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.

 pamela hansford johnson

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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Why tourists love mysterious riddle books

As for me, I can’t say that I am well in history.
I belong to the category of people who do not experience the pleasure of reading weighty volumes of monotonous historical works and do not always remember the dates of the reign of kings in distant eras from the first time.

My desire to touch the old times is expressed mainly in the love of looking at the bas-reliefs and stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals.
I really like that frequent feeling of a traveler when you are walking down the street, and suddenly a large old building, hidden until that moment, suddenly grows around the corner, and then you are trying to find out what it is and what era it belongs to.
When a tourist walks along a city street that keeps the secrets of history, he wants to take some action that immerses him in the mysteries and intrigues of history and “to touch” to ancient artifacts so beautifully described by writers. The traveler wants the pages of history to come to life before his eyes. A tourist wants to see costumed inhabitants or dress up in a historical costume himself, he wants to see a historical reconstruction in which residents of that era walk along these streets, wants to take part in some interactive costume show, or … read a book in the genre of Dan Brown.

In a sense, the books of Dan Brown and his imitators are the quintessence of modern tourism, they have become a kind of travel guides. People want to get around the tourist town and make sure that some of the points can be viewed as stages of a puzzle-solving quest – the same quest that the characters in the book walked through, trying to decipher the riddle.

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Is it interesting to read memoirs?

My story “I Become a Woman” is a true story from real life.

But let’s think, what’s different about memoir literature.

As I wrote earlier, the ideological inspirer of my cycle of stories “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh” is Marcel Proust.
In his novel “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” Proust touches on the comparison of fictional reality and reality extracted from memory. Proust discusses the memoirs of Saint-Simon and writes about the author’s desire to insert into his text real words and characters, which in the living integrity of the work can then turn out to be a dead weight, its weakness. When Saint-Simon creates the characteristics of his contemporaries, he does it amazingly, but when he quotes the “lovely”, in his opinion, expressions of various smart people, they sometimes seem mediocre or unclear …
So, according to Proust, the author’s desire not to commit falsehood in the describing of real events imposes certain restrictions on any memoir narration.

I can confirm that this is undoubtedly so, and I really experienced limitations when coming up with the text of my story.
Indeed, in the case of some completely fictional story, the author constructs events and heroes, feeling free to fill in his text with any details to create a more impressive fictional world, and in this case the author’s fantasy has no restrictions other than his own literary taste. A fictional hero is usually a collective image, that is, it combines the features of several real or fictional characters.
Whereas, in documentary narration, the main task of the author is not to invent the most convincing and impressive details, but to convey real details as accurately as possible, without sinning against the truth. That is, for the author of memoirs, the events of his own life are so significant that he seems to be afraid to distort them at least in some way.

By the way, sometimes real life events are so intense that they can even overshadow the author’s personality.
This is what the famous Russian philologist Dmitry Likhachev writes about one of the most famous autobiographies in the history of world literature – “Confessions” by Jean Jacques Rousseau: in a fit of desperate frankness and in an effort to diligently convey the true facts of his biography, Rousseau seemed to have overshadowed his true personality, his real mental and spiritual life with an external outline of events, and thus in his autobiography the great thinker was turned into a kind of some fictional character.
Of course, when it comes to such a great thinker and public figure like Rousseau, such a “replacement” of the hero can be disappointing for the reader who expects to see some truly magnificent image in the autobiography of his idol.
But in the case of my own memoirs, curious events of the life can be interesting in themselves. 🙂
So, all of the above does not mean at all that my story is poor in events. And moreover – in terms of personal reflection on the events that have taken place, the heroine’s emotions are really extra genuine.

One of my beta readers – an Englishman – asked me in surprise:
did all this really happen to me in reality?

Another beta reader of mine, an American – who, by the way, is a writer himself – said that he was most interested exactly in stories from real life.

This is why, as rhey say, sometimes life is more convoluted than any fiction.

So… Do not forget to download my novel “I Become a Woman” on free days from 28 to 29 November.

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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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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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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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The woman who stayed unknown

A few days ago, in the very end of one of my favorite films “Deja Vu”, I saw Claire, unable to tear her seemingly hypnotized gaze from Doug’s face, nodding in response to his question if they had met earlier – indeed, these things sometimes happen when the time space is warped. And at this very moment I asked myself: where else – in what kind of invented world – did the woman know so much about the man she met while he was convinced that he was meeting her for the first time in his life?


Now I think that, of course, it would be much more logical for me to remember “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and the very moment when Henry meets Claire (Claire again!) for the first time in his life at the Newberry library, but she has known him for a long time since her childhood and knows that sooner or later the day will come when they will meet …
But at that moment I remembered about the “Letter from an Unknown Woman” by Stefan Zweig (1922).

