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Hello, dear friends. I am continuing my series of talks about reading, its importance, what to read, how to read, why to read, and what it’s all for.
Philosopher Andrii Baumeister discusses which books a person should read in a lifetime, arguing narrative thinking builds holistic understanding and maturity.
Key Takeaways
- Narrative thinking is essential for constructing meaning and holistic understanding of self and world.
- Reading, especially fiction and classic literature, develops maturity and consciousness.
- Complex, unsimplified texts are necessary for genuine intellectual and personal formation.
- Stories preserve meaning and tradition even when rituals or methods are lost.
What the video covers
- Continues a series on reading: what to read, how to read, why read, and what it is for.
- Introduces the 'narrative turn' in thinking and the humanities, arguing narrative is everywhere in science and history.
- Argues the ability to construct stories enables holistic thinking and organizing fragmented data into meaning.
- Illustrates with Paul Maar's children's story about a boy who cannot tell stories, linking it to adults who lack a coherent worldview and sense of personal development.
- Cites Gershom Scholem's account of Hasidic masters who lost the ritual steps for solving problems but kept the story, arguing narrative preserves meaning.
- Discusses how Homer, Greek tragedy (Oedipus Rex, Antigone) and classic novels form essential reading for mature people.
- Warns against shallow adaptations and simplified texts that strip away complexity needed for formation.
- Recommends a list of major works including Dante, Augustine, Dickens, Melville's Moby Dick, Goethe's Faust, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Bulgakov.
- Addresses the value of reading in original languages versus translations.
- Ends with a reflection on how cultural memory and intellectual traditions are lost when they are discarded.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Purpose of Reading
- 02:17The Narrative Turn and Grand Narratives in Science
- 05:25Paul Maar's Story: The Boy Who Couldn't Tell Stories
- 07:43Gershom Scholem and the Hasidic Tale
- 12:33Story, Development, and Holistic Thinking
- 22:00Homer, Greek Tragedy, and Essential Classics
- 30:57Recommended Books: Novels and Epics
- 44:10Original Languages vs. Translations and Concluding Reflections
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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And today I would like to discuss a very important topic. What books should a person read in their lifetime?
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Or what books is it necessary for us to read? And, of course, we will have another question: what is the purpose, and why is it necessary to read these books?
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This question will allow me today to delve a bit deeper, because by talking about reading, we will touch upon another important problem of our consciousness, our thinking, and our attitude toward ourselves, people, and the world around us.
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I will begin with one assertion and two examples. The assertion is this. Today, many understand the importance of narrative and the ability to tell stories.
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In this regard, people even speak of a narrative turn in thinking and in the humanities.
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What is a narrative? A narrative is a story, a message about something in the form of a tale, in the form of some kind of narrative communication and process.
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And why do people talk about this turn? Because previously, narrative, or so-called narratology or the theory of storytelling, was dealt with mainly by literary scholars.
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They studied genres like short stories, novellas, novels, and, I don't know, dramatic works, cinema, theater.
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All this was viewed as genres of literary and art criticism and had a fairly narrow scope of application.
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But it turned out—and as a philosopher, I know this well—that our thinking only has meaning, only becomes filled with meaning, and we only learn to work with meanings if we can construct a narrative , if we think holistically.
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And in fact, narrative is everywhere. Those who have seen my lectures on metaphysics remember the great natural history.
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From subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, the psychic, living psychic, to consciousness. Scientists tell us about the great natural narrative from the Big Bang to us.
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In biology, for example, Darwin’s " Origin of Species," or in chemistry, or mathematics, or even more so—as I have already mentioned regarding physics and other sciences, sociology, not to mention history or psychology—we always encounter these grand narratives.
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And if we think in a fragmented way, if we think only in fragmented data and information, as we are being trained to do today, it is difficult for us to assemble meaning.
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Therefore, those who spoke about the narrative turn drew attention to this very important point.
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The ability to construct a story means the ability to think holistically, the ability to connect and organize a multitude of data, facts, events, and information into a coherent narrative.
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And that is why reading, especially reading fiction, shapes our thinking, shapes our consciousness, and gives us the keys to maturity, the sources of maturity.
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We are going to discuss this with you now. Now, for the two promised examples.
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I will start with the first one; it is an example from children's fiction. It is by the German children's author Paul Maar.
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His books have been translated into both Russian and Ukrainian. He has a story called "The Boy Who Couldn't Tell Any Stories." The boy, naturally, has a dad, a mom, and a little sister named Susan; his name is Conrad.
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One evening, perhaps a family evening, I only read a fragment of this story. Dad says to Conrad: Conrad, please, make up a story.
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And Conrad says: What do you mean, make up a story? Do you want me to lie?
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Do you want me to tell a falsehood? Dad says: No, we don't want you to lie.
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Just make up any story right now. Well, for instance, start like this: Once upon a time.
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Conrad replies: What does "once upon a time" mean? These are vague things. What do you mean , "when long ago"? What specific time was it long ago?
