The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking

10 hrs. 26 min.

Language Russian

Author Olivia Laing

Narrator Svetlana Kuryavina

Description

An irresistible thirst for the illusion of one’s own power—found in brief moments of faith that one can fill the emptiness of loneliness and turn time back—the desire to forget the failures that haunt you and the chain of losses that make up existence. All of this brings together two addictions to creating an imagined alternative to life: art, especially literature, and alcoholism. The British writer Olivia Lang attempts to look at these addictions—equally tyrannical for those who have acquired them, and equally destructive for their lives through one another—using several famous examples: Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver. She shows how the illusion of paradise and the painful awareness that it is impossible intertwine in their work.

Age restriction: 16+