{"id":62109,"date":"2026-02-24T13:54:54","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T13:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=62109"},"modified":"2026-02-24T13:56:53","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T13:56:53","slug":"galina-yuzefovich-talking-about-reading-is-a-kind-of-comforting-refuge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/galina-yuzefovich-talking-about-reading-is-a-kind-of-comforting-refuge\/","title":{"rendered":"Galina Yuzefovich: \u201cTalking about reading is a kind of comforting refuge\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

May we start our conversation with your book \u201cThe Keys to Hogwarts\u201d, which you recently presented in London at the Idiot Books bookshop? Why did you turn your attention to Rowling\u2019s seven-book \u201cHarry Potter\u201d series?<\/strong>
<\/strong>There are many reasons. In 2024 I taught a course on the world of Harry Potter<\/em> on the Stradarium platform, and I gathered an enormous amount of material for it. To be honest, I had been accumulating it actively long before that: I\u2019d been watching the Harry Potter<\/em> phenomenon since the early 2010s, though with goals that weren\u2019t entirely clear even to me. Then that material turned into a course, the course ended, but new information just wouldn\u2019t stop arriving\u2014one thing you read, another catches your eye\u2026 At some point it became clear that everything I\u2019d amassed either had to be formalized, organized, and poured into some stable form, or else I had to simply stop doing it. And I chose to formalize it\u2014this is how the book came into being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the first explanation, the practical one: I really wanted to put all that collected material to use somehow, to generalize it, and to put, if not a full stop, then at least a semicolon. But if we step one level higher, the point is this. I\u2019ve always been tremendously interested in large-scale mass phenomena in literature, because for me literature is not only art but also a kind of media\u2014something that communicates, among other things, about its readers. If huge numbers of people begin reading a book, passing it hand to hand, speaking in images and quotations borrowed from it, then obviously this characterizes first and foremost not the book but its readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once I grasped the scale of the \u201cHarry Potter\u201d phenomenon, I realized I was desperately curious to understand how it is built, which buttons it presses in the reader, why it was this\u2014this exact thing\u2014and why at this exact moment. In short, Harry Potter<\/em> became interesting to me not only as an artistic phenomenon but to a great extent as a social one, located at the intersection of the public and the literary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, I\u2019m very surprised by people who aren\u2019t interested in such mass phenomena. There\u2019s an idea: if everyone reads it, then it must be something lowbrow. I take the exact opposite position: if everyone reads it, that means I need to read it too.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by Sveta Mishina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This object doesn\u2019t necessarily have to make me fall in love with it, but at least I\u2019ll understand what my contemporaries are interested in, what they live and breathe, and I\u2019ll be able to form some hypothesis about their desires, moods, and values. In the case of \u201cHarry Potter\u201d, my almost sociological curiosity aligned perfectly with my sincere love and fascination with the book itself\u2014and that\u2019s the third reason to turn to Rowling\u2019s universe. I think it\u2019s an outstanding monument of literature which also tells us about the period when the current generation of adults was forming. It tells us far more than many sociological studies. If you want to understand where modernity came from, turn to Harry Potter<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s teenagers also grew up on <\/strong>Harry Potter<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong>, to be fair, because we shoved it at them with frightening force. But now they say it\u2019s not very fashionable; they have \u201c<\/strong>The Hunger Games\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong> instead.<\/strong>