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Dad, please, I really don't understand what you want from me. Then Mom intervenes and says: Well, okay , start the story like this: "Once" or " One day." Conrad is puzzled again and says: What do you mean, "one day"? Which day
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exactly? How would I know what day that was? What is it connected to? Mom, sorry, I can't start a story like that because those are vague things.
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And then the little sister intervenes, her name is Susan, as you recall. She is the little one, and the boy, I take it, is about 11, 12, or 13 years old.
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And then Susan says: Listen, start the way I usually start. "And there was a mouse." He says: Susan, wait.
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What kind of mouse? A shrew, a field mouse, a house mouse? I studied zoology and biology in school , and we were told about this species of rodent, these subcategories, and so on and so forth.
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And eventually, this episode ends like this: Dad sighs, turns to Mom, and says : I've realized he just can't make up stories at all.
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That’s how it is. Truth be told, don't many of us resemble this boy? They ask: But isn't literature just a lie?
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Poets lie, writers invent, and we want reality; we are always such big realists .
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When we say, "let's start with something ," well, for example, "this happened then..." Why must I start with that time ?
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Why "once upon a time"? Why "one day"? And here we see that this boy does not have a coherent worldview.
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He cannot develop a plot; he cannot find a place to start. And narrative always presupposes a beginning.
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In our lives, we arrive at certain thoughts, we undergo certain experiences , we reach insights, we come to decisions, and they are always part of our biography, part of our development.
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And if we cannot localize, cannot place important events of our lives into a context, then nothing truly important will happen.
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And if we cannot observe our development as an individual, as a consciousness, as an active character in some story, then we have no conscious progress.
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And if we do not weave our life into our own narrative, into a broader narrative of the region, the country, Europe, or civilization, we are cast out of reality altogether.
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It turns out that by not knowing how to create stories, we are cast out of reality as such.
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We want to be realists, we want to stick to hard facts, but we are thrown into a fragmented propagandistic meaningless world where those facts are inflated with what propagandists or manipulators need. This is my first story. So, the
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boy who did not know how to tell stories . How many such boys and girls are there among us, not only in childhood, but also in adulthood.
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The second story was told by Gershom Scholem in his book on Jewish mysticism .
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He is a famous philosopher who influenced Borges, influenced Umberto Eco, who was friends with Martin Buber and other philosophers, and founded an entire field of research in Jerusalem.
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At the end of this book, he tells a story; I will give it in my own translation.
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Here is that story. When the Baal Shem, the Baal Shem Tov— the founder of Hasidism—intended to solve a complex problem, he would go to the forest, to a specific place, light a fire, immerse himself in mystical meditation, and recite a prayer.
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And then his intentions were fulfilled, and the problem was solved. When the Maggid of Mezeritch, a generation later, intended to solve a complex problem, he would go to the same place in the forest and say—we can no longer light the fire, but reciting the
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prayer is well within our power. And then his intentions were fulfilled, and the problem was solved.
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If yet another generation later, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov intended to solve a complex problem, he would go to the forest and say—we can no longer light the fire.
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We no longer know the secret meditations that bring the prayer to life, but we know the place in the forest where it all happened.
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And that is quite enough. And that was indeed quite enough to solve the problem.
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But then, another generation later, Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, preparing to solve a difficult problem, would say, we can no longer kindle the fire, we no longer know how to offer up the prayers , and we no longer know the place in the
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forest where it all happened. But we can tell the story of it. And, the storyteller added, his accounts had the same power as the deeds of the rabbis mentioned in the story.
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That is a small narrative, a small tale like that. Well, first of all, it is interesting that when you study the history of Hasidism and the legends and stories about the founders of Hasidism, you suddenly see—and many of you know this—
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that this is the territory of Ukraine, that this is a part of Ukraine, the 17th -18th centuries.
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And this alone shows how much broader the narrative of Ukraine, or the Ukrainian narrative, is than a narrow nationalist narrative.
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Ukraine is the birthplace of Hasidism, Ukraine is the birthplace of one of the most powerful mystical movements.
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And, of course, I am not even mentioning Orthodoxy, Greek Catholics, Catholics, or Islam, but it is a very intense, diverse religious life.
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And so, when we talk about this narrative, I asked a question, because I was writing this material for my patrons , and I actually had a conversation with my patrons just yesterday.
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By the way, subscribe to my Patreon channel; there are always new materials or videos there that are not published elsewhere.
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And so, when I was publishing this material, I asked a question. Just look, this is the narrative that Scholem told.
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But how can one convey this story in a news feed, in a short headline?
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Tradition lives on in its tales and in its lore. Or, the power of the teachers lives on in the memory of their followers.
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But the most important thing is lost in that sense: the dynamics, the life of meaning.
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What is told in this narrative cannot be laid out in short phrases. This, by the way, I address to those who often write in the comments, "you have a lot of filler." "We are watching, and well, there's just
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so much.""Everything you say in an hour or an hour and a half could be said in 2-3 minutes." These people do not understand that I am offering you a narrative that contains the meanings I want to share with you.
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If I spoke in aphorisms and short maxims , which I also know how to do—look at my lectures or some of my posts—it strips the meanings I want to share of their fullness and power.
