music: Olvi
Today, the comrade threw into ICQ a fragment of rather harsh nonsense authored by the famous modern writer V. Sorokin. Until that moment, I was only familiar with his works in absentia. but today I personally assessed the level of various mental illnesses. Compared to him, Palahniuk has no idea about abomination, and De Sade has no idea about perversion.
Maybe I wouldn’t mind him...you never know in the world there are schizophrenics with exacerbations on sexual grounds and their own inferiority, but I immediately remembered my sociology teacher at the university. G.O Perov professor. Doctor of Sociological Sciences. After all, in his classes he ardently advised and in every possible way praised the “great prose writers of our time” - Pelevin and Sorokin. Which, according to him, are almost the most read authors among modern intellectuals.
I was familiar with Pelevin’s work before that. Based on books like Amonra, Generation P, I didn’t find anything worthy of the cries of the intelligentsia about how brilliant it is. And just after the advice of the professor, I came across 5 P. I decided to read it and try to understand: “what’s wrong with that?!”... I read it... I only understood that my psyche had not yet decomposed to this steps. I only got through one story out of 5... for some reason I’m not interested in reading about a prostitute who imagines herself to be a praying mantis and twisted her client’s head, for the life of me, but I’m not interested. but let’s leave Pelevin, he’s a sandbox boy compared to Sorokin.
It’s useless to describe what the excerpt was like, because the author here is inimitable... I’ll just say one thing, he described in sufficient detail the process of fucking the brain, moreover, in the literal sense of the word... whoever is interested, welcome to PM, I’ll throw in an excerpt.
After reading the excerpt, I decided to make a selection from a couple of short stories by him, just in case, so to speak. One story turned out to be about a sniper who shot a crowd of ordinary people for no apparent reason, as if with the permission of the authorities. The book did not explain why, but the killing process was described in great detail. The second story was a description of a young whore coming to visit some major cultural figure, in my opinion, without comment...
The diagnosis for this author has been prescribed, in my opinion, and is not subject to appeal: first, castrate, and then hang, or another way of bringing him to a state of death.
After all this, the question arises: “What kind of intelligentsia do we have now?!”
You can appreciate the scope of the brain prostate in the stratum of the population that considers itself an intelligentsia by listening to a little radio Ekho Moskvy or browsing through a couple of liberal Internet publications, where there are always a lot of assorted intellectuals. I wonder if these people themselves believe what they say?!
In my opinion, the last intellectuals in Russia ended almost a century ago - with the death of Imperial Russia... After all, the intelligentsia is not only high education and cultural development, but also a high sense of national identity, the desire for constant self-improvement and self-development. I believe, contrary to popular belief, that the intelligentsia must defend its point of view not only in words but also in deeds, as the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia did. The intelligentsia must have a heightened sense of patriotism and responsibility for their actions (and inactions) not only to themselves, but also to their country and people. It is she who must create and direct the cultural development of millions, thereby creating a powerful culture and writing new pages of history.
The intelligentsia is the future of the country...and looking at the people who consider themselves “intelligentsia” one can only be horrified...after all, unfortunately, we do not yet have a true intelligentsia in which the spirit of the nation lives, it has not yet been reborn. But everything is in our hands. After all, who if not us?!
Family sagas, philosophical tragic farce novels, psychological detective stories and books in other genres from very different authors from different countries, written at different times, which are worth the attention of a thoughtful reader.
1. Junichiro Tanizaki - Fine Snow
Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) is a classic of Japanese literature, a continuer of its centuries-old traditions, one of the most significant writers in Japan in the first half of the 20th century. The novel "Fine Snow" is Tanizaki's main and best work. Written in the genre of a family chronicle, it tells about Japan in the 1930s, about the joys and sorrows of the four Makioka sisters, who belong to an old and wealthy merchant family. The writer creates a vivid and realistic picture of life in Japan in the years preceding World War II. The novel harmoniously combines an accurate and impartial analysis of reality and deep lyricism.
