The Antechamber of Hope
Taleb describes Yevgenia Krasnova’s attachment to a favorite novel as a form of friendship. Her refusal to hear it analyzed illustrates how personal affection can shape a reader’s response to criticism.
THE IDEA
The Antechamber of Hope
For Yevgenia Krasnova, a person could love one book, at most a few—beyond this was a form of promiscuity. Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it. Montaigne was asked “why” he and the writer Etienne de la Boétie were friends—the kind of question people ask you at a cocktail party as if you knew the answer, or as if there were an answer to know. It was typical of Montaigne to reply, “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” (because it was him and because it was me). Likewise, Yevgenia claims that she likes that one book “because it is it and because I am me.” Yevgenia once even walked out on a schoolteacher because he analyzed that book and thus violated her rule. One does not sit idle listening as people wax analytical about your friends. A very stubborn schoolchild she was.
This book she has as a friend is Il deserto dei tartari, by Dino Buzzati, a novel that was well known in Italy and France during her childhood, but that, strangely, nobody she knows in America had heard of. Its English title is mistranslated as The Tartar Steppe instead of The Desert of the Tartars.
Yevgenia encountered Il deserto when she was thirteen, in her parents’ weekend country house in a small village two hundred kilometers outside Paris, where their Russian and French books multiplied without the constraints of the overfed Parisian apartment. She was so bored in the country that she could not even read. Then, one afternoon, she opened the book and was sucked into it.
When to use it
When choosing a book for a deep, personal reading experience.
When understanding why someone becomes defensive about their favorite book.
When recognizing that a literary bias might prevent you from exploring other genres.
When building a personal library focused on meaningful, revisitable works.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Yevgenia's Bond with Buzzati's Novel
Yevgenia formed a deep friendship with Dino Buzzati's Il deserto dei tartari (translated as The Tartar Steppe), treating it as a confidant and refusing to allow anyone to analyze it, even walking out on a teacher who did so.
Montaigne's Friendship
Michel de Montaigne described his bond with Etienne de la Boétie as 'Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi,' illustrating the ineffable nature of deep friendship—a sentiment Yevgenia applies to her chosen book.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think of a book that feels like a friend to you. How do you respond when someone analyzes or criticizes it?
How does your attachment to a particular book affect your openness to new books?
In what ways might treating a book as a friend enrich or limit your reading experience?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable With a new section On Robustness and Fragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)