<\/strong>\u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d<\/em>, frankly, is already grey-haired retro too\u2014the first Hunger Games<\/em> book came out in 2008. It\u2019s wonderful, more than worthy reading, and I love it very much. But of course it\u2019s a phenomenon of a different scale: in quantitative terms, Harry Potter<\/em> is much larger. Roughly every third inhabitant of the Earth knows the key plot points from Harry Potter<\/em>. Maybe not everyone has read it or even watched it, but the number of people familiar with the Potter mythology is about a third of the world\u2019s population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d<\/em> can\u2019t really boast that: at best, one in ten\u2014and more likely one in twenty\u2014people on Earth knows about the Mockingjay. And I personally would read with enormous pleasure a book about the universe of \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d<\/em>, its mythology, its cultural references\u2014Suzanne Collins has plenty of those. Still, I\u2019d venture the guess that it will be a much less long-lasting mass phenomenon. I\u2019m not sure today\u2019s teenagers will as unequivocally stuff \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d<\/em> into their children as an older generation stuffs \u201cHarry Potter\u201d<\/em> into theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read somewhere that today\u2019s teenagers feel the Mockingjay is <\/strong>their<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong> hero. Adults betrayed them, and suddenly it turned out that the ideals that were being sold to them when they were three no longer work.<\/strong>
<\/strong>In that case I have bad news for these kids. In my view, \u201cThe Hunger Games\u201d<\/em> is an outstanding book precisely because it is ethically complex. It\u2019s not about the sacred Red Banner of the Revolution, but about much more complicated things. Essentially, it\u2019s the eternal story that when you kill the Dragon, you become the Dragon yourself. And in order not to become it, you have to make some almost abnormal effort. But to understand that, you need to read the whole cycle\u2014and to read it fairly attentively\u2014whereas the romance of revolutionary transformation lies right on the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course I understand what inner need this book answers: suddenly it becomes clear that the world is unjust and has no intention of becoming just. That is a very painful, tormenting realization, especially for a teenager. And of course you look for a hero who will help you cope with that realization. As Chesterton wrote: \u201cThe saint is a medicine: he cures because he is an antidote. That is why the saint often becomes a martyr: an antidote is painful as poison.\u201d In that sense, yes\u2014the Mockingjay is a good antidote for a time when it suddenly turns out that there is no justice and, in principle, none was ever planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we turn back and look at world literature before <\/strong>Harry Potter<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong>\u2014were there books whose love swept the whole planet and gave it the happiness of shared reading and shared emotions?<\/strong>
<\/strong>In the phenomenal success of J. K. Rowling\u2019s epic, the factor of timing played no small role. The first \u201cHarry Potter\u201d <\/em>comes out in 1997. It\u2019s an astonishing moment when, for the first time \u2014 and, as it turned out, for a short time only \u2014 the concept of \u201cthe whole world\u201d took shape. Today we see that there is no \u201cwhole world\u201d again \u2014 there are territories fenced off from the outside and fencing themselves off from within, segments with different forms of censorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But 1997 is the moment when the internet already exists, covering and in some sense leveling the whole world, yet it has not turned into a space of propaganda, censorship, and fake news. It already creates the possibilities we know today, but it does not yet create the problems we live with today. Rowling\u2019s books come out precisely at the moment when a spark can ignite a flame of truly global scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today we live in a world where the number of cultural and literary objects available to us increases by an order of magnitude every month, while time and inner capacity do not. A big phenomenon today always exists inside a small bubble. Let me give an example. When the Russian rapper Pasha Technik died, a significant part of the Russian-language information space filled with immense grief. And I heard that name for the first time on the day of his death. This doesn\u2019t devalue his work in any way, nor does it position me as some unpleasant snob. The fact of my ignorance says only how fragmented the information space has become: big phenomena (and Pasha Technik is certainly a big phenomenon) can form large support communities that do not intersect at all with other similar communities formed around other centers.