What it is like to re-read a book you read in your youth, and to recognize suddenly those passages in the text that once made a special impression on you? … For example, I remember I felt lost in thoughts when reading these lines in my youth:
I understood that you the one, who loves only everything that is carefree and easy, who seeks only play in love …
You love only everything light, weightless, fleeting, you are afraid to interfere in someone’s fate …

“To you, who never knew me,” – this is how the letter from an unfamiliar woman to the subject of all her thoughts begins. And a little further we read: “Fate doomed me to be unrecognized by you all my life, until my death … Even a fleeting memory of me never bothered you. Nothing reminded you of me, not even the most subtle thread of memory has not been stretched from your life to mine. “

What it is like to look at a heartfelt, screaming message about devoted love a hundred years after it was written, of which the last few decades have been decades of a kind of struggle between traditional values ​​and monogamy with something completely opposite?

I will quote here from Davis Robertson’s recently re-read “The World of Wonders” (1975):
“If you listen to what people are talking about, or see what they read and what they go to theaters and cinema to, you might think that a real man is certainly amorous and the more women he has, the more masculine he is. The ideal man for them is Don Juan. An unattainable ideal for most men, because if you want to devote your life to lasciviousness, you must have leisure and money, let alone the fact that such a life requires inexhaustible energy, unquenchable lust, and the sexual organ must be as strong as the woodpecker’s beak. An unattainable ideal, but nevertheless thousands of men try themselves in this field, and in old age they sort out their miserable victories, like beads of a rosary. But a one-woman man is a very rare occurrence. He needs spiritual resources and psychological artistry – no match for mediocrity, but he also needs luck, because a one-woman man must find a woman of outstanding qualities. “

I have experienced very conflicting emotions, rereading this text again after so many years! At first I thought about the extreme self-deprecation of the heroine, about the need, so to speak, of the timely intervention of a psychologist… But soon I got involved and started accepting the “rules of the game” in this text.
I recalled a similar obsession described in Kuprin’s “Garnet Bracelet” (1910) and the words addressed to the object of worship, putting thus woman on the same level with a kind of shrine: “Hallowed be thy name!“.
And finally, as a person who likes to mix the invented life and the reality, I was damn sorry that, during their nights of love, the heroes did not discuss the books writen by the object of love- “the fiction writer R”, which the heroine, she claimed, knew by heart – of course, this not too serious detail would reduce significantly the high degree of self-denial in the novel.
Probably every man can only dream of such an enthusiastic secret admirer who says in a letter to her beloved man:
“What was my whole life since the very awakening from childhood, if not expectation – expectation of your whim!”

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My old love to mystery books

In my first blog entry more than two weeks ago, I promised to talk about my love for adventure books – more precisely, for those called “mystery books”.

In my book “Flirting over a Cup of Coffee” (this is the third book of the cycle “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh”), in the chapter “The ticking of the clock” I write, “On weekends, Paul used to read out loud “Name of the Rose “book given to me by Dima, while I was lying on the bed with my eyes fixed on the opposite wall”.

Indeed, my discovery of Umberto Eco’s book “Name of the Rose” (“Il nome della rosa”) happened a long time ago. At that time, the movie of the same name by Jean Jacques Annaud was released.
Umberto Eco probably studied medieval treatises quite diligently in order to construct the image of William of Baskerville, who has a ready-made answer to everything and who has a way with words.
I remember I was extremely interested in why the book was named exactly that way – “Name of the Rose”? But it seems that a suitable ancient quote to answer this question has been found: “Rose as the previous name, having naked names henceforth.”

Some time later, I bought a book by the same interesting Italian author – “Foucault’s Pendulum” issued by the Kiev publishing house “Fita” with an unspecified name of the translator from Italian to Russian. It’s important that perhaps this very famous book marked the beginning of an era of fascination with the mysterious world of Templars history. Today, almost no novel in the style of an intellectual detective is complete without mentioning of this powerful order of the Templars and the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

For many years it was quite comfortable for me to live in the world, somewhere in the corner of which Umberto Eco lives. And I completely missed the sad media reports that this professor of semiotics of Bologna University died because of the cancer in February 2016. 🙁

Not lomg ago, while reading Voltaire’s Candide, I learned contemporaries called Voltaire simply “Philosopher” with a capital letter, and I remembered the similar honorable nickname Aristotle had in the Middle Ages. And then I again remembered the novel “The Name of the Rose”, in which much plot was built around the “secret” works of Aristotle.

There, the action takes place in the Italian Benedictine monastery in 1327. The entire detective story is construcred by the author around one book of Aristotle, banned by the Catholic Church. This book of Umberto Eco describes the kind of complicated way people of the Middle Ages could learn about the works of Aristotle.

