Текст книги "The memoirs of a Russian schoolboy (СИ)"

Автор книги: Марат Нигматулин

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I'm going home – a holiday  was over.

I hardly bend my legs,

I'm all hunched up,

I'm on the road after the holiday,

I'm on my armchair with my wife.

And the words all come out awkward,

And the sweets in me are chocolate.

And the sneakers were flawless,

Oh, I'll fall asleep forever now.

[Russian text:

Я домой иду – праздник кончился.

Едва ноги несут, весь я сгорбился,

По дороге иду после праздника,

Под руку с женой я лабазника.

И слова все выходят нескладные,

И конфеты во мне шоколадные.

И кроссовки расползлись безупречные,

Ой, засну я сейчас на веки вечные.]

So, to begin with, I would like to explain how Tonya could have occupied the school building for almost all vacations without much effort for her festivities, since this reader is probably most interested. Everything was very simple: on the second day of the holidays, acting in the deep twilight, a detachment of slaves Tony crept in, neutralizing the guard, who had just fallen asleep in his cubicle, locking it in from outside, previously depriving him of all communication possibilities with the outside world. Then the slaves brought all the necessary food to the school, after which the building was already occupied by the guests, after which the feast began, which did notstop for almost a whole week. Boys and girls for a whole week devoured a variety of delicacies, only a little interrupted by a dream, after which gluttony was renewed with much greater force, which was accompanied by constant communication on vulgar topics and singing songs. There was also a rather strange entertainment, which I met, however, quite often: boys and girls undressed to underwear, and then began to demonstrate to all around the dignities and shortcomings of theirbody (much more often flaws). When the great holiday ended, and it happened a couple of days before the start of the new quarter, everyone was sent home to put themselves in order by the beginning of the working week, which was very difficult for many. Some, like Julia Avvakumova, were engaged in physical exercises, others indulged in washing the stomach, like Sonia Barnash, walking on fresh, as did Tonya.

Chapter fiveteen.

The drunkenness.

How often some ignorant people like to say that in Russia they drink a lot of wine, although the majority of the population consumes the latter only relatively little, while a few drink, on the contrary, very much, which, when compiling general statistics, becomes invisible or unobtrusive, but  remains very important. To the few people from whom alcoholics and fornicators in our country originate, I entirely refer to school and university teachers, of which I knew even many teetotalers, but many others were great drinkers and snacks, which at that  Let time not be an insult to them and a humiliation of their professional honor. Snezhana Vladimirovna, who taught us the Russian language, was a great harlot, a glutton and a drunkard who, in appropriate ways, brought up three of her children, one with whom I had a conflict, as well as many other children in our school, to whom she was a teacher. In a word, I now would prefer to talk about the prosperity of drunkenness among many schoolchildren, who, listening to the stories of ignorant Snezhana Vladimirovna, believed that «from one glass of vodka a week nothing will be wrong». She gladly told us about how she liked to drink into a beastly condition in her student years, leading herself to such a thing, when a little more, and even signs of life will not be. «I always liked to drink. And in my student years I got drunk so that there was no sign of life. But you, girls, do not do this yet. At your age, I sometimes drank a bottle of dry wine with a girlfriend. That will help you. One or two times a week. And in three years you will be able to drink cognac, and vodka!» – Snezhana Vladimirovna told us.

But classmates drank quite a lot, and the older they got, the worse it was, but basically nothing much did not change much, except for the fact that after the government tightened the laws on the sale of wines and vodkas, and strengthened supervision  for traders, which came after power-conscious men learned about the disasters in the system of public education, the school began to revive the traditions of handicraft production of ethyl alcohol with the help of various distillers. Antonina, which I mentioned already many times over, organized by her own slaves the business of underground production of various drinks, the most popular of which was called «Egyptian Rum «Mummy»: I'm coming to you», a red liquid with a very pronounced smell of incomprehensible  herbs and cologne that was added there, as well as abundant sediment that was sold in glass bottles with a label where an ugly Egyptian mummy was depicted to the extreme. Alcohol was produced in country cottages owned by the parents of Antonina's slaves, where in various basements and sheds he was made on an almost industrial scale, bringing production to 434 liters a week soon, if we sum up the achievement of all our distilling slaves. Alcohol insisted on cherries, various berries, herbs and fruits, resulting in a variety of very bad smell drinks, but I can not judge their taste as a teetotaler, which were then sold for good money to other schoolchildren, often from other provinces of the Republic, through  Internet or through a network of «secret stores».