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by Sveta Mishina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Earlier\u2014before the end of the 1990s\u2014big cultural phenomena embraced large communities of people. For instance, a community\u2014let\u2019s call it \u201cSoviet children\u201d\u2014people born between the 1960s and the 1980s\u2014understand each other perfectly and pick up every little quote from, say, the Strugatskys\u2019 \u201cHard to Be a God\u201d<\/em>. We have a shared code formed by the fact that the number of cultural objects available to a Soviet child was limited. \u201cThe Three Musketeers\u201d<\/em> with Boyarsky and Dumas\u2019s \u201cThree Musketeers\u201d<\/em> are stitched into each of us simply for historical reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are similarly important objects inside other cultures. In London I went to a show called Ballet Shoes<\/em>, staged from Noel Streatfeild\u2019s book of the same name\u2014absolutely iconic in the UK. \u201cI am regarded as something of a dangerous intellectual,\u201d as they say in Jeeves and Wooster<\/em>, because I read that book, while no one around me had\u2014it’s not part of our cultural canon. Believe me, the French or the Germans haven\u2019t heard of Ballet Shoes<\/em> either. But in England it\u2019s an absolutely cult object!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s their \u201cThe Road Goes On Into the Distance\u2026\u201d<\/em>
<\/em>Or like \u201cWe Children of Bullerby Village\u201d<\/em> for Swedes. In Russia Astrid Lindgren is anomalously popular. But what do we read? Karlsson-on-the-Roof<\/em> and, a bit less often, \u201cPippi Longstocking\u201d<\/em>. In Sweden, however, Lindgren\u2019s main book is undoubtedly Pippi<\/em>, while Karlsson<\/em> is rather marginal. After Pippi<\/em> come Lotta on Troublemaker Street<\/em>, Emil of L\u00f6nneberga<\/em>, \u201cWe Children of Bullerby Village\u201d<\/em>, and \u201cKalle Blomkvist\u201d <\/em>\u2014 about children\u2019s adventures in Sweden in the 1920s\u20131930s. In short: a different canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My children and I also loved Emil very much, and once we made a point of going all the way to that L\u00f6nneberga, where we met\u2014who do you think?\u2014a large number of Swedish families walking around hugging copies of the Emil books. And they looked at us as if we were crazy: we were the only foreigners who had come to kneel at the roots. Because a little place in the Sm\u00e5land province is a truly local phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let\u2019s return to \u201cHarry Potter\u201d<\/em>. Rowling and her books broke through all these boundaries of local cults and cultures and created an entirely new, special space. Thanks to the emergence of a new carrier of information \u2014 precisely that internet which was already global but not yet corrupted \u2014 wizard boys and wizard girls spilled across almost the whole world. Of course, there are significant exceptions to this rule. As a rule, those are countries living in relative isolation and not included in the sphere of British colonial influence. In my book I write about Nepal, where practically nobody reads Harry Potter<\/em>, except for an urban hipster stratum. But that is still a smaller part of the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside each culture you can find a phenomenon comparable to Harry Potter<\/em>. But there is no international phenomenon comparable to Harry Potter<\/em>. Before Harry Potter<\/em> there were no books that could unite, sustain, and warm all of humanity at once and simultaneously. But, I repeat, the point is not only the virtues of the book itself, but also the moment when it was published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in some sense it was also authorial luck?<\/strong>
<\/strong>Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is authorial luck?<\/strong>
<\/strong>Well, I\u2019m exclusively a researcher, not a writer, and I can\u2019t teach anyone to write prose. I can tell a potential writer what is happening around them so that they don\u2019t reinvent the wheel, so that they don\u2019t feel tragically alone, so that they don\u2019t bang their head against a concrete wall. I can create context for them, show how the literary environment around them is structured and lives. But only a sensitive and experienced practitioner can teach a writer the craft of writing itself. And even then they can only suggest certain techniques, methods, tools. Everything else is a combination of motivation, work capacity \u2014 and, yes, something that doesn\u2019t translate well into rational terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did growing up with writer-parents shape your context? Did it bring you into the profession?
