To Urania, by Joseph Brodsky, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola or…

Great stories are worth the multiple rereads with each time to open up anew. The replete and filled world of the book is accepted positively, as has been represented with humour and affection from the Huckleberry Finn’s point of view, a very kind and a modest person. In the Absolutely Lost, by George Danelia, there was an another layer of the book uncovered, a tough and a cruel one. The travel down the Great River – is a deep archetype of the mankind. Russia is also a country of great rivers. Therefore, probably, the Huck and Jim voyage matches so organically the russian worldview

The poems of 70’s and 80’s by Joseph Brodsky – were the provisional peak of his poetry. He had only honed his art of the big poem here. His complicated and replete texts came as a revelation for me. The culture had turned to the German Renaissance Legacy at that era, with its meticulous accuracy and a keen eye for a detail. This style was implemented in painting by Mikhail Romadin, well-known for his art scenic work in Solaris by A.Tarkovsky, and by the main German artist of this era – Werner Tübke, I think. It was Joseph Brodsky doing the same in poetry. The Hawk's Cry in Autumn, Eclogue 4: Winter, The Fifth Anniversary are the texts, have been modelled after Bruegel. Slice-of-life scenes from all the aspects, and intersectional compositions were gathered into a single whole canvas, with hundreds of details, to distribute a sense of eventful life.

All the conceivable rules of writing the text are violated here, rules that could have been only violated. The book leaves an awesome impression. The magic worldview of the African continent has appeared in full, and without distortion here. Irrational Western culture texts as for instance, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll or Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić, seem formal and buttoned up at all against the mystical narrative of A. Tutuola.

A human being comes out of nowhere and with his memory has been wiped. He wanders as lost around for a while, among the life flows of other beings investigating, and then suddenly recognize his own thing and join it as it is his. In my case, that sort of association occurred one day in summer before the 10th year of school, when I finally got round to The Brothers Karamazov. Mastery of F. Dostoevsky has all the subjects in his power. A plot line of The Elder is extremely difficult to reveal narratively. His Zosima character motive – is an almost unique sample for the world literature. Only few writers know how to compose a romantic plot line. His story of Grushenka and Mitya is a shock precise pattern of it. V. Surikov has noticed once, that the power of Titian is all in the national ethnicity. After having watched the Titian paintings in an Art Gallery for a while, and leaving for the street, one discovers then the same faces in the crowd. The same thing happens with the Dostoevsky’s characters. Alyosha Karamazov both with Fyodor Pavlovich, as well as Kolya Krasotkin – have not gone to anywhere, they live among us, so close, that some of us are them

The book by K. Grahame that he had written for his sick son. Unfortunately, the boy did not survive. But I did not know about that at an age of 5 by reading this book. It is one of the first texts, I have read in my life. It happened in a small town at the very end of the Soviet times, I was surrounded by the kindly soft mass culture of the spent 80’s, with a «robin voice» (The Robin hearing the voice, by Edward Hunk), and an «old mill» (The Old Mill, by Igor Nikolaev). All that was unexpectedly nice harmonizing with the Victorian England habitat, reconstituted in the book. An enormously big willow grew behind my window and on windy days I could hear her brittle branches falling down on the slate roof. My book was wonderfully illustrated by Sergey Denisov. There was an amazing freedom of creativity, an expression, that I do my best to share with my comic art students. In our present-day world, filled with mercantile plates of mass art, it is not that easy to feel the freedom. We are pretty good at this, I hope