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My Home Library (The Books That Made Me)

I‘ve said before that, when I came to England, the thing that stood out the most was the absence of books anywhere on display in the house. The majority of houses I visited had books shelved somewhere away from the sight. You would see mirrors, paintings, ceramics, photos, but rarely many, if any, books.

My Moscow flat is small, and what you see is the so called “large room”, i.e. the living room, that also functions as a study and a bedroom, and on occasion – as a dining room. I’ve lived there since I was born, and ever since I’ve been surrounded with books. Admittedly, the books I was looking at when I was a kid are now in another room in a different bookcase. In the living room, however, most of the books were bought in the years after I became a student. More books stand on the shelves in the corridor.

What books are they? Having not looked at them for 7 years, I’m impressed and amazed at myself at the range of literature in front of my eyes. The most impressive thing is that I did actually read them. In no particular order, on those eight shelves you’ll find: Sigmund Freud; Nicholas Roerikh; Chinese, Greek and Roman philosophers; ancient Russian chronicles; the Russian language dictionary by Vladimir Dal’; encyclopedias of Symbolist movement, Music, Philology, Mythology, and Religion; history of erotic painting; Thomas Mommsen; Andre Mauroit; English, French, and German dictionaries; Bertrand Russell; Boris Pasternak; Mikhail Bulgakov; Domesday Book; Aldous Huxley; Franz Kafka; Victor Hugo; Gustav Flobert; and many, many others…

Looking at these books so many years later, I become aware of a few things. I realise that it is impossible to be ordinary when, as a child and teenager, you grow up surrounded by this wealth of human culture. I also see why my own mind is so panoptical yet capable of finding the common between different things. I can understand why I find it so easy to navigate between the topics and epochs; but I also see why sometimes I cannot tolerate the mental laziness in people.

Last but not least, I understand why for many people I come across as a serious, brainy, logical, realistic person, with little interest in emotional stuff. Although the image is far from truth, I realise why I so love Maugham’s “Theatre”. Julia Lambert may have been vain and pathetic on the scale of an ordinary woman and mother, almost a child; and she didn’t know much; but being distanced from the ordinary and free from knowledge allowed her to convey the deepest emotions and thus to be the best actress, to inspire people.

I know more than Julia, I am aloof and calm most of the time, and because of this people confide in me. Because I need “human material” for my own purposes, I don’t stop them. They tell me things they cannot tell anybody else. Instinctively, they suspect that I know enough to put them in the proper perspective, to relieve the burdensome feeling that they are complete misfits and to inspire them to lead their own lives. But would I be able to do this without compassion and empathy? Without passion for literature which is a synthetic art, in that it requires not only mental power but also emotional engagement in form of imagination and invites to see our emotional responses from the outside? Without knowledge of how similar people are and have always been?

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