2. Klaus Merz - Jacob is sleeping
In his small book, which brought the author wide fame, the modern Swiss writer Klaus Merz managed to fit on a few printed pages an entire family saga about the life of three generations of Swiss peasants. Merz talks about the dramatic life of his heroes extremely delicately and carefully, with amazing sincerity and dignity, finding, as German critics put it, a unique “balance between sadness, faith and love.” The unusually concentrated and poetic form of storytelling was enthusiastically noted in the press. Merz's novel went through several editions and was awarded the Hermann Hesse Prize. The Russian edition of the book is timed to coincide with the anniversary of the establishment of Russian-Swiss diplomatic relations.
3. Iris Murdoch - School of Virtue
Edward Beltram is overcome with guilt. His little prank turned into a huge disaster: he slipped a hallucinogenic drug into his friend’s food, and the young man fell out of the window and died. In search of salvation from mental anguish, Edward turns to a medium and during a session he hears a voice that tells him to reunite with his own father, a famous artist leading a reclusive life...
4. Muriel Spark - Girls of Modest Means
Muriel Spark is one of the most famous contemporary English writers, a winner of many prestigious literary awards; Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene spoke enthusiastically about her work. Many of her novels have been filmed.
The novel "Girls of Modest Means" is a real tragic farce. It combines irony and philosophical depth. The novel takes place in a boarding school for girls from good families. Their livelihood is limited, but their ambitions are not limited...
5. Veniamin Kaverin - In front of the mirror
Veniamin Aleksandrovich Kaverin, a significant Russian writer, author of novels and stories ("The End of the Khaza", "Nine Tenths of Fate", "Bandalist, or Evenings on Vasilyevsky Island", etc.), short stories and fairy tales, became known throughout the country thanks to the adventure novel " Two Captains", which is still extremely popular and has been filmed many times. The novel “Before the Mirror,” presented in this edition, was written by Kaverin at the age of seventy and is often recognized as his best book.
It all started at a gymnasium ball: amid confetti, streamers and thunderous music, the serious Kostya Karnovsky and the charming Liza Turaeva met and danced together the whole evening. Over the next twenty years, fate rarely gave them meetings - but all this time Lisa wrote to Karnovsky, her either friend or lover. These were wonderful letters, funny, tender, and philosophical, from Perm, from St. Petersburg-Petrograd, Yalta, Constantinople and Paris, where the girl bravely went to study painting... Will Karnovsky and Lisa finally be together, will she achieve recognition artist Turaeva, will she return to her homeland - and what will happen to the heroes, whose youth was spent in pre-revolutionary Russia, now, “at the crossroads of times”?..
6. Yuri Alkin - The physical impossibility of death in the consciousness of a living person
A young journalist becomes a participant in a strange experiment where people are taught to pretend to be immortal. But why are immortals so unhappy? And why doesn’t even the promise of eternal life save you from falsehood and pretense?
Yuri Alkin is a master of psychological intrigue, adding a new dimension to classic detective fiction and science fiction. This is exactly the kind of literature that awaits the generation raised by the Internet and which has already outgrown the framework of online prose.
7. Ephraim Sevela - Why there is no heaven on Earth
“Efraim Sevela has a fresh, genuine talent and an amazing gift for striking sparks of humor from the most terrible and tragic events that he managed to survive,” noted Irwin Shaw.
Whatever Sevela wrote about - about the small town of his childhood or about the vast America of his mature years - his work is always imbued with the sweetness of Russian birch sap, infused with the bashful bitterness of Jewish tears.
8. Joel Haahtela - Butterfly Collector
The novel is built around the metaphor of a dried butterfly: our memories are like butterflies caught and pierced with a pin. Joel Haahtela is trying to understand the complex mechanism of human memory and retrieving memories to the surface of consciousness. This is all the more important because, by grasping the thread connecting the past with the present, a person can grasp the essence of what is happening to him.
The hero of the book, having unexpectedly received an inheritance from a complete stranger to him, a certain Henry Ruzicka, wants to find out how he is connected with the testator. Bit by bit, he begins to collect what is left of Ruzicka, follows in his footsteps, and it turns out that, having become the owner of someone else's house and other people's things, he actually receives the key to his past.
Joel Haahtela (b. 1972) is a Finnish writer and psychiatrist. The author of seven novels, for one of them, “At Seven O'Clock at the Crossroads,” he was awarded the Olvy Foundation Literary Prize (2002).
