Svetlana Ben’s Alphabet: A Journey Through Her Unique Worldview

Svetlana Ben: A Woman of Rare Inner Beauty

Svetlana Ben, also known as Benka, is a singer, theater director, poet, musician, and the leader of the musical group “Silver Wedding”. She is a woman of rare inner beauty, sharing her unique perspective in the author’s column “Alphabet”.

G

Galileo. He was so handsome in the physics textbook… No, it was Giordano Bruno who was handsome! Galileo was fantastic, like a wizard from children’s fairy tale films. The first astronomer, inventor of the telescope! And the discovery of the law with the ultimately optimistic name “On the Indestructibility of Matter”! The courage, desperation, and enthusiasm of the old-time scientists seem incredible to me. Such a broad, bold, and soaring thought – and next to it, the Inquisition, with every step under supervision…

Yo

Hedgehog. A creature that I really like for the philosophy of its physical structure. It is prickly on the outside, but the hedgehog’s belly is the softest and most pleasant thing a person can touch. Friendship with a hedgehog is a beautiful metaphor for human relationships. It is no coincidence that the first and most important play I directed while still in college and continue to perform to this day is “The Hedgehog in the House” based on the fairy tale by Vladimir Shinkarev (a well-known artist from the “Mitki” group, writer, and ideologist of the Mitki movement). It is a touching story with a harsh ending. About a hedgehog who fell in love with a cat, they started living together, and then the cat, naturally, met a ferret… and the hedgehog, naturally, could not survive such betrayal because he had opened up his prickles for someone for the first time in his life. And also “Hedgehog in the Fog” – the cartoon of cartoons, the fairy tale of fairy tales!

I

“The Illusionist”. A film by Joss Whedon that shocked me and largely changed my attitude towards cinema. This movie is about two brothers, one of whom is completely insane, truly ill, and the other is always with him, trying to save him. It is a phantasmagoria resembling delirium, where you don’t understand who is sick and who is healthy – everything is mixed up. We watched it with friends in a small cinema that used to be near the Institute of Culture. It was a wonderful video room where you could order a cassette, 5-7 people would gather in this room and watch movies in the dark. There was something partisan, underground about it, it was our secret world, our resistance, resistance to all the gray and dull around. We discovered Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Joss Whedon for ourselves there.

L

Lambda. A beautiful word! (Laughs.) There is a bard Mikhail Shcherbakov – he is simply a genius of poetry. His songs are of such dense, textual richness, with so many witty associations, unexpected, paradoxical, wild, that with such “words you can break glass”. Mikhail Shcherbakov is the one who justifies the phenomenon of bard songs. And he has a song about an anteater that he would like to name Lambda.

O

Oberiu. Kharms, Vvedensky, Oleinikov – my favorite poets and their crazy movement, inventors of the word. They blew up all Soviet realism to hell. (“Association of Real Art” (OBERIU). Attacks from official critics, the impossibility of publishing forced some Oberiu members (Vvedensky, Kharms, Vladimirov, and others) to move into the sphere of children’s literature. At the suggestion of S. Marshak, they began to collaborate with the children’s editorial office of the Leningrad State Publishing House, where since the end of 1928, a funny magazine for schoolchildren “Hedgehog” (Monthly Journal) began to be published, and a little later – “Chizh” (Extremely Interesting Journal) for younger children. Here, a large role was played by N. Oleinikov, who, while not formally being a member of the group, was creatively close to it. Being the chief editor of “Hedgehog”, he attracted the Oberiu to work in the magazine. In the 1930s, with the beginning of ideological persecution, texts for children were the only published works of the Oberiu.)

T

Television. An object that has not been in our home for many years. And we are happy to see that almost none of our friends have it either. It is a spawn of evil, an invention of Goebbels – television. Which, like every invention of mankind, has positive and negative sides. The positive is how many cultural and intellectual discoveries can be made with the help of television. But there is a huge minus, which does not even need to be voiced – propaganda. This is what I avoid, and I consciously avoid any contact with television, try not to appear on it.

U

Ulyana. The name of my eldest daughter. The most beautiful name in the world. Once I met a magical girl named Ulrike. She was from Germany. In those days, she lived a life that has now become very fashionable. She left the university and settled in some garden. She just came to people who had a big garden and asked to live there. They allocated a small hut for her. She made herself dishes from clay, baked her own bread, altered old clothes, sold some of her crafts – these were her means of subsistence. And she very seriously told us that she talks to birds. I was so impressed that when my daughter was born, I thought about Ulrike. But for our linguistic space, it is too much, so Ulyana appeared. And I also have a friend named Ulyana: fierce, cheerful, who danced on tables. It seemed to me that this is such a good protection, a strong name.

C

Circus. In childhood, it scared me a lot. And I did not feel any tenderness for the circus until I discovered the “Cirque du Soleil”, which in my opinion is more of a theater than a circus. In childhood, the circus was associated with something terrible, from the book about the gutta-percha boy, it was a place for me where children and animals are tortured. And now my attitude towards the circus has changed. Thanks to Vyacheslav Polunin, many small European groups creating a circus of a new formation. There is a “Upsala Circus” friendly to us (the cabaret band “Silver Wedding”), which is located in St. Petersburg. It is a circus of hooligans, a social project for children from difficult families and families with very limited income, as they have almost no chance to break into some fascinating world and get everything for their development. They study in this circus and put on absolutely wonderful professional performances, subtle, smart, demonstrating the wonders of the human body, the strength of spirit, imagination, humor – everything to feel like a hero. This is the best option for such children. They travel so much! And they create simply fantastic performances. Famous artists, well-known actors are friends with them. This is a very wise, interesting, extraordinary project, not at all like children’s amateur performances.

Ch

Cheburashka. This is a representative of Zen Buddhism in our childhood. A wonderful creature that cannot be surpassed in terms of endearment. Nothing more touching than Cheburashka, who in a bandit-like manner tears human hearts apart, has been created. My favorite character. Last New Year, our whole family celebrated in the image of Cheburashkas. We sewed Cheburashka ears, danced Cheburashka dances around the Christmas tree, and we had a box of oranges. And everyone likes these ears so much that we are now giving patterns to friends (laughs).

Sh

Bumblebees. I love the topic of insects and am very interested in entomology. This is the world of very small creatures, and perhaps it is an internal association, I also feel like a small creature in this world. Insects seem so tiny and insignificant that they can be overlooked, crushed, but their world is organized so wisely and subtly that not all large creatures are capable of such organization and interaction. I once read that bumblebees fly contrary to the laws of physics. And I remembered this as a miracle!

Interviewed by Maria Stolyarova