My colleague Zinaida Lobanova’s article on this topic snickering Muscovites It resonated so much that I wanted to join the discussion. Readers sent angry messages in which they proved that they were real natives of the capital in the third, fourth, fifth generation, but lived modestly, quietly and without black caviar in kilograms. This is just a matter of a bunch of ignorant people!
Such discussions always begin the same way: Participants begin to measure themselves by the number of ancestors born in Moscow. My great-grandmother fed the pigeons on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, and my great-great-grandfather looked after Pushkin’s house from his apartment on the Arbat, and mine almost built the Kremlin. It is as if these many generations of Muscovites behind them add to the commentators’ personal achievements.
Although they actually add something. And this something is a parent’s apartment. Or your grandmother’s or your great-grandmother’s – who has yours? And this parental circle makes the “native” Muscovite no better, but worse, in terms of his potential achievements, than those who come in large numbers.
Nothing in the capital could be as depressing as these precious square metres. At 20, you can move away from your mother, huddle in a one-room apartment in Biryulyovo instead of the general’s Stalinist building on Krasnaya Presnya, but the feeling that you always have somewhere to return will allow you to sleep a few hours extra, do not go to the exam, be late for work and even send your boss away. Why bother if your 11th grade t-shirt is still in the nursery?
Come on, grab your tomatoes, but I sincerely believe that the guys who came to Moscow were generally more successful. Of course, everyone has that friend who has achieved nothing, lived in a doghouse on the edge of town for ten years, and went to an unloved job and sat in ugly pants. But there are many more locals like this. Because we are not that loaded. We are lazy. We don’t need this.
As a child, I dreamed of studying at MGIMO. I really had a goal in life; Since the fifth grade, I was preparing to act in “Smart Girls and Clever Girls” just to get in. As a result, he played, but on the open day it turned out that MGIMO was in Yugo-Zapadnaya. What does it mean that I will spend two hours a day on the road? Who are you taking me to?
I still sometimes think that I went to the journalism department of Moscow State University because it was close to my home.
So men from the provinces, charged with success and sleepless nights, order buckets of this famous black caviar and complain that the gold isn’t gold enough. It is they who create the image of the richest, the most hard-working, the most capricious, the most cynical. And, of course, the lazy and relaxed locals in their grandmother’s apartments write that they have neither luxurious parties nor facial affairs against their background an expensive schedule. And they are offended that it isn’t. But we had to work, guys!
And Moscow girls just don’t really want to work – they even half-eyedly look for grooms, and they are all capricious, sorting out the options, and then complaining that millionaires are snatched by agile girls from Penza and Chelyabinsk. There was no point in flapping your ears!
And then new complaints appear: a sad Muscovite complains to the carpet in her grandmother’s apartment that all her classmates in the regions have long been in their own villas in Italy, and she herself has not even been to Anapa for three years.
This is the phenomenon of low starting that Lewis Carroll described in his book “Alice in Wonderland”: “To stay in place you must run as fast as you can, and to get somewhere you must run at least twice as fast!” Those who need to gain a foothold in Moscow are running as fast as they can, and then they cannot stop – and while we watch their race, they have already fled to unknown distances, lying like that blue caterpillar with a hookah on his mushroom cap.
Admitting such a thing is probably offensive and upsetting. But the sooner we accept the fact that we need to act first in order to get drunk later, the easier it will be for us. True, there is a possibility that we will not have time to comment on other people’s articles in the media because we will be working.
And of course, eat black caviar from golden plates.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.