My Reading for Them: Eisenstein's Scripts and the Revelations of Virginia Woolf

Lectures by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the founder of electronic music, unrealized scenarios by Sergei Eisenstein, memoir essays by Virginia Woolf and "visual aphorisms" by the artist Olga Chernysheva. On the eve of the Non/fictio Spring Fair, publishers have released a number of bright novelties in which fiction, documentary and scientific are intricately intertwined. Izvestia has selected books of the season that are worth paying special attention to.

Sergei Eisenstein "Unfinished business"

Comp. Nahum Kleiman

Sergei Eisenstein is, without a doubt, the most famous Russian director in the world; an absolute classic, without whom cinema would be different. It seems that the legacy of such geniuses should have been published and republished to the last line long ago. But in fact, even among the creative artifacts of Sergei Mikhailovich (not to mention epistolary and theoretical works), there are many things that the public is completely unfamiliar with. First of all, these are scripts and developments of failed films. In his new major work, the chief Eisenstein scholar Nahum Kleiman collects five similar projects — publishes them in a carefully verified form according to all sources and complements them with a selection of related materials: director's drawings and articles, diary notes, photographs.

"Zutter's Gold" and "American Tragedy" (Dreiser's film adaptation, approved by the writer himself) Eisenstein was planning to shoot in the United States in the early 1930s and wrote the lyrics in English; alas, the paintings were never put into production. ¡Que viva México!, which the director took up in Mexico, admiring its culture, traditions, people and nature, was more fortunate — a significant part of the planned was shot, but it was not possible to complete the work and all the material was "captured" by an overseas producer (the Soviet Union refused to buy it). Already after Eisenstein's death, several editing versions were made, and it seems that the story of this tape is not over yet.

Finally, after returning to the USSR in 1932, he conceived a film about Moscow and a satire "MMM". But luck did not accompany these plans either. As well as the idea to collect the five listed developments in the book "Unfinished Things". Sergei Mikhailovich wanted to release it in 1935, thereby responding to critics who accused him of creative stagnation (which, of course, did not happen — only bad luck). Now, 90 years later, there is one less unfinished thing: Eisenstein's ideas — both the scripts and the book based on them — have reached the reader, if not the viewer. In addition, with exemplary scientific support.

A curious detail: in 1932, Eisenstein, having come across an illustration by Boris Yefimov in Izvestia, circles one of the characters and writes in French in the margins.: "Well, that's it: MM." Obviously, Sergei Mikhailovich, being an excellent draughtsman himself, saw one of the heroes of his comedy "MMM" in the cartoon of the Izvestia cartoonist.

The Memoir Club

Virginia Woolf

In the 1900s, Cambridge students and their aristocratic friends began to gather in London's bohemian Bloomsbury neighborhood and discuss literature, politics, social life, and art. This intellectual circle was named the Bloomsbury Group; its active members were the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, as well as their half-brother George Duckworth.

Their most frequent meetings were in the first half of the 1910s. And then, after a pause during the First World War, the 13 members of the group met again in 1920. And we decided to organize a Memoir Club: it was assumed that everyone would share their memories of their lives, while maintaining maximum frankness.

Virginia Woolf wrote three essays for the meetings: the first is about her childhood and social debut, the second is about the Bloomsbury Group, and the third is a reflection on herself with the eloquent title "Am I a Snob?" These texts are now available to the Russian-speaking reader. And despite the fact that they do not negate the value of Wolfe's later memoirs, it is also not worth considering the essay as something passing. On the one hand, these are ironic, elegant sketches about the life of British high society — its morals (and immorality), hypocrisy and stupidity. On the other hand, there are pictures of the growing up and becoming of an outstanding writer, the roots of whose works are precisely in these impressions.

And, of course, even such seemingly non-artistic memories and not intended for the general public, Wolfe fills them with sometimes unobvious, but powerful drama. The best example is the first essay: 22 Hyde Park Gate. Sarcastically recounting how George Duckworth taught his sisters (then their last name was Stephen) By setting out her dialogues in great detail and describing this whole artificial, prim world, the writer deliberately bores the reader in order to shock and shock him at the very end by telling him about the rape: "Yes, the elderly ladies from Kensington and Belgravia never found out that George Duckworth was for "these poor Stephen"not only father and mother, brother and sister, but also lover."

Karlheinz Stockhausen. About music

Ed.-comp. Robin Maconie

When people talk about the birth of electronic music, they usually think of pop bands like Kraftwerk. But in fact, this trend appeared much earlier, and its origins were not pop stars at all, but experimentalists from the academic environment. First of all, Karlheinz Stockhausen. The leader of the post-war generation of avant-gardists, Stockhausen became one of the key figures for the art of the second half of the 20th century, and his influence was much broader than that of many of his colleagues. Suffice it to say that the Beatles composer's photo was placed on the cover of his album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (along with Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Einstein, Sigmund Freud and other icons of the century). And in the 1990s, Bjork, having already become a superstar, specially traveled to Stockhausen in Germany to interview him.

He also came to Russia: many music lovers and connoisseurs still recall the excitement that was at Stockhausen's performance at Moscow State University in 1990. There he not only supervised the performance of works, sitting at the sound engineering console, but also talked about creativity, communicated with everyone. Despite his image as a guru and prophet, he was generally quite open and talkative. Stockhausen is clearly not one of those composers who, when asked to comment on the idea of writing, say: "I've said it all in my music."

One of the proofs of this is a book that combines his lectures in England, delivered in 1971, and detailed conversations that took place a decade later. Reading this is certainly not easy and is designed primarily for people who are immersed in the topic. But before that, his texts or other direct speech were not available in Russian at all (at least in the format of a separate commercial publication). So the novelty is a rare opportunity to learn "first—hand" how what we call "modern music" originated — in every sense of the word. But Stockhausen's memories of his childhood during the Second World War should reach the general public.

Olga Chernysheva. About the drawings

The genre of the artist's book has existed in its "classical" form for more than a century, but still remains very rare and elitist (as, in fact, it was originally). Each of his examples is all the more important, especially the domestic ones. The idea of the genre is that a famous painter does not just act as an illustrator of the text, but creates at his discretion a unity — or rather, a dialogue — of the word and the image. At the same time, the literary component can be either classical or borrowed from modern writers, or invented by him.

Olga Chernysheva, one of the leading Russian artists, who held two major museum retrospectives in less than a year — at GES-2 last fall and at AZ/ART this spring - preferred the totally original version. In a plump, beautifully published album, reproductions of her graphic works are complemented by aphoristic philosophical remarks. In most cases, these are comments on specific works (including those that can now be seen live at the exhibition "From Scratch" at AZ/ART), but sometimes they grow into memoir sketches and reflections that go far beyond a specific drawing or watercolor.

Of course, the very order of images and texts is also built by Chernysheva and develops into a kind of three—act narrative: in the first part, characters depicted in color come to the fore; in the second, rather, spaces shown in monochrome; in the third, colors return, and characters and spaces meet. Although in the case of Chernysheva, all this is conditional. And the beauty of her art is not in its rigid conceptuality (despite the fact that Olga is called the heiress of Moscow conceptualism), but, on the contrary, in some special simplicity, unpretentiousness, as if by chance.

Urban birds, street vendors, subway passengers, even laundry that is drying on ropes... Chernysheva the artist and Chernysheva the writer look at all this with wise tenderness. And it teaches us to see the beautiful in the small.