9. Manuel Puig - Kiss of the Spider Woman
"Kiss of the Spider Woman" is the most famous novel by Latin American writer Manuel Puig (1932-1990). The author himself created a play based on it. And in 1985, “The Kiss...” was filmed by Hector Babenco (Oscar nomination). In 1992, the musical of the same name was staged on Broadway. This book was simply created for film adaptation. In the novel, two prisoners sit in a cell and show, or rather, tell each other, exciting films, many of which are fictionalized by Puig, while others are based on his real cinephile experiences. "A Woman's Kiss..." became one of the first in a whole wave of literary texts about cinema.
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne - "The Scarlet Letter"
The Scarlet Letter is the most famous of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels. It tells the story of the fate of Hester Prynne, who found herself in the pillory with her illegitimate daughter in her arms. Among the witnesses to the public humiliation are Esther’s husband and her seducer, the baby’s father. The tragedy that connected these three people reveals the spiritual qualities of the novel's heroes, revealing the courage and nobility of some and the cowardice and insignificance of others.
2. Daphne Du Maurier - "Rebecca"
"Rebecca" is not just Daphne Du Maurier's most famous novel.
Not just a book on which Alfred Hitchcock's cult film was based.
Not just a work that laid the stylistic foundations of all the “intellectual thrillers” of our day.
"Rebecca" is a unique novel, scary - and transparent, simple - and elite. A novel without which neither Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf nor Stephen King's Carrie would exist.
3. Roman Korobenkov - "Jumper"
Think metaphorically! The book “Jumper” is like an expensive cigar. It slowly envelops you in a thick smoke of neo-philosophical prose, from which the bizarre characteristic forms of the characters gradually begin to emerge. A person is completely immersed in a half-fictional, half-real reality, losing the outlines of boundaries over time in the thick fog of the text. Love and death, as we know, often go hand in hand. In this book, the theme of high feelings is also intertwined with suicidal thoughts and, most importantly, the search for oneself. The further the reader goes into the black and white jungle of the pages of the book, the more thoughts about the meaning (of life and not only) are born in him. And you will agree, this is probably the true proof of the artistic value of the book.
4. William Styron - "Sophie's Choice"
A pearl of the creative heritage of William Styron. The novel, which formed the basis for the script of the amazing film of the same name starring Meryl Streep, which won an Oscar.
What is the price of human survival in the hell of Nazi concentration camps?
The executioners from Auschwitz forced the young Polish woman Sophie to make a terrible choice...
Years have passed, Sophie has long since moved to America and, at first glance, is quite happy.
But the past still haunts her, suffocates her and prevents her from living.
And one day this past comes back...
5. David Herbert Lawrence - "Sons and Lovers"
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) is one of the most widely read writers in England in the first third of the 20th century, the author of ten novels and many novels and short stories.
The novel Sons and Lovers, written in 1913, is largely autobiographical. Lawrence tells the story of two generations of the Morel family living in a small mining village. The marriage of Gertrude and Walter was unhappy. Over the years, moving away from her husband, the wife gave all her love to the children. But the overbearing motherly love turned into disaster for them...
6. Elfriede Jelinek - "Mistresses"
The most famous modern writer in Europe, the infamous Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek throws her works in the face of the world, but the world does not feel offended, “this is not about me,” everyone says...
Dissecting a sanctimonious society where consumer values are mixed with patriarchal traditions and where “respectability” directly depends on what things you own, Jelinek paints two opposing destinies. Brigitte and Paula are two girls, one from the city, the other from the countryside, but for both, love, family and sex are just means to get through life - a life in which each of them will have high purchasing power.
Recognizable reality: there are many “idyls” around, inhabited by characters from this book, “idyls without prospects,” with a church in the center of the town and a lingerie factory, the director of which is the owner of this world.
"Mistresses" is Elfriede Jelinek's most widely read novel. The publisher strongly recommends starting your acquaintance with her work with this book in order to tune in to the perception of those features that form the “Jelinek style.”
7.Vladimir Nabokov - "Pnin"
The fourth English-language novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the life story of the emigrant professor from Russia Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, who teaches Russian at an American university, but is comically at odds with English, which, coupled with his funny appearance, absent-mindedness and awkwardness in handling things, turns him into a curious local sight. The title character of the book - unlucky, eccentric, touchingly absurd - a kind of Don Quixote of the university town of Weindel - gradually reveals itself to the reader as a complex, multifaceted personality, in whose fate moments of supreme happiness and moments of genuine tragedy are combined, whose life, like any human life, forms a bizarre mixture of unspeakable charm and inescapable sadness...
