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# Shall I tell you what a fair of intellectual literature is?
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/rasskazat-vam-chto-takoe-iarmarka-intellektualnoi-literatury/
- Published: 2025-12-04T17:45:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:27:48.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Moscow, Observations, Reportage, Humour

Shall I tell you what a fair of intellectual literature is? City dwellers, worn out by bustle, obligations and a dusk that begins at four in the afternoon, come to Gostiny Dvor to sigh a little in the queue at the entrance, jostle by the cloakroom and, at last, plunge into a sea of titles, authors and publishers never heard of before. To listen to a public talk by some famous writer, though just in case one checks the programme: is this already Amayak Akopyan reading poems about Moscow, or is it still Vladimir Vishnevsky telling about his "Moskvest"?

I approach a stand bearing a sign that says either "Diplomatic Academy" or "International Relations Publishing House", and the brightest spot in the display is the encyclopaedic dictionary Slavic Mythology. But in a dictionary, unlike in diplomacy, it is at least clear who is the Leshy and who the Kikimora, and who has simply lost their way.

I walk on: a biography of a woman named Vera d'Angara. One cannot simply float past such a book.

Here some young men are asking the price of the collected works of Heidegger. And perhaps for the first time they truly grasp what being-towards-non-reading is, for the wallet rushes towards it even faster than thought. But for one's own peace of mind one may enquire which works, precisely, are offered inside this set.

In principle, our behaviour at book fairs wonderfully illustrates how the modern ideological-consumer system functions. Without noticing how, I gather up strange memoirs at the GITIS stand; further on, as though gazing at a scattering of jewels, I look at the editions of Valentin Gaft, and conspiratorially leaf through the multi-volume Galkovsky. Mummies and fat, walks with Alexei Mikhailovich, artificial intelligence in art, narratives and meanings. You look: on the cover a professor, weary from scientific councils, and in the title a set of words that seem to have gathered at one table for the first time in history. Take it at once! Not because you will sit down to read it this minute, but simply because the brain wants to feed the eyes. One must show respect.

You go home with a rucksack and a bundle full of heavy ideas. The books smell of fresh meaning. You look at them, bashful, whispering with the corners of their pages "I have been bought", and you think: God gave the book, and He will give it a place on the shelf.

It would be good to agree at once on an honest relationship. You do not intend to read it, and it will not take offence. Let it sit with its girlfriends in the warmth, exhaling designs. Later it will tell its grandchildren how it was bought at a cultural event by someone with a clever air. Otherwise it would have vanished into a warehouse, and, God forbid, been banished to waste paper.

Let us not deceive anyone. We do not buy books in order to read them. We buy them to fill some anxious emptiness, as though dreaming that great, kindly knowledge from outside will somehow help our small, naive stupidity. That it will step out from under the buckram binding on its own and climb into our heads.

It is all better than a gym membership. There the only exercise is the act of buying. Here, besides, one must remember the authors and the titles, and tell friends afterwards: I was there, I saw, I leafed through it, I honestly bought it. The purchase is made, payment by transfer; let us consider the first act of reading successfully played out. We shall get home, sort the bags onto the shelves, and can boldly say: "Actually I am a reading person, it is just that I do not always have the time."

The book is a kind of new deity, especially in the electronic age, whose very presence in a flat already scares off folly and ignorance. And perhaps it even reads itself on our behalf.

The funniest thing is that all the participants in this intricate performance understand perfectly well how tiny a fraction of the books sold at this market will ever be read, and the less people read, if they are decent people, the more they realise the importance of buying the right books, which must certainly exist. Read, leafed through, looked over. And simply exist.

Congratulations: together with the book you have bought the idea that you are clever. How clever, you alone know. And that too is a kind of intellectual pleasure.

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