, follow your dreams” he does not feel in the depth of his soul any desire to achieve something and become someone better than he is now. And, frankly, I don’t see anything particularly bad in this contradiction with the ideas of social growth. 🙂

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July 17, 2020September 3, 2020

Features of Russian national tourism

Perhaps, I will again change the topic of today’s post a little, and write not about adventure books, but about tourism.
Of course, I love to travel like most of you. But now I’d like rather to dwell on the fact that for me, as well as for many other Russians, tourism is generally something more than just staying in a hotel, swimming in the pool and the evening opportunity to have fun at discos.
In Russian culture, and more percisely – in the Russian verbal space, there is such a well-known phrase (we would nowadays call it something like “meme”): “A poet in Russia is more than a poet”. These words were said by our poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who lived and lectured his last years in Tulsa, Oklahoma), who was continuing with this phrase the Russian tradition of reasoning about the proper place of a poet in society – for example, the Russian classical writer Nikolai Nekrasov discussed this in his poem “Citizen and Poet”. And now I will paraphrase this statement of Yevtushenko and say this way: “Tourism in Russia is more than tourism.”
Several months ago, I re-read Orhan Pamuk’s “Black Book”, and while learning the details of the life of Turkish inhabitants of the middle of the 20th century, I discovered a lot in common with the life of the Soviet people of the same period. For many years, we, the Soviet people, lived with the feeling that all the most interesting was happening somewhere out there, behind the border of our tremendous country, and we lived in a kind of backyard of civilization. Judge for yourself: Soviet people understood that the furniture of domestic production was not so fashionable, and the plumbing was not so modern as abroad, and there were much fewer types of sausages in the grocery store, and only those pop stars used to come on tour to Russia whose popularity had long been on the decline, and censorship in our country was raging, meticulously inspecting too bold masterpieces of western cinema and literature.
When, finally, the Iron Curtain was destroyed in 1991, the Russian tourists flooded overseas countries, which we learned before only from books and from films about the “sweet life” of the local bohemia, in which we, for example, might see some offspring of a rich family or a stylish beauty sipping casually some next drink from a fashionable glass on the edge of the pool, with a boring look talking about something very different from the values of the era of developed socialism …

At this very point, I will take this opportunity to post my own photo by the pool, taken in Turkey:)

But still, in order to fully understand the driving force of Russian tourism, you need to take into account another point. In Russia, for example, some architectural styles are missing that are widely represented on the streets of European cities. And, perhaps, even in the most ancient cities of Russia there are no streets associated with such an ancient, and most importantly, with such famous and popular historical facts as there are in Europe.. And well educated Russians are very susceptible to this interest in history.
Here is what one of the heroes of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Teenager” novel, published in 1875, says about this (in this case, I will not dwell on the fact that the hero eloquently contrasts Russia, full of spirituality and suffering for the whole world, and frivolous Europe, leaning into atheism):
“For a Russian, Europe is as precious as Russia: every stone in it is dear. Europe was our fatherland just like Russia. Oh, even more! It is impossible to love Russia more than I love her, but I have never reproached myself for the fact that Venice, Rome, Paris, the treasures of their sciences and arts, their whole history is dearer to me than Russia. Oh, these old strange stones, these miracles of the old world of God, these fragments of holy miracles are so dear to the Russians; and this is even dearer to us than to themselves! They now have other thoughts and other feelings, and they stopped cherishing old stones … “

Perhaps, Russian tourists have a special inclination to visiting Italy with its majestic cities filled with history. And all this fascination, this kind of pleasant intoxication may even not be completely understandable to the locals, who are simply parasitizing the tourism … What I suggest you see in this seven-minute fragment of a Russian-Italian film from 1993 …
If you are lucky enough to know Russian or Italian, then you can even make out what exactly the characters are talking about in this fragment. 🙂 Well, otherwise, you can just enjoy the beautiful views of Venice and let your imagination run wild. 🙂

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