8. Gustave Flaubert - "Madame Bovary"
The book will take you to France and allow you to observe the life of a beautiful, interesting woman. The passionate and romantic nature of Emma Bovary does not find happiness in her marriage to a village doctor and her life turns into a series of events that are always frowned upon by society. But no matter how vicious and immoral the heroine is, she is a “true woman” whose flaws are as attractive as her virtues! This paradox is the beauty of the most controversial female figure in French literature. Such women will always be loved by men and rejected by society.
9. Theodore Dreiser - "American Tragedy"
The novel "An American Tragedy" is the pinnacle of the work of the outstanding American writer Theodore Dreiser. He said: “No one creates tragedies - life creates them. Writers only depict them.” Dreiser managed to portray the tragedy of Clive Griffiths so talentedly that his story does not leave the modern reader indifferent. A young man who has tasted all the charm of the life of the rich is so eager to establish himself in their society that he commits a crime for this.
10. Robert James Waller - "The Bridges of Madison County"
This book, America's biggest literary phenomenon, was on the bestseller lists of the nation's major newspapers for more than 90 weeks, and rightfully became the undisputed winner of the ABBY Award. In the United States alone, the first circulation of the novel by a then unknown author, a professor from Iowa, amounted to seven million copies.
The Bridges of Madison County is a once-in-a-lifetime novel about love and loss.
Required reading. The public reaction was not long in coming, and many different lists appeared on the Internet. The most interesting thing is that some of them did not include either Pushkin or Lermontov. Many respondents recommended reading Orwell, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and other wonderful writers.
As in the joke: you can prove that the population of Ireland is larger than the population of China, if you take a sample of only redheads. It can be proven that there is no need to read Pushkin and Lermontov if respondents are not given the opportunity to vote for them, since these writers are simply not on the survey list.
On one resource where a similar survey was conducted, readers were offered a table with buttons; Sorokin was included in it, but Pushkin was not. Orwell's "1984" is in the first row of the table. So the readers voted by pressing buttons, especially the first one, but did not make their own proposals, otherwise they would probably have included Pushkin.
To compile this list, you should take a scientific approach to the survey method and pay especially close attention to the audience. And the results of a survey of some sites on the Internet should be treated as an anecdote, a joke.
But in every joke... It is very difficult to compile a list of 100 books. Here's a snapshot without a system:
Bible; Homer "Iliad", "Odyssey"; Apuleius "Metamorphoses"; Dante's "Divine Comedy"; Rabelais "Gargantua and Pantagruel"; Basho, haiku; Omar Khayyam, rubaiyat; Shakespeare "King Lear", "Hamlet"; Griboedov “Woe from Wit”; Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”, “Belkin’s Tales”, “The Captain’s Daughter”, lyrics; Lermontov “Masquerade”, “Hero of Our Time”, lyrics; poets of the "Golden Age"; Gogol “Dead Souls”, “The Inspector General”, “Marriage”; Goethe "Faust"; L. Tolstoy “War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina”; Dostoevsky “The Idiot”, “The Brothers Karamazov”, “The Village of Stepanchikovo...”; A.K. Tolstoy “Trilogy”, lyrics; Leskov “The Enchanted Wanderer”, “Russian Clandestine”; Flaubert "Madame Bovary"; Zola "The Trap" Jules Verne "Captain Grant's Children", "20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"; Cooper "The Last of the Mohicans"; Saltykov-Shchedrin “Lords Golovlevs”, stories; Ostrovsky, two or three plays; Goncharov “Ordinary History”; Balzac "Human Comedy"; Maupassant “Life”, “Dear Friend”, stories; Chekhov "Uncle Vanya", novels and short stories; poets of the "Silver Age"; Mark Twain "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn", "A Yankee in King Arthur's Court"; Gorky “Vassa Zheleznova”, “At the Depths”; Kuprin “Duel”, stories; Bunin “Dark Alleys”, “Cursed Days”, “Song of Hiawatha”; A.N. Tolstoy “Peter the Great”; A. Platonov “Pit”; Fadeev “Destruction”; Bulgakov “The Master and Margarita”, “Theatrical Novel”, “Heart of a Dog”; Kataev “The Lonely Sail Whitens”, “My Diamond Crown”; Ilf and Petrov “Twelve Chairs”, “Golden Calf”; Efremov “Andromeda Nebula”, “Hour of the Ox”, “Thais of Athens”; Kaverin “Two Captains”; Dudintsev “White Clothes”; G. Mann “Loyal Subject”; Hasek "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik"; London "White Fang"; Hugo "The Man Who Laughs" Dumas "The Three Musketeers"; Sholokhov “Quiet Don”; Capek "War with the Newts", stories; Hemingway "A Farewell to Arms" Remarque “Three Comrades”, “A Time to Live and a Time to Die”; Grossman "Life and Fate"; Simonov "The Living and the Dead", lyrics; Tvardovsky “Vasily Terkin”; Orwell "1984", "Animal Farm"; Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”; Rybakov “Dirk”, “Krosha’s Vacation”, “Heavy Sand”; V. Platonov, G. Baklanov and others, “lieutenant prose” about the war; Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude"; Soviet and anti-Soviet poets...
