"On vacation took an iPad with him"

Theater expert Boris Lyubimov - about the latest literary preferences

Rector of the Theater School. Shchepkina, theater expert, teacher, theater critic Boris Lyubimov - about empathy, teenage eyes and three collections of Pushkin's works

I am a bookfile, I like to hold old editions in my hands - the 19th century, the first half of the XX, I love old yellow paper. And in general, I prefer to read in paper form. But on vacation he took with him an iPad, partly under the influence of Andrei Nemzer , with some texts that he mentions in his book “In the light of Zhukovsky: Essays on the history of Russian literature” . For a long time, voluminous literary work has not read with such a hobby. Nemzer covered one and a half, if not two centuries of Russian literature: from Vasily Zhukovsky to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and David Samoilov. I again felt a young fuse, which happens when you attack an interesting reading. The figurative system of the author, the problems of textology, the connection between writers - everything is entertaining. Writers are both large and less known, but thanks to the author, they become closer. Thank God, we have similar tastes. It seems to me that in literary criticism, philology, the history of literature this is the most significant that I have read recently.

From fiction, three works really touched me. Maya Kucheskaya’s novel “Aunt Motya” , read it in a journal publication. This work is underestimated by our criticism, somehow ran past him. And in my opinion, a very significant thing in the biography of this outstanding writer. A bright sensation of the world - through the abyss of everyday details, through the extremely difficult and suffered life of a woman, let's say, Balzac age. There is no feeling of purely female prose. I like the ratio of humor and - no, not tragedy, but the drama, which is characteristic of the writer and manifested itself in the novel in full.

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There is no barrier between centuries! You feel the proximity of the ancestors, everything is ridiculous, you will empathize with the tragic

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It seems to me a very noticeable book - “Lavr” Evgeny Vodolazkin . I read everything that Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev and his school were released, so the world of the Russian Middle Ages, about which the author writes, is not alien to me, interesting. Evgeny Vodolazkin, a deep professional and specialist in ancient Russian literature, the amazing sense of freedom of existence in this world, separated from us for several centuries. The feeling that there is no barrier between centuries! There is no stretch, except a few, at the level of vocabulary, games with a word; There are no attempts to overturn modernity into the past, he writes about how people lived several centuries ago. You feel their proximity, everything is funny funny, you empathize with the tragic. And finally, such a category as holiness, which is completely alien to the huge number of people of the 21st century, is shown in full. It seems to me that we are dealing with a very outstanding writer.

I am very carefully and intently followed by Roman Senchin. "What do you want?" In the "Friendship of Peoples" - completely "hot", with the heat of the heat, journalism. The action takes place in the winter of 2011-2012, with both swamp squares, with unrest, military-political passions that excite the peers of Senchin's novel. And all this through the prism of the gaze of adolescents, which, it seems to me, is the main discovery of this book. Perhaps, in general, the most encouraging phenomenon of recent literature. I was happy that this is about a generation that is listening and looking at the words and affairs of the parents.

In this regard, I can say that much more impressions are falling on today's teenagers, which is why the books are fading into the background. I was a bibliophile, and the best gift that my father made me*was books, there were books, collected works. (We had three libraries at home - my father, my eldest sister and mine. Accordingly, there were three works of Pushkin’s works, three Dostoevsky ...) I think if I, while the current teenagers, could watch the NHL matches or the game of the championship of Italy, Spain or France (not to mention the Internet), I would read several books less ...

Photo: Mitya Aleshkovsky