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Hmm, you could say it in 2 minutes: read books, read books 1, 2, 3, it is important for the development of your consciousness.
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That’s it. Those who want a summary can log off, because they have received it.
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But what does that actually provide? It is a flat thought, a short phrase torn from context, not living within a narrative, which gives us nothing.
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Christ spoke in parables. The Buddha told stories. Socrates in court tells the story of Chaerephon, who goes to Delphi and asks the god Apollo, the oracle, who is the wisest, whether Socrates is the wisest.
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That is, humanity is accompanied by these stories. The story of Muhammad, the story and so on, many important stories.
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Our reality and what we call goals, meanings, and values are part of these stories.
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By the way, Martin Buber's "Legends of the Baal-Shem," you see, this is the 1922 edition.
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It is interesting that these ideas became important, even though they were formed in small towns that were mocked during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.
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Small-town mentality, provincial thinking. It turns out that in these small towns, a great spiritual tradition was created that later interested people in capitals like Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and eventually Jerusalem.
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This happens quite often. Even Christ, as we know, came from Galilee, and even one of his future disciples asked whether anything good could come from Nazareth, from such a strange provincial environment.
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This, by the way, is a lesson for the arrogance of metropolitan people who think that all life is concentrated in capitals.
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Let's move on. So, I have given these two examples. Both the example of the boy who cannot tell stories and the example of the founders of Hasidism show that meanings live in narratives.
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Therefore, when we learn to read and when we ask our main question of this conversation—what books should a person read in their lifetime—it turns out that the answer, the first glimmerings of the answer, like the first rays of dawn,
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begins to break through the darkness. The first glimpses of the answer sound like this.
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We must read certain important narratives. Literature is an ocean. Many different books have been written, many different texts.
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But some texts amidst this entire ocean are the most important. Here is a fragment of our conversation with patrons yesterday.
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When we were talking about education, about modern school and university trends, that was one of the topics.
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I said that my experience over the last thirty to thirty-five years is that many try to justify—I will say it directly and frankly—the decline in the level of consciousness, the level of critical thinking, and the level of education
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with vague excuses. "Well no, you know, they are just different." Generations differ from one another.
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Yes, fewer books are read now, but there are more other sources of information. Yes, they don't read long novels, but they play video games instead, and they can still be effective and get things done.
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First of all, I am against generational approaches. In every generation, I look at people vertically, not horizontally across time .
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People who achieve something have always been a small part of any generation. This is an exception to the rule, not the norm.
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Indeterminate patterns, a certain everyday typicality. These are not stereotypes, but exceptions. But even if we think in terms of generations, we will realize—and I am sincerely convinced of this—that it is a very false statement that they are different.
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No. A decline in the level of thinking, a decline in critical judgment, a decline in the level of education.
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Education is not just about knowing languages, and not just about an honors degree or a gold medal in school.
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The decline in this level is primarily connected to the fact that today more and more people are not being shaped by these grand narratives.
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They don't read those stories. And those stories were created to offer models for a life path, for a life search.
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I am not talking about sacred texts now —the Bible, the Quran, or the Upanishads .
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I won't talk about that or, I don't know , any other sacred texts. I am talking about literature and philosophical prose, which offered specific models, guided by which a person knew, an individual knew, what a meaningful life was, movement toward
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certain goals, a change or deepening of your understanding of what is happening, and an understanding of yourself.
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If these narratives don't exist, the question is—who will teach us then? We are currently attacking the remains of authority in this world.
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Everyone who was ever considered an authority—we want to mock them, throw them off pedestals, topple their monuments, and put some scoundrels on those monuments instead—that's a different matter, not our story today.
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But the question arises—who, then, will offer this to you? Through what stories? If we are not educated, if we do not grow up on these grand stories that shaped the generation of Europeans before us, what will we grow up on?
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Therefore, the second part of my talk is a transition to exactly what these stories are, what we can see, find, read here, and what we should pay attention to.
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So, reading, to summarize the first part , reading is necessary because we only think when we learn to perceive reality , facts, information, and events holistically, when we are capable of creating narratives, when we, boys and girls, are able to tell stories about
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ourselves, about other people, and about the world. The second step. Because in stories, we connect and organize the diversity of data, facts, and information.
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And then a second question arises—what should we read, what stories, what narratives? Here, I would like to suggest a few such stories to you.
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I will propose 20 short items, but again , I am not forcing my position; I am not just taking them as sources that shaped me.
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I have gone beyond my own experience and tried to build, through many, let’s say memories events reality history philosophy, and literature, a small list of texts that have shaped generations of Europeans over the last century.
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And here I will comment very briefly on each of these points, and then we will summarize this conversation.
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The first is, undoubtedly, one more small remark. I will not make allowances for the difficulty of these texts here.
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You don’t have to read them, but at least they will be in your mind as a task.
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And if a task is set, perhaps it will be solved someday. And so, the first text is Homer’s Iliad .
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Hmm, it’s difficult to read the whole work. I recommend reading books six, 18 , and 22.
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Interesting things are connected with the Iliad. I will soon be holding offline workshops .