“The staircase is over. Turning again, we entered the scriptorium from the north tower, and I cried out in admiration … The brightest places were given to antiqarians, the best miniaturists, columnists and scribes. The librarian introduced us to the workers. Malachi spoke about each of what he was working on, and I enthusiastically found in all them the deepest devotion to science and knowledge of the word of God.
…So we met Venantius of Salvemeks, a translator from Greek and Arabic, an adherent of the very Aristotle, who undoubtedly was and will be the wisest of men.
…Venantius said that even Aristotle speaks of jokes and word games as means of the best knowledge of truths and that, therefore, laughter cannot be a bad deed if it promotes the revelation of truths. But Horhe objected that, as far as he remembers, Aristotle writes about this subject in his book on Poetics as applied only to metaphors. And besides, there are two alarming circumstances. The first is that the book on Poetics, which remained – apparently, by the command of God – for so many centuries unknown to the Christian world, has come to us through the hands of unfaithful Moors … ”
“But she was translated into Latin by one of the friends of the angelic doctor Aquinas,” Wilhelm interrupted.
“So I said the same thing,” replied Bentz, instantly perked up. “I am poorly versed in Greek, and I was able to familiarize myself with this book precisely in the translation of Guilelmus Moerbekensis.”

We may learn from smart books that Guilelmus Moerbekensis is catholic archbishop, translator of scientific texts from Greek directly to latin language. He made the first translations of almost all the works of Aristotle, and before him translations of Aristotle into Latin were made from Arabic.
It was Tommaso d’Aquino (called above “angelic doctor Aquinas”) who inspired Guillelmus de Moerbeke to translate the corpus of Aristotelian writings to Latin and used the results of translation in his comments.

And quite recently, when I accidentally forgot my password from Amazon, I remembered the Umberto Eco book “Foucault’s Pendulum” and remembered Kozobon cracking the password from Belbo’s computer:

“The machine behaved indifferently, it knew that a password was required, and, not receiving the password, it was bored. But at the same time, it seemed to be prompting:” That’s it! What interests you, I have here, in my belly, but only no matter how hard you are sweating, old mole, you still don’t know anything. ”
It was most natural to take the Italian transcription of JEHOVAH as a basis. Six letters is already seven hundred and twenty permutations. Of these, he could use thirty-sixth or one hundred and twentieth for the password.
… But since I was still drunk, I moved up to the computer again and typed SOPHIA. The machine politely asked, “Do you know the password?” Stupid machine, you don’t even care about the thought of Lorenz.
… This time, from hatred of Abulafia, to his stupid harassment – “Do you have a key word?” – I barked: “No.”
The screen shuddered and began to fill with letters, lines, lists, and an abyss of words poured out.
I hacked Abulafia.”

(written in 1988)

So, I liked the genre of action-packed novels, in which some mystery in the past in the past casts its shadow in the present.

Then I read several books by Arturo Perez-Reverte, who was called “Spanish Umberto Eco” by literary critics in book annotations. Some of his novels were screened by Hollywood studios- for example, The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski.

Just in the book “Club Dumas or Shadow of Richelieu”, on which the film “The Ninth Gate” is based, I saw a kind of curtsey towards Umberto Eco, made by mentioning a very curious character among the members of the secret society of the Club Dumas.

Below I want to give you one quote. The story is narrated on behalf of the literary critic and specialist in the work of Alexander Dumas Boris Balkan.

I raised the candelabrum higher, and we moved down the corridor in the style of Louis XIII …
“The castle is very old, it is full of legends”, I began to explain …
“But still what are you doing here? The time is clearly inappropriate for excursions”.
“Once a year an exception is made,” I explained. “After all, Meng is a special place. It is not in every city that the action of a novel like “The Three Musketeers” begin.
We stopped in front of a locked door. Muffled sounds came from behind her – music and human voices. I put the candelabrum on the console.
“Now let me introduce you,” I said, opening the door, “the members of the Dumas Club.
Some faces were well known to him – from the press, cinema, television.
“Are you surprised?” I asked, trying to determine by his appearance what effect all this had on him.
I even introduced him to some of the guests, and did so with a kind of wicked pleasure, because he responded to greetings with embarrassment, clearly feeling out of place.
“Let me introduce you to Mister Corso … Look there … You recognized him, right? .. Professor of semiotics from Bologna … Now a blonde lady is talking to him, this is Petra Neustadt, the most influential literary critic in Central Europe …”

Here is my own old rhymeless poem written in Russian in 2006, dedicated to Corso, the protagonist of the Dumas Club:

The Missing Link

And now you are to find the missing link.
You’ll ask enormous fish about it,
So big that she exceeds the size of island.
And passing through the wilds of virgin woods
You’ll find an ancient chest under a palm tree
That indicated by the cross on map.
You’ll threaten with the magic sword to dragon
That watching all the time to guard the chest.
And you will learn the password from the beggar,
After you hearty open him your soul.

You’ll bring your customer the part of the mosaic.
The bolts are locked and there is no exit.
He’ll take it with his trembling hands, delighted.
Within the bounds of the vicious circle
Not able to go out, he will stand.
And in the cherished language he will mutter
The incantations by a strange changed voice.
A fire will happen and the house will burn …
He’ll meet any disaster, laughing crazy.
A deaf-mute woman’ll knock over a candle
Upon her lonely bed before the dawn.

In one of my next posts, I will write my thoughts on the novels of Dan Brown.

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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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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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