<\/strong>Well, to begin with, when I was little, my parents were not writers at all. My father taught history at school, my mother worked at a newspaper in Perm. In any case, it\u2019s hard to answer this question. Of course, the general \u201cliterariness\u201d of the family influenced me in some way. Yes, there were always many books in our house; yes, my father read aloud to me a lot in childhood; yes, my parents\u2019 friends would sit late into the night in our kitchen and talk about books breathlessly. But I know other people who had all the same things and happily became IT specialists, working and earning normal money, not\u2026 all of this.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by Sveta Mishina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I began very early \u2014 abnormally early, as I now understand \u2014 to identify myself through books. When I was about five, A. A. Milne\u2019s \u201cWinnie-the-Pooh\u201d<\/em> was important to me\u2014important in a grown-up, intellectual way. In the kindergarten I attended for a very short time, I couldn\u2019t make friends with anyone. And I remember: I\u2019m riding a carousel with a new girl, Natasha, and Natasha says: \u201cAnd I really love Winnie-the-Pooh!\u201d I ask gloomily: \u201cThe cartoon?\u201d She answers: \u201cNooo! The book!!\u201d And I realize that I\u2019ve finally met my own. A person who loves the Winnie-the-Pooh<\/em> book is my secret handshake. And my parents definitely didn\u2019t teach me that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, can you imagine how much entertainment was available to a child in the early 1980s in the city of Perm? If you don\u2019t want to run around outside and play football with the boys \u2014 and I was never good at that genre \u2014 then what do you do? You sit at home. And what do you do at home?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You read.<\/strong>
<\/strong>Right \u2014 exactly. But everyone read; many people in Soviet times had books at home, but not all of them tied their lives to literature. So I\u2019m inclined to think that in addition to family and social factors, there is also a certain natural predisposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think there are books \u201cfor a certain age\u201d? Can parents advise a child not to read something? Forbid them to take a certain book from the shelf?<\/strong>
<\/strong>I think you can read anything at any age. The probability of getting hurt by a book is extremely small. Only domestic law enforcement believes that if a child reads an unpatriotic book, that\u2019s it, game over. Of course not. I\u2019m absolutely sure that at any age anyone can read whatever interests them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another matter is that sometimes that first reading experience is inaccurate. I\u2019ve been in that skin many times. For example, I read Tolstoy\u2019s Resurrection<\/em> at ten years old and remembered perfectly all the plot twists, the characters, even the dialogues. But already at university I discovered with enormous interest that the emphases, shades, nuances, context \u2014 everything \u2014 had been formed by me in childhood catastrophically wrongly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let\u2019s face the truth: how often does today\u2019s child pull Madame Bovary<\/em> or The Decameron<\/em> off the shelf the way we did in childhood, trying to partake of forbidden joys of love? They don\u2019t. So today, if a child wants to read something \u2014 if it catches them \u2014 let it be \u201cthe bald devil in a mortar,\u201d anything at all: any self-respecting parent should whisper thanks to the heavens and in no case take the book away. Don\u2019t try to over-censor, correct, or steer a process which is already, frankly, not going smoothly. And then those very parents come and ask in a dreadful voice: \u201cAnd how did you make your children read?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by Sveta Mishina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cThe club of famous radio nannies\u201d \u2014 your programme with Ekaterina Shulman, <\/strong>Zakladka<\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong>. Why have conversations about literature become so important today? I can answer this from my perspective as a listener, but how do you interpret this audience interest?<\/strong>
<\/strong>Your answer will certainly be no worse \u2014 and perhaps better \u2014 than mine. My version of the answer seems rather trivial. It\u2019s all because Ekaterina Mikhailovna and I are cute little cats: two pleasant, intelligent, adult women sitting and speaking in an intelligent language, with great enthusiasm and interest, about literature. The one thing you absolutely can\u2019t suspect Ekaterina Mikhailovna and me of is that we are discussing a Flaubert novel while heroically enduring disgust and boredom. In fact, the idea of Zakladka<\/em> was born at the moment we realized we couldn\u2019t stop talking: we talk before the recording, and when we\u2019re leaving, we keep talking about the same things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t call us friends in the sense that we raise children together or go on vacation together, but we have this secret garden \u2014 plants in which we love to discuss with each other. You know, I have a favourite cooking show where people don\u2019t so much cook as talk about traditional Chinese cuisine, which I don\u2019t really eat and never cook, but they talk about it with such interest, enthusiasm, and involvement that it\u2019s incredibly compelling. I suspect in our case people respond to sincerity, involvement, and genuine interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And our audience, broadly speaking, resembles us. People who watch and listen to us are intelligent women 30+ who read now, read before, or simply would like to read more\u2014and our conversations about reading are a kind of comforting refuge, not politicized, not charged with hostility and hatred. It\u2019s a live conversation in which each listener can try on the role of a third interlocutor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I literally feel like I\u2019m back at my own university \u2014 at RSUH, at Zverev\u2019s lecture. I\u2019m eighteen again, and tomorrow at seven in the morning I have to go and take a place in line at the Historical Library.<\/strong>
<\/strong>And then they hugged and cried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you remember RSUH?