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And we will be talking about worldviews and different structures of consciousness. And we will look at several narratives.
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And the Iliad, or the tale of Troy, Homer's narrative of Troy which he passed on—because it was a long oral tradition—effectively forms the entire ancient world, and, looking ahead, all of Europe.
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Because, well, that's roughly the 8th century BC for Homer, but the story told is from a much later time—much earlier time, excuse me.
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It’s an approximate, conditional time, and people still argue whether Troy even existed. Yes, excavations were carried out, yes, there is a lot of new data, but many contemporary classicists, archaeologists , and historians doubt that we have clear evidence of whether the Trojan War
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even happened. So, this is approximately—very approximately—the same time as the conventional date for the Jewish people's exodus from Egypt.
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The exodus itself likely took place over several decades, but people often point to a specific point around 1250 BC.
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And it is around this same time, 1250 BC , that Troy fell. Just imagine, this speaks of the 13th century BC.
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And what is important here? The fact is that this is the epic of all epics, or the narrative of all narratives.
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It laid the foundation for Hellenic self-identity, the naming of Greek peoples, an understanding of a certain mission, and the ability to recount and describe events, feelings, experiences, goals, and actions.
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All of this is present in Homer. And it's no wonder that Homer shaped antiquity. Well, for example, Alexander the Great wanted to be like Achilles and went east, reaching India.
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He wanted to surpass Achilles as his primary hero. This is that model. His teacher, Aristotle, gave him a copy of the Iliad, which he kept by his head while he slept, along with his dagger.
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That is a famous story. And what I am saying is, that is the model for Alexander the Great.
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But not only for antiquity. It is interesting that even Socrates, in his Apology, tells of his wisdom, of Chaerephon, of Delphi, and also compares himself to Achilles, noting that Achilles knew he would die if he killed Hector.
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And upon learning this, he said—in Socrates’ words—that all the more reason he had to fight him, that having learned the gods 'will, he, as a hero, could not turn from his path; he had to see it through.
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And Socrates also says that the god Apollo assigned him to serve Athens, and even if you sentence me to death, I must complete my mission.
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You see, even Socrates compares himself to Achilles, despite Plato's criticism of the poets, especially in The Republic .
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But for Europeans as well, those of the Renaissance and the Modern era, Homer is very important.
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When Greek intellectuals migrated to Italy and other European cities, they taught Greek to humanists, specifically Italian humanists.
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And around centers like Florence, Milan , and other cities, societies of friends of Homer and Plato were formed.
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They read Plato, read Homer, and began giving the first lectures on Homer—on Homer’s Iliad, mind you.
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The 15th century saw the first prose German translation in the mid-16th century. And when Homer began to be translated into national languages in poetic form, it helped shape those peoples' languages .
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For example, I managed to find a second edition of Voss’s translation in a secondhand bookshop; it's from 1819.
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And he translated it in 1794, if I’m not mistaken, for the first German edition.
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That is a contribution to German literature. And there is this Gothic font and these black-and-white illustrations.
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It is a translation, but beyond just translating Homer, we must also talk about him and provide some form of commentary.
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This also creates a cultural, literary, and philosophical tradition. For instance, these are commentaries and notes on Homer.
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Do you see? The year 1792. This is a story; this is a commentary on Homer.
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We might say, well, listen, Homer’s Iliad, what is there to comment on? It’s the end of the 18th century, a rather thick volume that teaches us how to understand great literature.
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That’s the first point. And the second point, I’ll be briefer now. Undoubtedly, it is the great Greek tragedy that shows clashes, personal conflicts, individual-society conflicts , individual-gods conflicts; this is Sophocles.
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Oedipus Rex and Antigone are what I consider essential reading for every mature person. Starting from the age of 12, starting from 12 or 13 years old.
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I would also recommend as a third point two dialogues by Plato. I love other dialogues, but for the educated general public, I would recommend the Symposium and the Apology of Socrates.
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This can be read as a literary work. By the way, classical philologists study this as a literary work, for example, Plato’s Symposium.
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And this connects us with great literature and the epic, with Greek tragedy and the epic.
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Plato, the Apology of Socrates and the Symposium, because they are also constructed as a dramatization of an idea, as a playing out of meanings in Plato.
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The fourth point is Virgil, the Aeneid. By the way, returning to Homer, I mentioned Voss, then the English translations.
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And it’s interesting that Gnedich’s wonderful translation from 1829. Gnedich himself was a person, well, known; he was likely a Freemason from the Poltava Governorate.
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In one of the small Poltava towns, I recently, a couple of years ago, saw a monument to Gnedich.
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I don’t know if it’s still standing. I would like it to remain there. And when you read Gnedich, it’s an amazing feeling.
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On one hand, the unfolding of the language, the richness of the language, on the other hand, the sensation of the archaic, of antiquity.
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Because later translations, like Minsky’s, Veresaev’s, and even later ones, are such an attempt, on one hand, to adapt to the modern reader, but it seems to me this is not very good, because it’s the same as translating Aristotle’s
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metaphysics for 21 st-century teenagers . All the philosophy will disappear from there, and only some simple steps, simple schemes will remain. And what is the point of reading then?