To many more teachers, we were loved by the inspectors who were previously teachers and appointed to these positions for such faults at work, which could not be dismissed, although the clarity of the impossibility of furtherwork with children was clear; first of all, it was drunkenness at work. The saying said that «the examiner is a former bad teacher», being absolutely correct here, because it was from those who drank or were stupid and often combining both these qualities that the horde of these incomprehensible people was recruited, which in the opinion of the teachers and schoolchildren themselves were complete  loafers, which was very close to the truth in order to voice this. The examiner appeared at the school about once a week to «check the implementation of existing legal acts», which in fact meant a situation when he came to a teacher's room where he was treated to a variety of delicacies, wines and vodka that were invariably bought for money collected from the parents of students  as donations, and after leaving, reporting that all the school affairs in the most complete order. «Odor vocatus – censorem euntibus» – says another school proverb, which also accurately conveys the essence of this particular post, since the examiner, who had very little work daily, only being forced to go to schools for their verification, and then to run into the administration for  announcements of the situation in them, which provided for his employment only for a few hours a week, while giving a good salary, and therefore left the possibility of free drinking. They fell in the composition of inspectors and persons, work not only with children, but in general with human beings contrary to certain characteristics of character, and, more simply, the most outspoken crazy in the worst sense of the term, often inclined towards what the Latins called the Greek word coprolalia, and therefore especially funny. Once there was a case when slaves were obliged to bring in a gift to a very prominent inspector in the form of a gift a huge bottle filled with homemade vodka tincture released under the patronage of the blessed Antonina; one slave said then that he was ready to argue – the inspector would die from this bottle, while the other said that he would not even get blind from it; their dispute was resolved in favor of the former, since methanol proved too strong for the official's body.

Chapter sixteen.

Confidential shops.

About these same stores need to be told separately – so much it was colorful establishments. I do not remember if I've said this before, but I'll probably repeat: in Moscow, our garages are located in separate blocks, and so when you go by subway or train, you can seethe vast quarters of garages. These areas are in the outskirts, usually near the railway, and therefore there is always full of all dark personalities. Even in Soviet times in such garages were engaged in all sorts of not quite legal things, and during my youth, Antonina Bozhenko began to open there «conspiratorial stores».

I remember how I visited one of these stores, so I can somehow describe his interior and range: an ordinary garage, along which there were racks with bottles of all sorts of rubbish, like the same rum «Mummy». There you could see «English whiskey of fusel oils», which was an incredibly foul-smelling liquid of turbid brown color, from one smell of which any normal person started vomiting.  Still there was sold «People's Cognac», which they did: they took a whole vat of alcohol, poured into it oak leaves, bark, acorns, sawdust, and then waited about a week, after which the resulting liquid was bottled. There in general a lot of everything was sold: smoking mixtures, cigarettes,cigars, hemp, hashish, opium. Our conspiratorial shops were a real paradise for a lover of intoxication, and so many of our students immediately went straight to these shops, where they bought everything they liked. In conspiratorial stores one could buy only goods produced by the efforts of Tony's slaves, and therefore the assortment was, although not very large, but still acceptable for unpretentious Russian schoolchildren, aiming to swell after school.  Since it was very difficult for a schoolboy to buy anything alcoholic in an ordinary store, our brothers preferred to go to Antonina for a drink. As a result of the almost complete monopoly on the sale of alcohol to schoolchildren, conspiratorial shops began to raise prices that became so great that the unfortunate schoolboy had to get into debts that he could not repay, thus falling into slavery. In a word, conspiratorial shops bred debtors, and debtors are almost slaves, but they themselves do not yet know about it.

The goods for secret stores were produced separately, in various places, but mostly in dachas, which belonged to the parents of tonic slaves. The dacha is in general a very strange Russian phenomenon, not very understandable to Europeans, and therefore I willexplain its meaning a little. This is a full-fledged country house with a plot that is kept by people permanently living in the city, but in summer and on weekends they leave it for the benefit of the village. On this countryside site, the townspeople usually break gardens, work long hours all summer, and return to the city in the autumn. It was in the suburban areas and we had organized the production of a variety of goods sold in the safe shops of the city. In a word, I'll tell you more about this from the position of one of my friends, Maxim Smirnov, who was engaged in the production of all kinds of products from cannabis and opium poppy for conspiratorial shops. He is generally a kind and good man, but a terrible drunkard, who himself admits this, and therefore I hope his followers will not offend. I met this person much later, when I was already in another school and other sciences, but he devoted me to the long-held secrets of the production for sale, surprising me by how much we all have in this respect simply. He himself fell into slavery to Antonina for the incredible debts that he gained from his love for the bottle: in the fifth grade he first began to apply to the bottle, and in the seventh grade he already thumped like a pig. Bottles of whiskey and rum were in his room just everywhere: under the table, on the table, on the bed, and under the bed. For huge debts, he was made a slave, but was so lazy that his Tonya could use it only in this kind of production, which she unfolded right at his dacha. He himself was not warned about anything, just like the family, just having put before the fact that from now on he will be a young gardener at his own dacha.

