I wonder what the writers themselves read? What authors, plots and characters make a particularly strong impression on them? Writers will tell about their circle of reading in our section “Questionnaire”. Today Tatyana Tolstaya answers the questions of the Psychologies questionnaire.
1. What are you reading now?
The book Love in the Life of Leo Tolstoy by Vladimir Zhdanov (1898-1971). This is a literary critic, a textual critic, on the back of the book is Bunin’s recommendation, who writes, “how noble, smart, rare she is – generally wonderful in a sea of books and everything else that is written about Tolstoy.” The opinion of Bunin, who was “evil and tremulous”, knew Tolstoy himself and wrote about him, is especially valuable. Zhdanov knows how to pull out all the most intimate aspects of life, but to present them so carefully and gently that there is no feeling of a keyhole or dirty laundry.
2. A book that made you laugh out loud.
“Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome seemed very funny. And the fact that he had a middle name – Klapka, seemed homerically ridiculous, as if he was deliberately trying for us.
3. The book that made you cry.
“Steep route” Evgenia Ginzburg. The best book about the time of Stalin’s repressions. If you need to tell a child, a fool, anyone about these years, you need to give this book.
4. A character who is especially close to you.
None of the characters are close to me. Perhaps because I myself am a writer, I see not characters, but the author’s avatars, which create the character. I see what stands between the author and the character. And if we talk about the avatars of the authors, then I like Chekhov’s avatars the most. But not Antosha Chekhonte, who was different – both charming and vulgar, but already an adult Chekhov, quiet, sad, beautiful in every way. I like him, but he is no closer to me than others, because he is incomprehensible to me, and everything that I read about Chekhov did not explain him to me.
5. Which writer would you like to talk to personally?
I would really like to chat with . He is a neuropsychologist, author of several books, two of them translated into Russian. These are medical novels about the amazing properties of our brain. He writes about how a variety of disorders and deviations open in neurological patients what is closed in a normal person. He knows how to tell it and it’s very funny and heartbreaking. And what is amazing, he is not limited to materialistic frameworks, he allows God to stand behind it. This is rare for doctors, they pick up the signals but deny the one who sends them. But not Oliver Sachs. And I re-read it about once every two years.