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After all, this is solving riddles, this is solving some puzzles. By solving them , we become mature.
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But if they, these puzzles, these depths are tailored to us and made shallow, completely stripped of any roughness of meaning or complexity, then we are not being formed.
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Formation requires this breaking through of complexity. So, returning to my point, I mentioned Gnedich.
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And, by the way, there is a wonderful Ukrainian translation of the Iliad by Borys Ten.
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I will speak about Virgil. I would recommend reading the first two books of Virgil, and the sixth through the eighth.
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It is interesting how Virgil integrates into Homer’s epic. He explains the Roman mission to the Romans.
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It was written during the period of Augustus, the emperor Augustus. This is the last decade of the 1st century BC.
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The late works of Virgil. It is interesting that the Aeneid begins by linking itself to Troy, and to the fact that Aeneas learns of Troy's fall.
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It is there that the Trojan Horse is recounted, and not in Homer's Iliad. And there we see how from Troy, which is the current western coast of Turkey, the hero and his family sail to Italy, and the great Roman era begins.
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Virgil wisely, eight centuries after Homer and almost 13 centuries after the Trojan events, weaves the history of Rome into it.
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And in one of the books, a prophecy is described regarding what Rome will become, drawing a narrative thread to Augustus and to the apotheosis, the pinnacle of Roman development.
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This is how craftily Virgil embeds this narrative structure. And there are also Platonic motifs, the transmigration of souls, when the hero descends into the underworld.
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All this is congenial to Homer and inscribes one history within another. A very interesting move.
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At the fifth position, I would name the Confessions of Augustine, because here we are dealing with a narrative about the soul.
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It is a history of the soul, a history of quests, insights, and conversions. And this history of the soul stands before God, serves people, and examines its path based on changing understandings and meanings.
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This would become the model for the confessions of all European texts of this genre.
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And there we find both treasures of theology and narrative, and the atmosphere and scent of late antiquity.
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Of course, the translation by Sergey Eyenko is somewhat embellished. It reads well, it is easy to read, well, the theological depth is lost, but you can read other translations, or perhaps one of you can translate it yourself, make a
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new translation into Russian or Ukrainian. That is your choice. But I would recommend Augustine.
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The sixth is, without a doubt, Dante’s Divine Comedy. This is something we read throughout our lives.
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And in the sequence of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, this is the third puzzle. This is the third great narrative, which , on one hand, absorbs theology.
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Dionysius the Areopagite, Neoplatonism, especially in the Paradiso section, the final chapters of the third part of Paradise.
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And on the other hand, these are personalities characters histories and levels of existence. Relationships between outstanding personalities over a long historical interval.
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And from a third side, it is also a history and conversion of the soul.
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It is a connection to both Homer and Virgil, and on the other hand, a connection to Plato and Augustine.
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Undoubtedly, this is a focal point or a nodal point in the spiritual history of Europeans. And it is very important to enter into it.
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If you find it difficult at first, read a page or two, flip through it, look at the illustrations by Doré, for example.
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Well, check out some adaptations, but remember that adaptations tend to, um, create a false sense of awareness.
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Once you read Dante in 15 minutes, you might never return to The Divine Comedy again.
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You'll think you have the text in your pocket, and the meanings are tucked away in your pocket, in a small brochure.
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You should probably try to read the book itself after all. Lozinsky’s translation, for example, is the most famous, classic, and relatively smooth one, but there are other translations that are just as significant and important.
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Shakespeare. Generally, the more you read Shakespeare , the better, but I'll focus on Hamlet because I spoke about it in one of my talks.
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Also, check out my conversation with the Estonian director Lembit Peterson. In Hamlet, this puzzle, this collision between revenge, filial duty, and Christian perceptions creates such a knot that, uh, that Hamlet initially finds impossible to untie.
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And here, again, are those who say, " It's too wordy, you could summarize it.
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" But if you tell it briefly, there is no Hamlet. Then it would go briefly like this. Dad appeared and said, "Kill this man who is living with Mom." Hamlet goes, takes a dagger, and kills him. That’s it, no fluff, everything is
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resolved in two minutes. Problem solved . Dad said, son did. Dad said, son did, and lived happily ever after. What else could there be?
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He married Ophelia. An absolutely perfect ending. Hollywood would make it just like that. And we could also rewrite Romeo and Juliet and so on and so forth.
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Everything can be solved peacefully, kindly, and so on. But then, what’s missing? There is no dramatization of ideas, no dramatization of meaning, no formation of ourselves. These texts don't just inform, they form.
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That is why we must read them. This is a novel that was first published in 1790.
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Behind me up there, you can’t see the, uh, six volumes of the history of literature.
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And here we find, first of all, the formation of the classic English novel. And this is, after all, a grand narrative. On the other hand, it is a connection with Dante, Augustine, Homer , and Virgil, because it is the story of
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a soul. But it is the story of a soul that preserves itself despite being cast out of civilization as a second, well, a second Adam—this is Christ, or rather, let's say, a variation of Adam in the divine garden, but without Eve just yet
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. And this character, through a life of order and prayer—which was glossed over or sometimes cut out in Soviet translations—builds his own world and brings civilization to this island.
