“To make a lampshade did not work, so father made us all cardboard visors on the rubber bands. So we read: mom, dad, and I at the table and visors…” About our favorite books says Archpriest Andrei Lorgus.
The Priest Andrey Lorgus. Photo: radiologos.ru
- Three books
- Three way mission: Church, reading, conversation
- Books that are seldom read by children, but in vain
- I “dumped” on Pasternak’s wife and wish she was my ideal
- The book lingers in me so that I have a doctor’s smock to cassock
My father discovered gold Deposit in Chukotka. In the late sixties, when the field started to develop, the family moved to the mine where his father worked as chief geologist. High school was not there, but in seventy kilometers in poluchatsa-half-Russian village was a boarding school. The prospect of three months to live away from parents are not attracted to, so I was assigned to training and consulting item of correspondence school for working youth.
This item was controlled from Anadyr. He was not a school, and literally was a point where student were I single, though teachers were many. All of them – people with higher specialized education – worked at the mine were friends of mom and dad. I was prepared, and from time to time “to bring them in to school.” One exams, other tests: physics, chemistry, history, literature and Russian language.
Studied not from textbooks that were given, and the program. Under it he picked up the literature, reading the encyclopedia and made notes. In a sense, the education I got was exceptional and mosaic, because had a lot of books, but not enough.
Television in the 70-ies in Chukotka was not, books and periodicals were the main, if not the only source of information. At home, we had a good library: higher education is not enough, but for school – abundantly. Parents are more subscribed from Moscow. Mail came every two weeks, sometimes once a month. When the whole pile of Newspapers, magazines, subscription encyclopedia (Great Soviet, arts, countries, peoples of the world) and books (mostly classics) came, I read, studied or watched.
“Binge” of reading carried away in fourteen years. The reading was completely arbitrary: if you want night read want day. No, this process is not controlled, do not blame me: “lessons learned first,” or “you’re up early tomorrow, going to sleep”. Reading and discussion read was the family sport. We even had a favorite joke.
When we still lived with my older sister, entering in a large room, where there was a library, she greeted the father with the words: “Well, what am I going to read?” Father, not looking up from the newspaper, usually answered: “it is necessary to Read parents!”
It really was an atmosphere of continuous reading.
One winter fired power plant. The village in January, were left without heat and light as much as 40 days. Were heated by stoves, and lighted the house with candles and kerosene lamp. And it turned out that if you read at the oil stove, her eyes get tired fast, because the light falls not only on the book, but strikes the eyes. From old pictures I remembered that before electricity was used, which helped to preserve vision: the glass bulb of the lamp having a lampshade. However, to make this lampshade did not work, so father made us all cardboard visors on the rubber bands. So we read: mom, dad, and I at the table and visors.
F. M. Dostoevsky. Artist Vasily Perov
“The idiot” and “the Teenager” Dostoevsky I read in a row, one after the other. They’ve made such a lasting impression that I even began to imitate the ideas of the heroes of Fyodor. Awakened my consciousness. I did a lot of thinking, and what feelings do I, what are my motives, principles, what kind of relationship I have with people? Eyes has changed my attitude to myself, to reality, to the world that we can call the world of intelligence.
In the Adolescent, I found what attracts me to this day: the motivation of human behavior. Why man lives this way and not that way? What makes him do some things and not others? Psychological insight of Dostoevsky close to me so far. As close the idea to understand and justify a young person who commits heinous acts.
Many have criticized Dostoevsky for leftist humanism, because for him the little man was sometimes more important than the deaths of entire peoples. It is clear that in a situation when these works were written, i.e. during periods of political intrigue, books were perceived in the context of these events. However, in the adolescence to this context, I was far away. I, the teenager, took the interest of the writer to the little man, his grief, experiences as the main motive. It was important for me that on the highest level a person can be justified and, therefore, can be significant. It is clear that I didn’t have any of the Christian categories, and was humanistic view. And I was in Dostoevsky hooked.
