SamTamBooks publishing house published a book by director Alexei Fedorchenko and film expert Lida Kanashova entitled “The Head of Fairy Tales.” This is a collection of biographies of repressed scientists, arranged in an original way: terrible biographical information is replaced by imaginative aphorisms, reminiscent of Fedorchenko’s screen work. Film critic Anton Dolin tells us why this book is definitely worth having in your home collection in paperback form.
This is one of the most wonderful books I have ever read in my life, in form and content. It is amazing how organically their sharp originality and very ancient sentimentality are combined. If your heart is not made of stone, you will cry and laugh while reading.
Perhaps the only thing that is not surprising in this story, but on the contrary, puts a lot of things in their place, is the names of the authors. The creator of the films “First on the Moon”, “Porridge” and “Anna’s War”, Yekaterinburg director Alexei Fedorchenko, is famous for his ability to combine incongruous and elegant low-budget form to solve the most puzzling technical problems. Film critic and festival curator Lida Kanashova worked with Fedorchenko on three of his best recent projects: “The Last Sweet Bulgaria,” “Uli Kali’s Big Snakes” and “Mitrofan Aksenov’s Sausages.”
Fedorchenko’s long-standing hobby is collecting rare books, as well as biographies of scientists who were repressed in the Soviet Union. “The Head of Fairy Tales” is an anthology of these life stories, passed through the author’s eccentric filter. As often happens in the director’s films, it is often impossible to separate fiction from reality.
Let’s start with the documentary material. The book consists of fifty small chapters, each devoted to one (rarely two) scientist. The diversity of specialties is shocking: mathematicians, dialectologists, philosophers of biology, hydrogeologists, icon restorers, zoogeographers, art historians, theoretical physicists, specialists in land reclamation, ethnographers and immunologists, unique experts in the field of aviation, underwater navigation and equestrian sports.
What is less surprising is the similarity of their fates: almost all of them died in NKVD torture prisons or labor camps. There are also those who survived repression, but there are only a few such heroes: some were lucky with emigration, others with lifelong rehabilitation. Although the luckier ones passed through the crucible of Stalin’s terror.
This is a heavy, complex and terrible matter. Many people have volumes with lists and biographies of victims of mass repression on their shelves, but few people have the strength and nerve to read them in succession (if you are not a professional historian). However, Kanashova and Fedorchenko found a unique way to establish contact with the reader.
Each chapter begins with a brief background on the scientist – usually quite surprising: this applies to both a biography and a list of achievements and scholarly works. This is followed by a stylistic leap: the author’s text of a “fairy tale” about another hero. These hallucinatory poetic texts cannot even be defined by genre. Moreover, Fedorchenko and Kanashova are constantly experimenting: there is not only prose, but also screenplays, drama, rhymed poetry, spells and even counting rhymes. Then the reader emerges from imagination to reality. Delicate episodes tell of the completed careers and deaths of geniuses who were shot, tortured, strangled, driven to suicide, starved to death and disappeared without a trace.
In one of the fairy tales dedicated to the biologist Max Ludwigovich Levin, the author wrote:
For some, Hein is everything. Someone is reading Walter Hasencliffer. Some people cannot live a day without the poems of Gottfried Penn, but for me the highest poetry is “Manual of Handmade Works”, Moscow, Selkhozges, 1936. Show me at least one line from Rilke that can be compared in tenderness to “List of Works Performed Live”.
The table of contents of “The Head of Fairy Tales” looks no less inspiring. Here are the titles of just a few chapters, either Borges or early Pelevin:
- “Labyrinths of Bolshoi Zayatsky Island”
- “The Devil of Arbanasi”
- “Divination in the Pear Outer Building”
- “Phone” (that’s not a typo!)
- “The Fall of Eros”
- “The Frog That Wasn’t There”
- “Stalin stole cutlets”
- “The inscription on the fire shield of the salted watermelon warehouse of the Spartak collective farm” in the Kazakh village of Karuba”
- “A tree-filled day”
- “A Guide to the Circle of Young Pilots Bearing the Warning Squadron”
- “Love of General Gri-Grri”
- “Complete Sentence Method”
The names and surnames of the characters, especially in combination with photographs (the faces of some, unfortunately, have not been preserved at all through history), also produce a magical impression. Naturally, there are famous figures in the list – philosophers, economists, science fiction writers – but even the interested reader has never heard of most of them in his life. It’s as if you’re leafing through the records of Atlantis, lifted from below, to which, by the way, New Berlin, Fedorchenko’s latest cinematic fantasy to date, is dedicated.
With the help of visionary images, the authors of the book arbitrarily change the intonation of despair imposed by history itself. It literally lifts the reader off the ground and carries him into parallel air spaces. It is no coincidence that on the cover we see a man gaining wings and taking off (its author is Anna Zorko, without whose illustrations this collection is unthinkable). This at least partly alleviates the bitterness of learning about the lives of eccentrics, scholars and talents, which have been stained by the iron shoe of the state.
Despite the fact that Fedorchenko and Kanashova are relative newcomers to the literary world, and that SamTamBooks is entering previously unfamiliar territory of books for adults, the result is a strikingly powerful and mature artifact. It’s hard to imagine this book of any other quality. It will not be suitable as a movie or play, and even in its electronic version it will lose a lot. One-piece object, like any Fedorchenko film.
Maybe this book is not for everyone, but it is certainly relevant to all of us, even if it is uncomfortable to admit and even if the authors themselves would like to deny it. You read about scientists a hundred years ago, but yesterday or today’s news stands before your eyes – about a mathematician being tortured in an Arctic colony, or two physicists who… sewed on betrayal. No matter how meticulously the archivists work, the list continues to grow.