Vadim Petrovsky read for us the book by Galina Ivanchenko «The Logos of Love»
“This book is difficult to read to the end — in the sense that Okudzhava has about Stary Arbat, remember: “Never go through you to the end”? Many meetings, and each is already a conversation. Shakespeare, Rilke, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Brodsky. And also Hegel, Heidegger, Bart… Familiar and unfamiliar «watchmen of love»… What is this book about? I will answer “in Mayakovsky” — “about this”. About the fact that love and freedom — the two main values of human existence — are in no way compatible.
Well, except perhaps only at the beginning, while I remember: there was a choice. About the fact that the fatal meeting is not accidental, no matter what arguments against it common sense puts forward.
Loyalty in love is, first of all, loyalty to yourself and, as a result, to your loved ones.
And also — about devotion, fidelity in love. And there are no illusions! Loyalty is, first of all, loyalty to yourself. And only as a result of this — fidelity to «living in me» loved ones. Well, what about those who live on the other side of my «I», in reality? It is bitter to admit, but their life is unpredictable. They can cheat on us, they can cheat on themselves. Take it for granted!
Mikhail Epstein, who wrote an amazing preface to The Logos of Love, admits: “I was most impressed by those pages that talk about the dying of love, about the fall of its nine shells. Nowhere is the vital vitality of love so piercingly revealed as in the writhings of its dying. And here our impressions coincide.
I will add as a practicing psychologist that the book contains a tremendous potential for healing understanding and acceptance of those who have fallen to love passionately, suffer from love, experiencing it for people who love or are able to love only “a little bit”. What is one small remark by Galina Ivanchenko worth: “I … had seventeen years before I could confidently talk about solving the problem of“ falling out of love ”. “And I have twenty,” is ready to echo her without any pathos. Maybe that’s why I feel the strength in myself, and even a certain moral right, to help people who come to see me with this question.
Once Rollo May, reflecting on fear, identified the difference between Freud and Kierkegaard, writing about this “subject”: “Freud knew everything about fear; Kierkegaard knew fear.» The author of The Logos of Love seems to know everything about love, but more than that, he knows love.”