He told me this: «Once. In June it was. I sleep in bed after drinking. I sleep, I sleep. Then someone knocking at the window. I open it. There Misha Morozov. He said to me: «Get up, lazy freak! You're lying on your bed, like a crook. Come on, lift your fat ass and start working, lazy nigga!».  The clock was four in the morning. I got up, put on my pants, went out into the yard. There stood Misha Morozov with sprouts. The seedlings of cannabis. God, how many of her were there. I was fucked by so much cannabis. I've never seen that much. We planted this hemp all day. More precisely, I planted, and Morozov himself sat in an armchair, drank a cola and yelled at me: «Work, fat pig, whore!». Then the parents woke up. They were, of course, glad that Misha had come, but they said thatplanting hemp was a bad idea. Then Misha said: «It is so, but this is the order of Antonina. She said that either he should plant hemp in his house – or she will fuck him with an iron pin.». Parents then conferred and decided that it is better to plant hemp. Since then, and put.». It must be said that the courtyard of Maxim was overgrown with cannabis bushes higher than human growth, through which, by his own admission, it is very difficult to wade through.  In a word, not only the cannabis grew over the yard of Maxim, but also the opium poppy, which he also had to collect, process and transport on suburban trains to Moscow for sale, under the control of Misha Morozov. It's hard for an Englishman to understand that in Russia such things are realized extremely simply: people simply take leaves of hemp and opium, collect them in packages, and therefore these packetsare taken all this to Moscow. No conspiracy measures are applied even close, except, of course, that the packages were still taken in black, and therefore it was impossible to make out the contents from outside. Antonina did not want to bother especially with the synthesis of heroin, and therefore opium was used in the same way as it was in the time of the Opium Wars in China, although later heroin began to be produced under her leadership, but this applies to already later times.

Chapter seventeen.

School of aesthetic obesity.

Earlier, I had already promised to tell you about the aesthetization of obesity in our school, hitherto not entirely dedicated to this topic, but now having selected a whole chapter for it, although in fact it will be given far more space here. I have to give so much space to this topic, speaking about it in almost every chapter, though only because in our school it had a truly colossal significance for our entire public and private life.

In my era, this fashionable current densely populated in the minds of young people throughout the country, gradually grabbing more and more new supporters, who went there more actively. In the previous chapters I mentioned boys and girls who grew fat without special intentions, some of whom were trying to lose weight, as well as those who were involved in sports, and therefore did not belong to this category. In my time, however, the type of the schoolboy-athlete more and more retreats into the past, disappearing in the darkness of the old epoch, becoming an anachronism incomprehensible to contemporaries, a «guest from the Soviet past».

As the school load grew more and more every year, reaching the time when I was in the sixth grade, to a record eight or nine hours a day, burying myself in the ceiling of the maximum working day of teachers, which should be added to the multiplication of school homework, the sport did not have any strength left. The forces also took away the constant examinations introduced by the government to test our knowledge that the sword of Damocles was hanging over us, constantly recalling the need to learn the wisdom of life for the glory of the government and the president. I perfectly understand that these exams, introduced in the fourth, ninth and eleventh grades, forced us to work better than we could work without them, and therefore were a good means of combating the laziness of the students while at the same time daring them away from the sport.

At the same time Sveta Solntseva gave the following classification of our schoolchildren, slightly giving off her humor, in one of the articles of the «Journal of the Patriotic Schoolboy»,although in our school there was no border between the ridiculous and serious, and therefore I ask you not to be deceived on this score:

1) The first group included all those boys and girls who, despite all the difficulties they had to face, persistently continued to play sports. All these people were called «evil reactionaries», accusing them of sympathizing with the Soviet educational system. Those, according to Sveta, dominated the 1970s and 1980s.

Here, I undoubtedly should make a small digression, since foreign readers, and even those of the domestic ones, who do not communicate with young people, may think that among our schoolchildren there is a flourishing hatred of the USSR and anti-communism, which is really absolutely wrong. In our school, the absolute, simply overwhelming majority of schoolchildren had totalitarian and pro-Soviet views, while liberal views had only a few people. This accusation was mostly humorous, parodying the anti-communist propaganda of the Russian liberal media, but still it was not entirely comic, bearing some «back seriousness», by which we understood the seriousness of the hidden, not noticeable at first sight. The thing is that I somewhat simplify the whole state of things, calling our views pro-Soviet and communistic, because not all that was in the USSR attracted the view of our schoolchildren, but very much and repelled. Modern children, like people of any epoch, compared all actions of the people of the past with their own, tried to think about what they would do if they were in the place of their ancestors, and therefore most of them did not understand and did not accept the general interest in sports in Soviet Russia  among youth.  This question will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters.

