“You sooner. This is a very adult book, certainly not for you.” Obviously, from my mother’s side it was manipulation and I’m gonna bite…” We asked the priests to talk about the books that made the strongest impression, maybe something changed their lives. Says the priest Pyotr Kolomeitsev.
Priest Pyotr Kolomeitsev. Photo: Anna Halperin
- The book lingers in me so that I have a doctor’s smock to cassock
- “You’re a great man, sire! Forgive me for my licentiousness — you are a giant!”
- Evangelical comics and the Bible “for one night”
- “With the filing of Schmemann, I realized how little faith was”
- “Divorce” Lewis – book for understanding faith
In elementary school I had dyslexia and dysgraphia. And then on the letter jumped out the wrong letter, and the reading didn’t go. The letters are formed into syllables, syllables into words, words into sentences, but the meaning I captured with difficulty. We therefore read with my mother evenings. Usually she fell asleep in my mumbling, and when I made mistakes, through slumber corrected. To read I didn’t love.
But once saw on the table a big, thick, small print book. An academic publication. She said: “What is it?” She shrugged, “You before. This is a very adult book! Definitely not for you.” Obviously, from my mother’s side it was manipulation, and I fell for it.
The next day, came home from school, and learned I was in third grade, literally pounced on the book. Having won dozens of pages, not even close to realizing the talk of the author, I decided to read to the end, albeit without understanding.
Read quickly, afraid that mom will take away or hide. At some point a critical mass of the text read exploded. Not only was I to understand what I read, I got carried away. I could not detach.
Time was Soviet. How this book came home to me was a mystery. Because it was described as a man comes to God. It was path is not a spiritual person, and, frankly, lazy, trapped in difficult circumstances, ultimately blessing all that was happening to him. The main thing to the end, he becomes a real Christian.
It is easy to guess that I read then academic publishing “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe. The expression “Thank God”, “Praise”, “But the Lord again, I was pleased…” has been saved, unlike the children’s newspaper, which not only separate words, but in General all religious philosophy was emasculated. Read the book with dire adventure story, in which besides the main character constantly turns to God, for me it was unusual and exciting.
Children’s version of “Robinson Crusoe” appeared in the USSR in 1935 by Korney Chukovsky. Pereskazchik deprived the novel of Christian content, turning it into a text glorifying the human mind and the perseverance that resulted in a deadlock there is output. The original text was published in 1719. The plot is based on the real story of the Scottish sailor. After a quarrel with the captain, Alexander Selkirk was left on one of the Islands in the Pacific ocean. There he spent four years. It was an appeal to the faith helped him survive on the island. This idea was based on the writer the plot of memoirs of a sailor from York.
Photo: starie-knigi.ru
The book was significant also because the main character not only appeared in the terrible conditions that he was alone! I myself with three months to seven years never one remained. Lived in the orphanage. My life was “congested”, in front of everyone. And what it’s like to be alone, I just didn’t know. The stronger was the impression when Robinson yearned abandoned them to a desert island. The island, which for him became the gateway to the Kingdom of heaven. For me, “Robinson” was the first book experience with Christianity.
After “Robinson” fountain literally burst. Dyslexia disappeared, and I began to absorb tons of books, literally swallowing them. Reading now I was omnivorous and perenial tales from Hauff with the philosophical work of Lenin’s “Materialism and empiric”, by Charles Perrault with Hegel’s “Life of Jesus Christ.” However, my thought has awakened fiction.
Primarily fiction of ray Bradbury. His “451 degrees Fahrenheit” I heard in a radio show and soon took out a book. The second work was the short story “sound of thunder”.
Heroes in a time machine, go on Safari in prehistoric times. However, their journey there is a condition: to walk on special paths and to kill only those dinosaurs that at the present time long been extinct. Despite the warning, the main character, frightened by some animal, going with the “right” path. He does not notice how crushes a butterfly. Returning to the present, did not recognize him, because this has changed everything from the language to the political situation.
This story is about the ecology of history. For me personally it was about the fact that every act of man is deep and existential for the future. From us today, this “butterfly effect”, depends on where and how will develop the future, how huge might be the consequences of our actions.
Of course, this story and about Christianity too.
In General, fantasy was an exclusive opportunity Aesopian language to talk about important things, that censorship is prohibited. It was a different literature.
Later, for example, I learned that during the filming of “Stalker” starring Alexander Kaidanovsky asked the Director what he read Strugatsky in addition, to prepare for the role. What Andrei Tarkovsky said: “Read the gospel”.
It is clear that was science fiction, Jules Verne is boring and outdated. To read Jules Verne is now pointless. All inventions and discoveries, which he anticipates will be done, long done and even beat. Many, opening the book, do not realize that this is fiction, because his novels are more like a dusty treasure chest of the history of science and technology in those days. Or “the Star of kets” Belyaeva and other space things? They seem frankly ridiculous. And out of all three books we will name and remember only a “Person-amphibian”.
No, not because this book was filmed. But because it is a novel about love and human cruelty.
Where fiction was a form and about to speak, to talk about actual and spiritual things – she lives still.
In his youth, much of what I have read and loved, turned out to be just about Christianity. For example, the tale “the Ugly duckling”. In many ways I associated with character and plot with me. Tale metaphorically describes how one finds the faith and the Church. Duckling looking for her in the barnyard, at the lighthouse at the lamplighter hermit, and finds among white swans, becoming himself the same Swan.
Shortly before his eighteenth birthday I read the story of the life of seagulls “Seagull named Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and finally realized that human development is not physical, not intellectual, but in General – change of man, his regeneration is only possible in the direction of his spiritual development. This book contributed to my conscious acceptance of Christianity. After “the Seagull” and I was baptized.