What do you think of the list? There are not very many left to a hundred, and there are still many good writers who were not included: Turgenev, Dickens, Paustovsky... And how many writers I didn’t remember right away. He did not mention modern authors. There is little science fiction on the list (Wells, Belyaev, Greene, Wyndham “The Day of the Triffids”), no detective stories (Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Francis “The Favorite”). In addition, the reader who liked “Dead Souls” will also want to read “The Tale of How They Quarreled...”. The list will “spread” many times.
The main feature of this list is that it is difficult to find a person who would read all these books! Who has read the entirety of “The Iliad”, “The Divine Comedy”, “War and Peace”, “Quiet Don”, “The Gulag Archipelago” and “Doctor Zhivago” (not every book, but all)? Almost no one. Even Mandelstam in the Iliad “read the list of ships to the middle...”.
But at the same time, it is difficult to find an intelligent person who in everyday life, in his thoughts, in his speech would not use images, associations, quotes from most of these great books! An intelligent person can immediately recite at least a few words from each book mentioned. In printed and electronic articles, these works are quoted daily and repeatedly, sometimes they don’t even indicate the source, so much so have these books become part of people’s everyday lives. Turn on the TV, and quotes will rain down on you: “housing problem”, “second freshness”, “thank you for your love”, etc. without mentioning Ilf, Petrov, Bulgakov, Vertinsky. The words are ordinary, but the classics put them together painfully well, resulting in succinct and beautiful expressions.
Contradiction? But it exists, so it’s not such a contradiction. The explanation for the contradiction is simple: not all books need to be read, it is impossible. Read something, get acquainted with something.
How can we introduce schoolchildren to the main works of world and Russian literature? How to introduce into a young man the system of values from these books, the concepts of nobility and conscience embedded in them? How to instill a love for the good Russian language, give one of the pleasures of life - reading with pleasure?
Any list will most likely turn out to be “overwhelming” for a modern schoolchild, since even adults are confused by this list.
I see only one way out. Make a list of books (considerably more than 100 titles) that the teacher is required to familiarize his students with. The teacher decides how to do this. Shakespeare, Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, Chekhov should be read. There is much to be read from War and Peace and the rest to be retold. “The Divine Comedy”, “The Iliad”, “The Gulag Archipelago”, “Doctor Zhivago” can be retold, and some can be read. Cinema will help a lot, such films as “Quiet Don” by Gerasimov, “War and Peace” by Bondarchuk. This is just an example, but the teacher himself knows what he and his students need, what books to read, what to talk about, what films to show. This approach will allow, on the one hand, to really familiarize schoolchildren with masterpieces (not to give in to the list, not to deceive the management, that is, to report that everyone has read, but in reality no one has read anything). On the other hand, it is possible to avoid the vulgarization of literary works, the transformation of the epic into a brochure: Prince Andrei was widowed, distinguished himself in battles, died from a wound received at Borodino, and did not marry Natasha Rostova. After all, a teacher will not spoil his favorite literary work.