2) In the second category included those schoolchildren, who themselves no longer follow their physical condition, not trying to be athletic, or specifically to get fat. This category dominated, according to the author, in the 1990-2000's.

3) In the third category, which, according to Sveta, «intercepts today the palm of the second place», they carried those children who are fat specially, acting purely as they wish.

I must say that many Westerners, and Russian readers, brought up in the European manner, the very idea that it can be specially unable to fit in the head, without docking with any knowledge. During my time at this school, and also in subsequent periods, I often encountered such a misunderstanding, and if the men simply shrugged their shoulders, saying that anything can happen, especially violently, even quite often aggressively, if frankly, they reacted to it  those housewives that always sit on a variety of diets, trying to lose weight, but always without any result.

When I told them about teenagers with a figure that most Europeans think is excellent, they want to grow fat, then they either did not believe me, or they tried to «search for a deep sense» in these actions, and sometimes they just started yelling and swearing without any reason, me the most abusive words. Some said something like: «It's all because they do that they are engaged in sports laziness, but I want pies to eat tons!». Others said: «These are just very sick people. Do not scoff at them, but we need to treat them in hospitals.». No one, of course, could catch mice without understanding the essence of this phenomenon in the same way that our inactive schoolchildren of Soviet schoolchildren did not understand, who were engaged in sports, for they were all in captivity of their illusions.

In my times, the concern, and often the real paranoia of schoolchildren over their appearance, has surpassed all former boundaries, while the aesthetic development of them has progressed significantly, and therefore the aesthetics of the body became more and more realized in my time in this environment. «If in the Soviet times it was almost indecent to talk about the body in any context, in the nineties only a muscular body was allowed to discuss, in our time it became possible to discuss it in general in any contexts and manifestations.» – wrote in the Journal of the Patriotic Schoolboy. In my day, the mores became more and more free, and the discussion of who was fattened, and who built it was in fact an everyday theme for the conversation of schoolchildren of both sexes, as well as the mutual demonstration of his figure was made the usual thing. Here I must make a small digression for a general understanding by the reader of the context in which all this took place to be.

The formation of such aesthetic tastes strange for most people is due primarily to certain processes taking place in the school community of my era.

The first process consisted in the fact that in my time between schoolchildren the closest in essence ties arose, which were even more heated by their almost universal slavish position, and therefore there were certain traditions and customs. We, for example, went to visit friends homes, often even having the keys to their homes, staying there sometimes for weeks or even months; the usual situation was when a schoolboy spent all summer living at home with a friend, without experiencing any inconvenience there. Once I was acquainted with a friend in his friend's family, having lived there for six months, that is, all the autumn and the whole winter, without suffering any deprivations from the owners. There were extremely strong friendships between all slaves, as well as between free people, which it was very difficult to destroy, and therefore in my time they relied on friendship, giving my friends all my secrets and discussing with them all the most intimate things before. It came to the point that schoolchildren united in various secret societies, very different from subcultural groups by their secrecy, spy mania, xenophobia and an extreme desire to participate in politics, although we will speak about these societies in the next chapter. If a schoolboy of the nineties looked at Schwarzenegger, then in our times such characters became boring youth, and it turned its views on themselves; they were tired of reading about the life of stars and heroes, as they became more conscious, wanting to become their own heroes. Very often it was possible to see how the students gathered almost in secrecy in order to show their bodies mutually, to look at the bodies of their own kind, which will be discussed later.

In addition, having received a computer with access to the Great Network, the schoolchildren finally managed to translate their «culture of silent majority» into a fundamentally new level of professionalism and form, leveling it with all other things. Schoolchildren wrote poems and even major works in Soviet times, but neither then nor in the nineties could they disperse especially far around the world, spreading in manuscript lists among friends. I still have a novel written by a schoolboy, one of the last such novels at the end of their era, in 2003, when the old form was gradually dying, and it was replaced by a new, more perfect one. Only with the advent of the Internet, literature created by the schoolchildren themselves began to acquire a truly mass character, and therefore also the significance, having finally reached the industrial level, and therefore improving more and more, for now the experience of exchange between the authors grew ever stronger. But about the literary creativity will be told later, but for now it is necessary to explain the phenomenon of intentional obesity.