<\/strong>Of course \u2014 it\u2019s the foundation of my life. I have a slightly special RSUH, because I studied in the Classical Philology department. Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya called it a \u201cbrotherhood of esoteric sadomasochism\u201d: we had six classes of Ancient Greek and five classes of Latin a week, and everything else \u2014 like everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We lived, of course, in a special world and in a special state of consciousness, slightly altered by perpetual overwork. My favourite teachers were also largely concentrated in our department and rarely appeared beyond it. The great poet, translator, critic, thinker, and teacher Grigory Mikhailovich Dashevsky \u2014 I believe the chance to study with him is one of the greatest pieces of luck in my life. Nikolai Pavlovich Grintser, head of our department, teacher of Greek and Ancient Greek literature, one of the world\u2019s best specialists in ancient epic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you step outside the department, then of course I was very influenced by Andrei Leonidovich Zorin, whose course on eighteenth-century Russian literature I had the chance to attend. And overall RSUH is a space flooded with light; I remember it with an almost unbelievable gratitude. All my closest friends somehow come from there. Last year my closest friend, the anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova, and I celebrated thirty years of friendship \u2014 we met in our second year, in 1995.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lately we\u2019ve often been turning to the literature of the \u00e9migr\u00e9 wave after the Revolution \u2014 Sasha Chyorny, Vladimir Nabokov, that pool of authors. It feels like with their lives, their texts, they are speaking to us\u2026 In short, is it legitimate to feel a certain kinship with them?<\/strong>
<\/strong>You know, I have a terrible secret that I periodically reveal, but luckily it\u2019s quickly pushed out of public memory: in fact I\u2019m not a philologist \u2014 my diploma says I\u2019m a historian. I graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology with a degree in \u201chistory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if historical education teaches you anything, it is that all historical parallels are unreliable. More than that: they often get in the way. We always love to discuss what year it is in Russia right now \u2014 is it 1937 or already 1945, or 1953, or 1985?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by Sveta Mishina<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

2026?<\/strong>
<\/strong>Yes, 2026. Fair enough.<\/strong> We try to see in the past a reliable parallel that would allow us to build strategies of behaviour. But that is an absolute kingdom built on sand. Such an approach doesn\u2019t help; it harms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not long ago I happened upon a lecture by Ilya Zdanevich, posted on the Arzamas portal. There\u2019s a wonderful idea there: the dead are also part of our society; they participate in our lives. Yes, in a certain way the dead live among us, and we can look to them for emotional support. Why do z-poets constantly try to forcibly recruit someone famous: \u201cBrodsky would be with us!\u201d And the same happens on the opposite side: \u201cBrodsky? Is he with them? He\u2019s with us! And Pushkin is with us!\u201d \u2014 \u201cNo he isn\u2019t, Pushkin is with us<\/em>!\u201d It\u2019s both terribly stupid and very understandable. Everyone wants to lean on the reliable shoulder of Alexander Sergeyevich; it calms us down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we are looking for emotional supports \u2014 if we find something that opens some cherished little door in our heart, gives warmth and support \u2014 then thank God, why not. But it\u2019s important not to overplay it. Pushkin died almost two hundred years ago; we don\u2019t know whose side he would be on. And would he be Pushkin at all if he had been born in a different time?..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same applies to emigration. To build your identity on \u201cI am like Tsvetaeva\u201d is foolish. I am not Tsvetaeva, thank God, and I don\u2019t write poems \u2014 what a blessing! And even Vera Polozkova is not Tsvetaeva, despite some resemblance. But if Tsvetaeva helps \u2014 then that\u2019s good. In general, I think literature should be treated like a healing herb. If it helps \u2014 wonderful. If it doesn\u2019t \u2014 spit it out quickly. There\u2019s no need to torment yourself with that too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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