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Defoe himself calls it an allegory. It is a religious narrative, a theological account packaged as an entertaining story that everyone would later imitate.
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We find elements of this in Stevenson's Treasure Island, my favorite childhood book, and even in Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo epic, where the hero also ends up on an island.
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And many other, many other repetitions. It’s all Daniel Defoe. Theology, a vivid and engaging narrative , an adventure component, and the emergence of the classic English novel by Defoe.
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This is position number eight, but I would add Swift's Gulliver's Travels here as a sub-position.
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They were, by the way, published about seven years later, give or take, but these are also grand narratives that include politics, adventure, and link literature with deep meaning.
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The ninth position is Jane Austen. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And this novel is viewed by many analytical philosophers today as a second Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle.
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For example, in MacIntyre's famous book After Virtue, Homer, Aristotle, and Jane Austen are featured—despite it seemingly being women's prose, a novel written by a woman at the very beginning of the 19th century.
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Is it really worth reading? Some sort of romantic feelings, semi-feelings, sighs, gasps, and so on.
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No, it is a great book of moral philosophy. It is a study, it is a model of courtship, a model of relationships, a model of communication between souls.
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Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Of course, Goethe's Faust. And we analyzed this book with our groups.
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A very important book. The first part is simpler, the second part is much larger in volume and much more complex, but Faust is a narrative about the European.
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Everything is tied together here, you see? I am talking about narratives that tie knots, that interweave many such stories , from which these meanings are born like flashes, creating in the reader something that cannot be grasped from a
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news feed or brief documentary reports. They got up, went, left, blew something up, went there, did something, built, opened, closed—that’s all.
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There is no meaning in it. Later, business begins to talk about the importance of storytelling, and business itself begins to imitate great literature, creating brand stories and incorporating them into various narratives.
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And there is not a single major brand that hasn't built a narrative around its product—forgive the word—around its product.
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Where did this come from for them? Well, specialists worked on it, of course. On the other hand, cognitive scientists and literary scholars got involved here too.
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And at the core lies our tendency to see meaning and significance in stories. I am not consuming a product; I am participating in a story.
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Uh, with this wine, with this laptop, uh , with this car, with this tie, heading to one place or another, a city or a castle, or a museum, I am a part of this history undoubtedly.
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So, Goethe's Faust. Tenth position. Well, eleventh is Charles Dickens. Dickens is a unique author whom I will continue to discover again and again.
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And I always revisit his, uh, A Christmas Carol for Christmas. But of course, any of the great novels, any Dickens novel could be taken and placed in this eleventh position.
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Uh, maybe, uh, maybe Great Expectations or Bleak House is what I could name as a recommendation.
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But again, I will keep discovering; Gustav Shpet, Shpet, uh, translated Bleak House. Uh, I have Shpet's translation, and he compiled extensive commentary for a number of other novels.
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He was passionate about Dickens and wrote in letters to his daughter about how we understand the depth and importance of Dickens together.
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Charles Dickens. Twelfth position is, again, you see, we are combining meanings and narratives, it’s Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The White Whale.
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In general, this is a parable, a philosophical, theological parable. It is also very difficult to read.
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And I entered this novel many times and moved through it slowly, as if sailing across the ocean.
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And there are also many obstacles there , many temptations, and many dangers. When they start listing harpoons, harpoons there, you know, the types of one or another, you know, fishing tools .
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Oh God, what is this? It lasts for a whole chapter. But it is a profound narrative that says something about personality, about man, about God, about fate.
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Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The White Whale. Thirteenth position, Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. I read this book as a child, and I think that at some point I will have to reread it.
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It is one of, perhaps, one of the most vivid novels in human history, certainly a 19 th-century novel.
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And it was written somewhere in the middle, in 1862. Mid-19th century. Hugo has many important works, but this novel holds a special place.
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As a sub-position, I called it in one of the conversations—it's Madame Bovary, or Madame Bovary, it's called differently.
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It's not so much the narrative, it's how it's described. And, of course, we see the France of that time, the mid-19th century. But sometimes the "how" is very important.
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And, for example, Nabokov himself—I'm not including him in these lists—but Nabokov Nabokov's prose is a rather important phenomenon for me, and I think it is for many of you as well.
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Nabokov is also about not what, but how . In literature, it's often not the narrative itself that matters, but how it's narrated.
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That applies to Bunin, to Nabokov, and to other authors as well. And, by the way, that gets lost in translations.
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And, of course, I don't read fiction in French. I only read philosophical texts and some interviews.
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And all of that is lost. We will talk more about this later— about reading literary works in their original languages.
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So, Hugo is in thirteenth position. Fourteenth and fifteenth, for me, is Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
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I have these two volumes here, but I have various editions of War and Peace.
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War and Peace is something I reread regularly. And as Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev said in one of his interviews at Ostankino, I think in 1986, he often reread War and Peace, but he had read Resurrection in school and never revisited it.
