"The book list for summer" book club -
2021-2022 season results

"The book list for summer" book club met regularly during the 2021-2022 season. The library bibliographer and co-host of the club Galina Aleksandrovna Solovieva speaks about whether it is possible to look at the school classics with an adult look.

Maria Pilipenko: "The book list for summer" book club has been open in the Blokhintsev JINR Universal Public Library for almost a year. The idea of the club is to read and comprehend in adulthood books from the school curriculum. Often we read or "pass through" the main literature of the book classics in school and never return to them. And this gives the feeling of missing vital knowledge, a serious gap in the personal cultural background.

Galina Aleksandrovna: Yes, in autumn and winter we read/discussed texts of the 19th century and we were amazed at how much at school had flown past our consciousness. In spring we read the science fiction of the last century: Bulychev, the Strugatsky brothers. We talked and it became clear that we had not been able to understand the Strugatsky brothers then - "great things are seen at a distance". On the last Thursday we gathered to "turn around" at the Cherry Orchard. By the way, later, a part of the club, adult "natives", unanimously agreed that our "cherry orchard" is Dubna of the sixties :).

M.P.: Do I understand correctly that the concept of the club has shifted from rethinking "its own" school classics to simply getting to know the books of the school curriculum, including modern ones?

G.A.: Many of us, at the time of the first publications, read books that today are offered to schoolchildren, albeit not in the main, but in many additional book lists. The same "Inhabited Island" by the Strugatsky brothers, stories by Bradbury, novels by Vonnegut, Ulitskaya or books about Harry Potter are perceived differently nowadays, especially in the light of the interpretations of literary critics, thanks to D. Bykov, for instance.

M.P.: And yet: what did you manage to read from the classics?

G.A.: We read the following books: "A Hero of Our Time", "The Captain's Daughter", "Dubrovsky", "Fathers and Sons", "Cliff" and "Torrents of Spring".

M.P.: Do the members of the club note any insights or personal discoveries? Or vice versa: they read at school, and thank God, there was nothing to re-read?

G.A.: No, no, I didn't register the feeling of wasted time :). Each time we had heated discussions, just because each person comes with his own impressions and, accordingly, conclusions and this expands the perception of others. Of course, in disputes something was born. We rarely came to a consensus, I must say. We tried to think of the finals - what could happen to the characters after the end of the text. For example, we thought: Raisky, having left Malinovka, could become an impressionist artist when he got to Rome. He was not good at academic drawing, yet he knew how to embody his impressions. Or - did Pechorin find a cure for boredom in Persia? We sketched plots for fanfiction.

Or "The Catcher in the Rye" has been our recent discussion. And why didn't any of the adults measure the child's temperature? Why does his little sister pick him up over the "cliff"? And what is it all about: a story about a Christmas miracle or a Zen Buddhist koan? Some agreed that it was a transformative text. We unanimously disagreed with J. Salinger that the text is enough for the reader to understand, that everything is said there, all the answers are on the book pages, the text does not need the author's comments, the publication of biographical facts. No, it turned out that it was not enough to understand. That is, in order to understand the essence of the story "The Catcher in the Rye", one needs to know that Salinger began to create his own artistic world on the front of the Second World War that it is about the post-war syndrome.

Someone perceived the text as muddy and incomprehensible and there are reasons for such an opinion, because there is no voice of the author - the speech of the demiurge, who traditionally determines how to relate to what. And this is an occasion to talk about the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, about how the artistic methods of writers changed in the twentieth century and what a revolution Salinger made in the art of the word.

It is sometimes difficult to agree on what we will read next, "The Cherry Orchard" was a compromise. Now we read the story "Duel" and the play "Bear" by Anton Chekhov - we continue the theme of dramatic, tragic and comic duels.

M.P.: Many new wonderful books are published every year. Based on your experience and the experience of "The book list for summer" book club, does it make sense to reread books of classical literature of past centuries that you have already read, even at school?

G.A.: We have all heard something about Oedipus Rex, more precisely, about the Oedipus complex, but almost none of us are familiar with Sophocles' "invariant" - the artistic image, the starting point for psychotherapeutic interpretations. Sometimes we just do not catch what the speech is about, but all the clues are in intertextuality, references to predecessors. There are texts that you just need to know - for a clearer understanding of the modern language, current reality and its artistic reflections. Let's be honest, who has read "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", "The Iliad", "The Odyssey", "The Divine Comedy", Shakespeare's plays? We read books that are fundamental to our culture in order to capture the meanings that are embedded in the allusions of contemporary authors. In order for the novel by A. Salnikov "The Petrovs in the flu and around it" to capture attention, in order to appreciate its depth, absurdism and humor, you need to know a lot of texts - the perception of postmodern literature directly depends on the level of erudition. And then you perceive a work of art as if performed by a "symphony orchestra", in its entirety of meanings.

Important: readers themselves choose the next book and when everyone has read and started talking, each participant speaks out - and different, contradictory, deep and extraordinary interpretations are voiced. Here we have both reading and life experiences.

M.P.: Well, the authors did not write for the school curriculum, they wrote for their peers, adults.

G.A.: Yes. And I would also like to offer "free reading": a person snatches something out of the literary stream and offers to read it to everyone because, in his opinion, this should certainly be in the school curriculum. Now I came across a book list for advanced schools, where high school students already have serious reading preparation. What can we choose for them from the current literature, so that a person does not waste time on secondary books, what kind of "growing up novels" are suitable for the 21st century? Growing up for children and evolution for adults.

It is probably possible to remove something long past from typical school lists because, firstly, it does not respond and, secondly, because the coldest summer is not enough for the entire list. However, in order to substantiate such an idea, the book still needs to be re-read, but it's a pity for time - it doesn't inspire. Thirdly, perhaps there is something accidental and not involved in the eternal classics, in the values that we want to fully understand. To finally understand yourself and in general :). We choose to read in the club what is alive.

Interviewed by Maria Pilipenko