This is a space for those who see literature not as entertainment, but as one of the greatest ways to understand humanity, history, and oneself.
12 great works. 12 months. One year of extraordinary conversations about what it means to be human. HELIOS presents The Literary Salon with Elena Skulskaya — a year-long series of live online encounters with an acclaimed writer, poet, philologist and literary critic. This is neither a conventional lecture course nor a traditional book club. Once a month, we will gather to read and discuss some of the great works of world literature, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Bunin, Nabokov, Kafka, Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Tennessee Williams, Albee and Ionesco. Each work becomes a point of departure for a larger conversation about questions literature has asked for centuries: power and guilt, love and memory, freedom and alienation, generational conflict, desire, illusion, cruelty, language and the absurd. At the heart of every Salon is Elena Skulskaya’s interpretation of the text, followed by an intimate discussion in which members are invited to question, challenge, interpret and rediscover literature together. Our ambition is to return reading to what it once represented in the great European literary salons: not a solitary encounter with a text, but a living space for intellectual conversation. The year begins with Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and culminates in a special closing Salon exploring the recurring ideas of the year and the evolution of the literary hero, language and form.
Meeting details:
For us, literature is a conversation with the greatest minds of humanity. Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Borges, Márquez — each of them becomes our contemporary when we engage in an honest intellectual dialogue with their work.
At the beginning of each month, club members gather for an online meeting dedicated to a new book. Together, we discuss why this particular work was selected for the month’s programme, its place in the history of world culture, the ideas and questions that deserve particular attention while reading, and what our intellectual journey will look like over the coming weeks.
Each month, participants embark on a new cultural journey. Alongside the book itself, we explore its historical context, artistic world, philosophical ideas, and its influence on global culture, theatre, painting, music, and cinema.
Подборка книг, которые помогают глубже войти в разговор клуба.
Each meeting is built on a shared intellectual experience. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the book beforehand, so that the discussion becomes a genuine dialogue rather than a mere retelling of the plot.
