Getting into Binding. Selected Passages from a Home Library

Andrei Kolesnikov is a journalist and political analyst, author of several books, including the memoir volume "The House on the Old Square." He is a laureate of several professional awards, including the Yegor Gaidar Prize 2021 for "outstanding contribution to the field of history." According to Borges, a library is a Universe. A home library is the universe of one family. It surrounds like a forest. Inside this forest, beneath the bark of the book-trees, its own life goes on, hiding secrets – notes, drawings, trolleybus tickets, receipts for long-gone clothing items. Books, marked by the annotations of several generations, tomes that were used for writing school essays by both great-grandmothers and great-grandchildren. The smells of the books are multilayered, sweetish, and the tactile sensations from the covers are a recognition of home, a memory of family. The spines of the collected works stand guard against the hostile world. In rows stand dark green volumes of Dickens and Chekhov, green Gogol and Turgenev, dark red Dreiser and Feuchtwanger, dark blue Jules Verne and orange Mayne Reid – and they hold the defense. Life goes on…