Dancing Natasha. Illustration By Valentin Serov
After I read “War and peace”. Roman was struck by several things, I already drowned: was hit by a tremendous, miraculous world of nineteenth-century Russia, aristocratic, landed culture, Moscow, St. Petersburg, with their court light, the bigness of the world, especially the world of ideas and different points of view. And what about the epilogue where Tolstoy tries to understand the nature and scale of this European event, the conquests of Bonaparte – from the point of view of individuals: Napoleon, Tsar Alexander, Kutuzov?!
Two places in the novel since that first reading I remember forever. First, the scene in the hunting Lodge when Natasha Rostov danced the Russian dance. In this description, all was great: the fact that Tolstoy got a portrait of a person, but Natasha is just a girl, though marriageable; and then, as he caught a combination of noble and popular, the ordinary and the aristocratic, the religious, the hysterical and mystical ardour of a young aristocrat. The second piece of text was the beginning of the third volume, literally the first paragraphs.
They Colon says what is being done is contrary to the spirit and the human mind in the event the war came, in which hundreds of thousands of some people killing hundreds of thousands of others. From this moment all my life, I became a pacifist.
Literally one sentence, Tolstoy has formed in my childish soul is still the absolute negation of violence, wars, killing under whatever pretext.
I am a boy of 60 years. I was five years old when Gagarin conquered space. I remember the helicopters Mi-2 over Moscow, which dropped leaflets and the boys and run, collect their packs. Remember flight Titov, Tereshkova. All of this was real delight, although I had no idea what outer space is. However, to become an astronaut I’m also not particularly wanted.
Passion for the movement arose in adolescence. And warmed it in me Stanislaw LEM. His novel “return from the stars” became the third book, which I in those years struck, which unequivocally responded soul.
This philosophical and utopian tale that has everything: adventure, hero, overcoming enormous difficulties, seeking himself in the world of the inhuman, finally, the question “why fly to the stars?” In this novel, I was struck by one thing: the absolute meaninglessness of the space era of mankind. LEM finally made fun of it in “the Star diaries”. And in “Return from the stars” LEM in the first place was thinking about the clash of progress and of a man who finds no place in the culture.
Stanislaw LEM
It turns out that humanity is totally uninteresting and no matter what the traveler saw in the stars what he was doing there. The world is living in the flow.
LEM in the 60-ies seemed to foresee that in a few decades humanity will not be interested in the fact that could be how life works on other planets. And it turns out that the space traveler, conqueror of the Universe, nothing really brought from the stars. It’s empty, but definitely lost the earth. It’s a novel about disappointment.
However, there are lovingly described by the LEM’s attitude to culture. Knowing that soon paper books will cease to be popular and on change by it will come (really, the writer does not call them even), he says that books are no more. But there is a library, or rather, one Mega-library of all the earth.
Hero walks in the store between the shelves and wonder how sterile air. All rooms are equipped with noiseless dust collectors, and because smell of books is missing. But the character takes a weighty Tome from the shelf… Every bibliophile knows, the smell of books, what are the pages on the touch, the smell of books from different centuries and what honey is from a cheap leather cover from the cardboard cover… LEM becomes a poet, describing the feeling of the hand and eye of the lover of books. He is a poet of the book itself, not abstract, but the book as a physical body. It always stuck with me.
…Here the hero takes a weighty Tome, the smell of old paper, leafs, almost to tears, and through all of these feelings suddenly returned to earth culture, in the world of ideas, words, warm, human acts and eyes… Since I love this work of LEM and love books. Paper books! I have the dwarf book, but to read I like books of large format. Represent Tom? The whole Aksakov, for example. Or “War and peace” in one decent volume?!
These books then sixteen-year-old teenager has awakened the concept of the sublime, aristocratic spirit, of the victory over passion, about perfection, about culture, about important and immediate. They truly turned over and raised me.