From the editor

Billions of words have been spoken and millions of pages have been written about the benefits of reading. “It’s fashionable to read”, “You need to read”, “If you don’t read, you’ll grow up to be a dunce and you won’t achieve anything in life.” Even the smartest, disciplined, intelligent boys and girls hear the instructions of grandmothers who are distracted from television series from childhood. But when people grow up, the need for reading in life ceases to be so obvious. You can read a lot and continuously and be an unhappy person. You can not read anything at all and still be completely successful in life. It turns out that we were misled throughout our childhood? What is reading? Education or entertainment? Luxury? Leisure? Fad? Escapism? Professional need? Why should an adult read today?

Gorky has many options for answering this question. Romantic: Reading allows you to live a thousand lives. Serious: reading allows you to understand another person, get closer to him and build a dialogue (it was not for nothing that Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov called philology “the science of understanding”). The option, after all, is everyday: it’s just interesting. And since everyone’s life and interests are different, we will try to write about a wide variety of books: funny and deep, deservedly forgotten and read by everyone, books that we are ashamed to admit to reading even to our friends, and those about which dissertations are defended (especially over time the former often fall into the category of the latter).

Goethe wrote in his later years that no one really knows how much time and effort it takes to learn to read: “It took me eighty years to do this, but even now I cannot say how much I succeeded in this.” With all our respect for reading (and Goethe), we believe that it can be done faster: reading does not require careful preparation and is accessible to everyone. And, as one venerable drunkard and venerable venereist said, you can be absolutely sure that from reading you will become not only smarter, but also more courageous.