To implement this plan, we need a powerful corps of literature teachers, in which the teachers themselves have read all the books on the list and formed their own opinions about them. Teachers must love the Russian language, feel the music of the language, teachers must love their profession.
Creating such a corps is a daunting task, but solving this problem promises the success of the program. Introducing people to reading is not only an educational task, but also a national one. In recent years, Russia has gone from being the “most reading country” to one that reads little and has no taste for reading. A graduate of a humanitarian university is not able to evaluate an unfamiliar text or formulate an opinion about the text. The “branded” approach to literary works is flourishing. But the writer in the recent past was both the “ruler of thoughts” and the “engineer of human souls.” A writer cannot be assessed as a fashionable dresser or as a pop singer: if the label is from a famous master, it means a good suit, if he sings on all TV programs, then he is a good singer.
The “brand” method is not suitable for evaluating a writer. Look, Belinsky even tried to scold Pushkin, resisted the “brand” “Pushkin”.
The result of the reasoning: it is necessary not only to compile a list of good books, but also to introduce this list to the broad masses of schoolchildren with the help of literature teachers. The list will be huge, but there’s nowhere to go, because after reading all the books on the short list, “you can’t plug the hole.” To familiarize schoolchildren with books from a large list, special pedagogical events are needed.
One more thing - as a necessary preliminary measure, you need to instill in babies and preschoolers a love of books in their families, read to children before bed, read aloud to the family at the table on Sunday. After all, almost all books should be read at a certain age. If you didn’t get acquainted with “The Pockmarked Hen” when you were three years old, then you will grow up and not understand what it’s all about. Likewise, “The Three Musketeers”, and “Two Captains”, and “Honestly” need to be read on time. It’s also not easy, we need children’s books with pictures that match the text and the age of the readers, we need parents who take care of their children. The task of “reading a hundred books on the list,” if taken seriously, is a huge government undertaking.
Especially for the newspaper VZGLYAD
10 examples of fiction for those who love fiction and especially fiction. However, how special they are is up to you to decide.
1. Junichiro Tanizaki - “Fine Snow”
Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) is a classic of Japanese literature, a continuer of its centuries-old traditions, one of the most significant writers in Japan in the first half of the 20th century. The novel “Fine Snow” is Tanizaki’s main and best work. Written in the genre of a family chronicle, it tells about Japan in the 1930s, about the joys and sorrows of the four Makioka sisters, who belong to an old and wealthy merchant family. The writer creates a vivid and realistic picture of life in Japan in the years preceding World War II. The novel harmoniously combines an accurate and impartial analysis of reality and deep lyricism.
2. Klaus Merz - “Jacob is sleeping”
In his small book, which brought the author wide fame, the modern Swiss writer Klaus Merz managed to fit on a few printed pages an entire family saga about the life of three generations of Swiss peasants. Merz talks about the dramatic life of his heroes extremely delicately and carefully, with amazing sincerity and dignity, finding, as German critics put it, a unique “balance between sadness, faith and love.” The unusually concentrated and poetic form of storytelling was enthusiastically noted in the press.
Merz's novel went through several editions and was awarded the Hermann Hesse Prize.
3. Iris Murdoch - “The School of Virtue”
Edward Beltram is overcome with guilt. His little prank turned into a huge disaster: he slipped a hallucinogenic drug into his friend’s food, and the young man fell out of the window and died.
In search of salvation from mental anguish, Edward turns to a medium and during a session he hears a voice that tells him to reunite with his own father, a famous artist leading a reclusive life...
4. Muriel Spark - “Girls of Modest Means”
Muriel Spark is one of the most famous contemporary English writers, a winner of many prestigious literary awards; Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene spoke enthusiastically about her work. Many of her novels have been filmed.
The novel “Girls of Modest Means” is a real tragic farce. It combines irony and philosophical depth. The novel takes place in a boarding school for girls from good families. Their livelihood is limited, but their ambitions are not limited...
5. Veniamin Kaverin - “In front of the mirror”
Russian writer Veniamin Aleksandrovich Kaverin, author of novels and stories (“The End of the Khaza”, “Nine Tenths of Fate”, “Bandalist, or Evenings on Vasilievsky Island”, etc.), short stories and fairy tales, became known throughout the country thanks to the adventure novel “Two Captains” ”, which is still extremely popular and has been filmed many times. The novel “Before the Mirror” was written by Kaverin at the age of seventy and is often recognized as his best book.