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It's the same for me. I read the novel Resurrection and grasped its major social message.
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And Katusha Maslova—Maslova, Katusha, right? I felt all of that, didn't I? And I felt those shifting emotions—who are the judges, who are the defendants— I sensed that message.
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But I don't want to read it again because it’s more of a pamphlet. But War and Peace is a great philosophical epic.
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And The Brothers Karamazov is the fifteenth position; Dostoevsky is something that is also always with me.
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And we will talk about that separately. At the sixteenth position—not place, but position—I would put Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, because it is the history of an individual in an era; I often repeat this formula I came up with.
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It is the history of an individual in an era that breaks the individual. And, by the way, we are living through such times right now.
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How does one remain an individual in an age of depersonalization? When the destiny of the masses is at play, Doctor Zhivago is a poet—a Christian poet of individuality, a first-person poet of the individual, if you will.
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While all around, the nations, the masses, the classes, and world destinies are in motion.
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I’m not giving this a specific position , but it’s also a very important work, even if not easily written: Grossman's Life and Fate.
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It is a novel that acts as a roll call with Leo Tolstoy. It is, in a way, the War and Peace of the 20th century.
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I think that was in Grossman's mind when he set out to write such a book.
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And here, precisely, is Life and Fate, captured right in the title, but that is all Doctor Zhivago, Doctor Zhivago.
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Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is a complex book. I read it for a year; I tried several times in my childhood, but read it fully in my mature years—it took a long time. I don't know if I'll manage
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to reread it again somehow. But it is a philosophy of civilization, a philosophy of culture.
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For me, this book is about what culture meant in the past and what it will be in the future.
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And who we are: conduits of culture, relays, or subjects of civilization that connect one world to another.
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It is a great, important book, but not an easy read. And George Orwell's 1984—sorry, not a year, just 1984—well, and of course, Animal Farm.
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I like Orwell's essays and his articles . But this book, this book of prophecy, is a book that becomes more and more modern . It was written in 1949, after the great war and trials, but it is written
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about the future. We must not think that totalitarianism, the destruction of the individual by the masses, by classes, or by nations is in the past. It is our future. The twenty-first century will yet feel this pressure of the masses on the individual
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. And the challenges that the individual faces. And, of course, I would like Bulgakov's novel, The Master and Margarita, to be on this list.
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I have analyzed it; there are analyses on my channel. I will return to it myself—perhaps I'll record a few more videos to unpack this novel.
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Undoubtedly, for me, it is Bulgakov. And now, in conclusion, I want to say something about reading in original languages versus translations.
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If we speak of the twentieth century, well, of course, it is diverse. I was influenced by Hemingway, and certainly by reading Kafka, and Marquez , and especially I remember the strong influence of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
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Well, and many, many, many more texts could be named that are certainly important, complex, and could all stand in that twentieth position I didn't name .
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Choose these great ones—it could be Thomas Mann, it could be the great family sagas of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
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From Scandinavia, for example, Lagerlöf —a great family saga. To Italy, it could be D'Annunzio, for example, it could be Joseph Conrad—well , that's the 19th century.
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It could be Sienkiewicz, if you, for example, live in Poland and a part of Polish culture is your native one.
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Right up to Spain. But I didn't mention Cervantes; Don Quixote is also a most important narrative of humanity.
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And this is also important to experience , to think through. But speaking of languages, what troubles me in my native Ukraine is the attitude of this national narrative, which wants to assert itself through bans and the destruction not of something foreign or
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neighborly, no, but of what was created right here, in Ukraine. And since it happened that there are bilingual and trilingual cultures, we are bilingual, and we can read in Ukrainian as well; Russian is my language, Ukrainian is my mother's, and
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the Ukrainian language is the language of my grandmother, my mother's mother. But I am a person for whom Russian is my native language.
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And what can I do about that? And this language opens the way to great literature.
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And not to value this is simply Bolshevism; it is such a nihilistic movement. If you can read, for example, Eugene Onegin in the original, here is the sixth volume from '37, Stalin's time, it sounds very scary, but it's just one of
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the editions. And if, for example, you read Eugene Onegin with the commentary by Yuri Lotman, who taught in Tartu and who is important, for example, to many current Estonian intellectuals.
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Imagine, Mikhail Lotman still teaches in Tartu to this day. Imagine if they, for example in Estonia , under the same theses that they are now trying to force upon us, were to discard all of this as well. And no
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Lotman, no tradition of the University of Tartu. So, what is a narrative? A narrative is the inclusion of the development of a plot. And this is what I mean by living in a tradition, in history. This is, by the way, one of the
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theses of Doctor Zhivago. A man does not die by a fence, he dies in history.
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And if we are to think using low-brow, fleeting, not even political but politicking, propagandistic clichés, we will, dear friends, live by the fence.
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We will not be living in tradition, we will not be living in history. And then, for example, there would be an Estonia without Tartu, the history of Tartu.
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And then there would be a Kyiv without the great Kyivans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, without the great Kyiv Orthodoxy.
