Delicate aroma of paper dust

Just close your eyes, and in your mind’s eye you will see...

An oversize, thin, brightly colored album from the series “Image and color” and somewhere on a page-spread, an incredible, absolutely nude, just so perfectly naked woman! (Clearly, the unknown REMBRANDT on the front cover)...

A very thick volume about four elegantly dressed men, all in high boots, feathered hats, and sharp swords...

A map pointing to the bulk of treasure buried on an island in the ocean... A gigantic long haired man surrounded by tiny people!

There is another thing you can do: take a chair, climb it and grab that other book! Oh, what a treat! Thick smoke everywhere, horses, explosions, people, canons, fortifications, shrapnel, cavalry attacks, and infantry divisions, wagon trains, and foraging parties and, above all this melee, a short plump death-despising man in a funny hat holds a spyglass in his hand. Across the battlefield, his adversary, the commander-in-chief, a black sash covering his eye. Another funny hat. War! And, just a step away, ladies, a ball, dancing, kissing... Peace.

A bizarre fat little man with a... propeller on his back.

Another man, in a garb made of raw skins, with a pointy hat carryies long guns and a ridiculous handmade umbrella gazes wistfully at the sea from the shore of some lost island.

And here is a fellow wearing a wig, a pointy mustache, a rich just-au-corps and shiny boots, by riding (you would not believe that!) a cannon ball!

All these “goodies” are right here. Grab any book, admire the pictures, turn the pages, feel the magic smell of ink and dust, it is all so right, so perfect, but! There is a tiny problem: you do not know how to read yet! I remember myself eyeing my parents’ bookshelves, my knees buckling, my back shivering as I desperately longed for, yearned for knowing how to read. I had all reasons to believe that these still incomprehensible letters hid an immensely beautiful world, a world full of terrors and wanders, of magic and enchantments, an incredible “Magnificent world”! When I did finally learn to read the reality exceeded my wildest expectations. 

A book, a print, be it a novel of “War and Peace” magnitude or a Superman comics, or a Playboy edition is priceless artifact of our civilization. Their flavor is real, the pleasure they provide – almost physical. Varlam Shalamov wrote to Boris Pasternak (the quote is not exact, but close to the original and loyal to the author’s intention), “Your poems are like a bowl of good meat borscht... You are just too lucky to be able to get my meaning.” Varlam Shalamov, a poet and a writer, having endured and survived almost twenty years of forced labor and settlement in Kolyma, knew too well what he meant. A good book, as a delicious meal, or as a young woman, is a phenomenon where “physical” and “spiritual” blend and coalesce. When I study a detailed “Danae” on the page-spread of my Rembrandt album, or when I read Dovlatov’s prose (surely the best Sergey Dovlatov in the world!), or when I return to my favorite pages from (Oh! Oh!) Tolstoy, I agree completely with Shalamov.

What a pleasure it is to savor a crunchy meat-filled pastry while reading a real book and, like Nabokov, to count with fluttering fingers the blissful pages still left and, almost with an eyebrow, to choose another pastry....

Surely, the book, the sheer capacity to record ideas and emotions, and then, to save and to transmit them to the later generations, is the most staggering invention of the Humanity since dawn of time and for all times. All that we have accomplished since, all that we sang, soldered, painted, danced, drew, blew, played, killed, and invented, all this is just an addendum to our only true creation:
the book.