What do the writers themselves read? What authors, plots and characters make a particularly strong impression on them? Every month famous Russian writers answer questions from Psychologies.
1. What are you reading now?
Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power (Ripol Classic, 2010). This is an extremely cynical guide on how to deceive, betray, manipulate. Only now I understand exactly how people who read this or who had an innate gift of manipulation did with me. The book is useful for self-defence. However, I do not advise you to use it directly: everything is available to a cynic, except for simple human happiness.
2. A book that has influenced you as a writer?
Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita initiated me. I read it in the Moscow magazine when I was in eighth grade. It was completely different from the usual, insipid composition of words from Soviet books. In my first year at university, I got to Faulkner, and I was struck by the fact that a writer can, with his will, build a city and populate it with people. Recent influences include Catherine Stockett’s novel The Help (Phantom Press, 2010). An example of how the complex dramaturgy of a book is woven from simple human stories.
3. A book that calms you down?
Chekhov’s stories. Apparently, it is no coincidence that the classic was a doctor: somehow his prose has a therapeutic effect. And, of course, the Gospel: the more questions a person has, the more answers there are in the Gospel.
4. A book that every person entering into life should read?
Jules Verne, «The Fifteen-Year-Old Captain» It is useful for a teenager to know that a person can manage a ship at fifteen, and command a regiment at seventeen. An example is Arkady Gaidar. Children’s books by this author may not be read, but military essays are worth it.
5. The book of your dreams?
I want to read a novel that decodes positivity and political correctness through a person’s deep personal drama. An attempt to ideally improve relations in society — does it not lead to a new totalitarianism? Does it not lead away from the abyss into which a person needs to look in order to understand his nature? I want this book not to be a game of giveaway: no condescension to the «average reader» who wants not to think, but to have fun.
6. Which of the departed writers would you be interested in talking to in person?
With Homer. I want to make sure that the great blind man really existed.