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I will record a separate video about this very soon. And then our science will be cut, literature cut, philosophy won't exist at all, because now they are even trying to cancel the so-called Kyiv school of thought, even though they mainly wrote
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in Russian, because it's written incorrectly and in the wrong language and so on. And it turns out that this is living by the fence.
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Because the generations before us did not think in our categories. They thought historically. And when Vasnetsov and Nesterov were painting the St. Volodymyr Cathedral, they did not know that Filaret would be serving there and representing the idea that he represents.
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Although Patriarch Filaret, as I recall , when he led, for instance, from sixty-six, was Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia, I believe it was called, wrote terrible articles against schismatics, against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists , against autocephalists.
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This cycle lasted, I think, for a year or a year and a half. I’ll have to find somewhere at mom’s apartment if any of those magazines are still left.
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I used to buy them at the St. Vladimir Cathedral and the Florovsky Convent, where in those shops in the early eighties I could buy those magazines.
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Somehow everything fades away. And for you, this is a good test. Look at who those various propagandists or these fragmentizers, manipulators of current politicking were.
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Who were they? Or who were their parents? What did they do, what did they declare ?
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The religious scholars who so fervently hold some positions now, what did they study? Scientific atheism. And what did they write about?
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Many of them campaigned against the church. Now they are the main experts on church issues.
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Excuse me. We are historical beings. So, anyway. Undoubtedly, I, for one, understand that even philosophy is untranslatable.
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Here I understand Hans-Georg Gadamer, who said he could not read philosophical texts in translation.
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I read most texts during my student and postgraduate years in translation, gradually moving toward the original texts.
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Now I read mostly in the originals. And I can say that I only read about five percent of Russian-language scientific texts out of a hundred.
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Mostly these are books in other languages. And when you understand that philosophy is impossible in translation, especially great philosophers, outstanding texts, even more so this truly applies to literary texts.
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Poetry is generally untranslatable. And so, for example, with the languages I tried to master, like when I studied Spanish at university—I’ve forgotten it now—I read a lot; I had such a good collection, Raduga, Moscow, or Foreign Literature bilingual right?
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Starting with Lope de Vega, starting with Calderón and the great baroque poetry there, and ending with Lorca and modern Spanish poets.
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You know, it's amazing. I memorized several Spanish poems in the original. It was very, very transformative inside .
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But for me, of course, it's German-language poetry and the attempts to read literature in German—a long-standing endeavor.
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And the attempt to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the original—it's very difficult. Very difficult, you always need the text. I can't say I've progressed so much that I can read Shakespeare or Dickens in the original as easily as breathing.
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Yes, or Madame Bovary, as I already said . I cannot read literature in French.
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Perhaps that is a task for my future, as we are constantly moving forward, we need these important tasks.
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And I think, for me, the challenge in my later years is to approach the books I mentioned, reading them in the original , because I do try to look at the original texts of great Greek and Latin prose.
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If it is medieval text, I read it in the original anyway. But, in principle, our native language is the key for us.
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And if we have access to two languages, and great world literature is written in one, then closing that window means leaving civilization, casting ourselves out of culture.
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As one authoritative figure interesting to me said in a recent interview, culture is not German, Russian, or French. Culture is culture.
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There is high culture, middle culture, and popular culture. But all of it is the heritage of humanity.
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And if we are people of civilization, if we live in history, then we view it as the heritage of world culture.
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And the German language—and you know how much trouble the Germans caused in the 20th century—does not cease to be great literature.
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And Italian literature, with its fascism and various communist movements, is tied just the same way to Spain and so on.
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And likewise, great Spanish literature is written in Latin America, written in other parts of the world, not just in Spain.
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And, say, great literature written in English is written in all corners of the globe, and nobody has the idea of it being a colonial language.
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And a person writing in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, some part of the Middle East, or Europe in English—are they writing in a colonial language?
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Brodsky has poems in English, what is he writing in? And essays. For example, *Watermark*—the original was written in English.
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What is that? It is an entry into great culture. It is the opportunity to have yet another key to a very complex lock, or to complex doors that one must open to enter culture, to enter history .
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Therefore, what I am saying now, summarizing this conversation, is my pain; I can only speak about it, speak frankly, speak boldly—while exposing myself.
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But I believe that if this is not heard , it means casting oneself out of the history of civilization and culture for many decades, and dooming oneself to an ahistorical acultural uncivilized existence.
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So, I posed a question at the beginning of our talk: which books must a person read in their lifetime to become formed, to become a rational human being, a consciously mature, thinking, critically thinking person?
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And I divided the answer into two parts . The first is the importance of narrative, and I gave the example of two stories by Sholem and a German children's author about a boy who didn't know how to tell stories.
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We saw that narrative is where meanings , values, and stories live, and where live structures reside, without which we cannot understand the world. And the second part of the answer to the question of what to read, what these
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great stories are, I proposed a list of 20 items and tried to examine them.
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Well then, thank you for your attention . Subscribe to my Patreon channel; there are more and more new materials, videos , and texts there.
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Support the YouTube channel, and see you next time.
Topics:readingnarrativephilosophyclassic literaturebooks to readHomerGershom ScholemHasidismmaturityBaumeister