...It all started at a gymnasium ball: among the confetti, streamers and thunder of music, the serious Kostya Karnovsky and the charming Liza Turaeva met and danced together the whole evening. Over the next twenty years, fate rarely gave them meetings - but all this time Lisa wrote to Karnovsky, her either friend or lover. These were wonderful letters, funny, tender, and philosophical, from Perm, from St. Petersburg-Petrograd, Yalta, Constantinople and Paris, where the girl bravely went to study painting... Will Karnovsky and Lisa finally be together, will the artist Turaeva achieve recognition, will she return or to their homeland - and what will happen to the heroes, whose youth was spent in pre-revolutionary Russia, now, “at the crossroads of times”?..
6. Yuri Alkin - “The physical impossibility of death in the consciousness of a living person”
A young journalist becomes a participant in a strange experiment where people are taught to pretend to be immortal. But why are immortals so unhappy? And why doesn’t even the promise of eternal life save you from falsehood and pretense?
Yuri Alkin is a master of psychological intrigue, adding a new dimension to classic detective fiction and science fiction. This is exactly the kind of literature that awaits the generation raised by the Internet and which has already outgrown the framework of online prose.
7. Ephraim Sevela - “Why there is no heaven on earth”
“Efraim Sevela has a fresh, genuine talent and an amazing gift for striking sparks of humor from the most terrible and tragic events that he managed to survive,” noted Irwin Shaw.
Whatever Sevela wrote about - about the small town of his childhood or about the vast America of his mature years - his work is always saturated with the sweetness of Russian birch sap, infused with the shameful bitterness of Jewish tears.
8. Joel Haahtela - “The Butterfly Collector”
The novel is built around the metaphor of a dried butterfly: our memories are like butterflies caught and pierced with a pin. Joel Haahtela is trying to understand the complex mechanism of human memory and retrieving memories to the surface of consciousness. This is all the more important because, by grasping the thread connecting the past with the present, a person can grasp the essence of what is happening to him.
The hero of the book, having unexpectedly received an inheritance from a complete stranger to him, a certain Henry Ruzicka, wants to find out how he is connected with the testator. Bit by bit, he begins to collect what is left of Ruzicka, follows in his footsteps, and it turns out that, having become the owner of someone else's house and other people's things, he actually receives the key to his past.
Joel Haahtela (b. 1972) is a Finnish writer and psychiatrist. The author of seven novels, for one of them, “At Seven O'Clock at the Crossroads,” he was awarded the Olvy Foundation Literary Prize (2002).
9. Manuel Puig - “Kiss of the Spider Woman”
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the most famous novel by Latin American writer Manuel Puig (1932-1990). The author himself created a play based on it. And in 1985, “The Kiss...” was filmed by Hector Babenco (Oscar nomination). In 1992, the musical of the same name was staged on Broadway. This book was simply created for film adaptation. In the novel, two prisoners sit in a cell and show, or rather, tell each other, exciting films, many of which are fictionalized by Puig, while others are based on his real cinephile experiences. “A Woman’s Kiss...” became one of the first in a whole wave of literary texts about cinema.
For Puig, the question of the nature of homosexuality was very important in the novel. He accompanies the text with comments from the works of Freud and other psychoanalysts. In general, the novel consists of a whole mosaic of plans - retelling of films, emotional tragedies, discussions about the causes of homosexuality, almost theatrical dialogues. As a result, such a multidimensional canvas is created that you will simply listen to it, look at it, and become engrossed in it. But the movie ends, and Molina is released...
10. Kazakov Yuri Pavlovich - “In a dream you cried bitterly”
Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov (1927-1982) is one of the largest representatives of Soviet short stories. His stories, which appeared in the mid-fifties, were a stunning success - they saw I. Bunin’s successor in Kazakov. The author of the short stories “Manka”, “Trali-vali”, “In Your Dreams You Wept Bitterly”, “Arcturus the Hound Dog” always lived on his own, without looking back at either authorities or detractors. Didn't adapt. Didn't fuss. That is why his prose remained not only a monument to the times, but also a living, understandable conversation twenty and thirty years later. A writer for all times.
