Читать книгу 📗 "The memoirs of a Russian schoolboy (СИ) - Нигматулин Марат "Московский школьник""

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.