Personal experience: work as a librarian

I never dreamed of becoming a librarian, but I accidentally became and accidentally lingered in this profession, which I sometimes regret, but more often than not — still not. They pay not so generously, but life is enough, and never happens to be boring.

So, if I come across some wonderful books that you may accidentally miss, I will write about them here.

If any important programs for the Russian public occur in the library, I will mention them here.

In addition to working as a simple ordinary librarian (first in the regional branches, and then in the Central), I was recently brought, to my great pleasure, to the history department of Brooklyn. If any interesting stories become known to me (almost all the time!), I will, as far as possible, share.

I have also been in charge of Russian literary programs at the Central Library for about eight years. Over the years, we have had quite a few good people. Among my most beloved ones are Yuri Norshtein, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Andrei Bitov, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya, Vladimir Voinovich, Yuri Shevchuk. This is the heaviest artillery. In addition, there were dozens of meetings with excellent writers and poets, filmmakers, politicians, journalists, theater people.

All these programs bring me not only the joy of communicating with our most worthy contemporaries, but also - quite often! – disappointment that our community does not know much and is not very keen to know modern Russian literature (I’m not talking about reading now, this “popcorn” was mastered quickly and thoroughly.) We don’t know even the winners of the most famous literary awards, not to mention the huge a mass of simply wonderful writers, whose names are well known in the metropolis, but in the diaspora - insofar as. Judging by several “landings” of Russian writers in New York: Dmitry Bykov (whose remarkable abilities, talent and charm I readily recognize and, moreover, have great affection for him personally) was crowded with people; and for the most talented and subtle Alexander Ilichevsky, or Anna Starobinets, or Alexei Varlamov - much weaker.

In order to probe the situation and understand who is the most interesting for our public to listen to, I conducted an absolutely unscientific poll.

At the same time for me personally, there are some standards that I do not intend to sacrifice. For example, I’d hardly ever invite authors who write two books a quarter. For me, these are not writers, but artisans, even if they are a hundred times successful, but I do not have enough imagination to find what can be talked to with them for an hour and a half. “How did you invent the matrix?”. Well, there are people just non-handshaking, this is also obvious.

So, the survey was smart, many regular visitors to Russian programs in the library took part in it. I want to ask the same question here: to meet with whom from modern writers and poets would you come to the Brooklyn Central Library? I will share the results if you are interested.

And finally, the rules of this blog are normal:
- please, no personal attacks and insults;
— if you write in Russian, use Cyrillic;
- try, as far as possible, to do without swearing;
— I will ban violators, I warn you right away.