Schoolboys began to be interested in bodily questions, considering themselves, first, in the first half of the 2000s, still thinking of being inferior and almost defective in comparison with the «stars» that they saw as titans and people very important. At the same time, as you understand, social conditions forced schoolchildren not to go in for sports, as I already wrote above, and the awareness of the school masses under the influence of various political and philosophical literature leaked to them from the Internet, has grown, and therefore my generation has already realized that we, schoolboys, a special group, with its own way of life, its customs and traditions, and therefore we do not need to be guided by any extraneous «stars».

Gradually, the attitude towards his figure changed, and therefore the conciliatory statement of the transitional period spread that «we are not flawed, we are normal», and later a more radical statement appeared, saying: «We are an ideal, we are an example to you to imitation, we are real people!». Given that the vast majority of schoolchildren of my time was frail, often with excessive weight, awkward from the point of view of the «classical» canons, the notion of beauty was appropriate, very unusual for people of other generations, especially those who had to grow up during the 1980s, 1990s.

It would be erroneous to believe that in my times of sports the children stopped participating in the whole, because there remained a small number of those who still continued to do this, hoping to create a sports career – very promising in my day. To make such a career, however, only those who were completely incapable of teaching in other sciences, excluding sports, were solved, and therefore the stereotype that the athlete is a priori stupid, if not mentally defective, among the schoolchildren was fixed.

As a result, an ideal for our schoolchildren was formed, which was finalized by 2015, which our children were quite simple and pleasant to meet, and many already corresponded to it, while the desire for it soon acquired mass character among almost all categories of the school population.

The male ideal was an unsportsmanlike, slightly chubby tanned boy with weak, undeveloped muscles, overgrown with a tender fat; the female ideal was recognized as an unsportsmanlike girl, who necessarily possesses the same weak muscles and excess weight. That the boy that the girl had to have puffy cheeks and protruding bellies, for it was considered indispensable for all the children of my time in their midst, since in the conditions when a person was dressed (and in cold Russia a man wears a lot of clothes for most of the year) it is by these parameters that the beauty of his figure was determined. It was very desirable to have a straight or slightly curved forward back, as it was easier to show the belly with it, while the back of the saddle was considered an ugliness, which was absolutely unacceptable.

Supporters of deliberate obesity were periodically attacked, not only by the ladies already mentioned, but also by the older generation, who accused them of links with the West, in propagating hedonism and debauchery. In Russia of my time, the argument about working for Western states was quite ordinary rhetorical technique used for polemics at any convenient opportunity by all its participants, and therefore nobody seriously took it. At the same time, contacts with Western colleagues, fans of so-called feederism, were established rather closely through the site «DeviantArt» and «imgsrc.ru», as well as through some other communication channels, less active ones. Western teenagers, with whom we had a chance to communicate, accepted, and now accept, us extremely well, being deprived of most of the bad ideas about Russia. About our correspondence, we will tell, however, later.

There were, of course, other views on what was good and what was bad, besides, it was considered, for example, that a boy should read philosophical literature, and first of all Nietzsche, the girl should be a fan of Donacien's creativity, passionately dreaming of repeating everything described in his novels of the scene. In a word, I will say more about other modes, but for the time being I will finish the conversation about conscious obesity. To finish it is necessary that in each following generation of schoolboys the given fashionable tendency was all stronger and stronger: among born in 1997-1999 I did not fix anything similar; among those born in 2000-2002, the trend was not very strong; among the generation of 2003-2005, this phenomenon became so common that any deviation from it was considered a sign of marginalization. Since the trends that gave rise to this phenomenon, which consisted in the gradual allocation of students to a very special class, only intensified and deepened, the view of obesity became more aesthetized and refined: if in 2010 it was enough just to be fat, then in 2016, to the mandatory procedures, added a huge number of subtleties, such as a mandatory tan, which was considered an integralfeature of a beautiful person. In short, the trend only intensified at the time of writing these lines.

Next we will talk about how I got acquainted with this phenomenon in my everyday life, but now I would like to tell you about some other interesting things that many are attracted to a much more aesthetic obesity: of course, of secret societies.

Chapter eighteen.

Secret School Societies.

The history of the secret societies of schoolchildren and students in Russia has several centuries, but in this case we will speak about the history of a relatively modern, although extremely rich in a variety of organization and phenomenon.

The first secret societies of schoolchildren, known from police documents, arose in our district in the 1990s, although it is quite possible that they existed before – since the 1970s, judging by authentic «internal» sources, on the documents of the societies themselves, as well as on the memories of the tenants. Next we will describe some brief history of these societies, collected by me from documents and memoirs, but still completely inadequate to understand everything, although it is suitable for a common understanding of the essence of the matter.