Tag: memoirs

Georgiy Daneliya “Nightmare on Tiptoes”

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koshmar

Georgiy Daneliya is one of the most prominent Soviet directors. I can’t say I love all his films, but his works like Walking the Streets of Moscow, Mimino, Kin-dza-dza!, Don’t Grieve!, Afonya, and Autumn Marathon are iconic, along with Gentlemen of Fortune, for which he wrote the script. And that’s not a complete list.

I once stumbled upon excerpts from his memoirs, but I didn’t pay them much attention until I saw a book called A Passenger Without a Ticket at a friend’s—a memoir by the director about his life. I got interested, started reading, and quickly got hooked.

I finished the book in a few days, and at the end, there was a note: “To be continued.” I thought that couldn’t be a coincidence, so I searched online and found that Georgiy Daneliya had actually written three memoirs, later combined into a single cycle, initially called Chito-Grito (when it was a two-part series) and later released as a single book titled Nightmare on Tiptoes.

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Grigory Belykh, Leonid Panteleev “The Republic of FeDoSh”

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It’s hard to believe that this book is almost a hundred years old! Yet, you don’t really feel that in the emotions of the characters. Sure, there’s a slight sense of “old-fashionedness,” that these are clearly not modern kids, but overall, you only remind yourself that it’s a century-old book.

To start from the beginning: I had wanted to read this book for a long time. My parents had traded scrap paper for it back in Soviet times, but I first saw the movie based on the book. I enjoyed the film. That’s when I decided that I should read the original. However, it took me almost twenty years to finally do it.

Even so, I was hesitant to begin. You know how some books seem to have their own right time? What you enjoyed 10-15 years ago might now, upon rereading, feel dull or even disappointing. That’s exactly what I was afraid of—that this book might resonate perfectly with teenagers but wouldn’t hit the same way in adulthood.

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Anna Starobinets “Look at Him”

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A very poignant, very honest… and very heavy book. Especially for those whose family has experienced something similar—the loss of an unborn child. At the same time, it’s a very necessary book. Necessary for everyone to understand the nightmare it is and how it continues to be perpetuated by modern medicine in the post-Soviet space. And especially necessary for those who have gone through it. We, as husbands (and sometimes as parents), can never truly understand a mother who has lost a child, but such a heartfelt story about this pain can help us come closer to our families and cope with the loss together. Not the loss of a “fetus,” as the doctors call it, but our child. Who will always remain our child.

My rating: 5/5

Lawrence Durrell “Bitter Lemons of Cyprus”

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You can’t always trust book blurbs. The book is essentially the author’s account of a couple of years spent in Cyprus in 1953-54. These were likely the last years when the island could still be called both unified and peaceful. At first, you can clearly sense the author’s condescending attitude toward the locals, even though he calls them his friends. Gradually, this tone fades, giving way to reflections on the difficult political situation on the island, which led to tragic and bloody consequences. Had the British made the right and, most importantly, timely decisions back then, we might not have had the bloody history and forty years of division and intercommunal hatred that still exist on the island today. Sadly, history doesn’t deal with hypotheticals.

As for the writing itself, the book is uneven, sometimes slipping into dull recollections of meetings with friends whose names mean nothing to most readers, then shifting to colorful descriptions of the local lifestyle or detailed analyses of the events of those years.