My favorite books on psychological enquiry written in alternative formats

If you would like to try and understand the Soviet and post-Soviet psyche, these first-hand, verbatim interviews from 1991-2012, by Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian Nobel Laureate, question and discuss what it means and meant to be a Soviet. With a wide selection of individual testimonies from different backgrounds of the Soviet Union, from ordinary folk to officials, prisoners, relatives of those who were murdered, the executioners, the book also investigates how they coped when the Soviet Union broke down. Written from transcribed, spoken recordings, these documentary / reportage texts get to the heart of the matter—often that there is a gaping vacancy in the place of what one had previously believed in, from one's earliest of days, even before becoming a red-scarfed Pioneer. When one's whole philosophical fabric has been torn down, how do you exist? How do you cope and make sense of the world? What really is so special about this book is that it is candid, first hand, from voices, deep within the system, away from the regular propaganda streams. 

Nabokov's ability to catch and pin ephemeral ideas provides sumptuous reflections in this prism of his analytic perception. Speak, Memory is a ludic, linguistic, conjuring of memories. The chapters were written on different occasions and collated for this purpose. He even wrote an extra Chapter (16) as an anonymous reviewer, explaining "He (Nabokov) is out to prove that his childhood contained, on a much-reduced scale, the main components of his creative maturity; thus, through the thin sheath of a ripe chrysalis one can see, in its small wing cases, the dawning of color and pattern, a miniature revelation of the butterfly that will soon emerge and let its flushed and diced wings expand to many times their pupal size." I most admire his ability to analyse a memory and comprehend it in atomic scale.

Maybe it mesmerised me because I was in a remote city in Russia, and it was fascinating to read of Nabokov's early life, his youth, his loves, his understanding of his close family, chess, butterflies, his education and upbringing, his synaesthesia, his learning of English which were all brought to light in obsessive detail. Maybe it was just his magnetic mastery of English which made this book such an exquisite riddle to revel in.

The book describes the performance, arrest, and prison term, of Maria Alyokhina, in deft, immediate, and succinct ‘beat’ style lingo, illustrated with her drawings. The text is refreshing on the open page, well spaced out. As one of the key members of Pussy Riot, her bravery shines out for her courageous activism which continues to this day. On 21 February 2012 the band performed their anti-Putin, anti-patriarchy Punk Prayer, called "Holy Shit", on the altar at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Critical of the relationship between the orthodox Church and Putin, with lines including “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out”, or “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Be a feminist! Be a feminist!” the band managed to escape after the performance, but the video went viral, leading to their arrest and imprisonment. Testament to her punk character and iron resolve, the book describes the terrible prison conditions, and how, even in confinement, Maria Alyokhina's was ceaseless in her activities, protesting on behalf of her fellow inmates for successful penal reforms.

I'd also recommend her fellow Pussy rioter Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's prison letters to Slavoj Žižek, available on The Guardian website. The Pussy Rioters are soon on tour in the UK.

I would read this book only for Prince Myshkin the so-called "Idiot", a holy fool, and Nastasya Filippovna, a complex, piteous, feisty, worshipped, orphaned, tormented, tragic woman of great beauty who was brought up to be a kept mistress. Aside from Nastasya Filippovna, the beauty of the book is reading how Myshkin navigates around his own sense of divided love, between Nastasya and Aglaya and how he contends with the greed and ambition of others. His thoughts on death, execution, infidelity, insanity, the profound depths of mentality, of dread and fear, are all presented in the unravelling of this tragic tale set amongst a small group of individuals in St Petersburg in the mid-19th century. Written in instalments, the intricate plots, the love triangles, the tragic love story intensifies as the narrative continues. But essentially, I really chose this book, for Myshkin's soul-searching soliloquies, his internal dialogues in which you sense you can hear the voice of Dostoevsky. The description of the moments before Myshkin has an epileptic fit, is a fascinating insight into Dostoevsky's own illness, if not, his own creative process.

As Cyril Connolly himself writes, "What follows are the doubts and reflections of a year, a word-cycle in three or four rhythms; art, love, nature and religion: an experiment in self dismantling..." This fragmentary method of writing, with quotes, aphorisms, epigrams, allusions, from a litany of great writers, thinkers, and diarists, with sudden reflections on love, the loss of love, spirituality, desire, literature, art, and psychology are the collected musings of Cyril Connolly, first published in 1944 in Horizon, the magazine he was founder and editor for.  My favourite parts of his writing are the plentiful poetic depictions of the scene, usually with the aid of perspicacious and evocative lists, revealing the interior life of the poetic author: "Dead leaves, coffee grounds, grenadine, tabac Maryland, mental expectation - perfumes of the Nord-Sud; autumn arrival at Pigalle..." 

This book is a literary sketch or prayer book, overflowing with ideas and impressions, deeply felt articulations of the psyche, of collated philosophies, of what constitutes one's being, often pitched with crystalline melancholy providing momentary and heartfelt illuminations away from any unnecessary or phoney narratives.