About universities

By the way, in high school, I wanted to be a writer or even a poet. Or, even better, both the writer and the poet. Mom advised me to enter the Institute of Military Translators, but I rejected her offer. By that time, my warlike fuse was forever wasted in games with soldiers. They did not teach writers and poets anywhere (people were accepted at the Literary Institute a little more properly and with publications). In this regard, I opted for the journalism department of Moscow State University. It seemed to me that journalists travel a lot, communicate with interesting people, and this will help me in the knowledge of life, without which there is no writer. Mom's brother was a whale. Hearing about the faculty of journalism, he exclaimed: “You are crazy! Education in your journalism faculty is no. If you're lucky, you will get, say, in the newspaper Pravda and you will lie all your life. And if it develops like everyone else, you will become a lot of tufts about the production of production of hymns in the factory. Do you need it? No, go my following-learn the eastern tongue, you will not be left without bread. Yes, and this is interesting. And the language is not a hindrance in writing. ”

I already understood about the Pravda. There was no toilet paper then, newspapers were used instead of it, from which Pravda was the most common and, therefore, used.

In general, I prudently obeyed my uncle and submitted documents to the Institute of Oriental Languages ​​at Moscow State University on Marx Avenue, which has now turned into Mokhovaya. I passed the exams, passed the competition.

All my school friends also entered the institutes, in joy at the end of August 1968, we went on a campaign. To tell the truth, walking with a heavy backpack, we did not bother-having reached the train to the Tuchkovo station, stood up by a late camp on the high bank of the Moscow River. The mood was wonderful - such as in the Aksyonovskaya “Sluttered Bochkotar” that was published that year, where he managed to so brilliantly grow absurdity, phantasmagoria and joy from non -impedic life. We bathed gambling, the weather was excellent, and we clearly saw how military planes were wested one by one, leaving, leaving in the blue sky, untidy white train. Just returning to Moscow, I found out that Soviet troops easily occupied fraternal Czechoslovakia.

* * *

The thick walls of the university building possessed a strength involved on the egg yolk and had a two -century story hiding in tiny audiences with blind windows. The current electricity scattered the darkness, but did not defeat it. Perhaps that is why it seemed to me that these audiences were not populated by the brightest people-because of the eternal twilight, I simply did not know how to see them properly. Another thing is true: the teachers preferred their brightness to mask, there were ordinary Soviet history behind the shoulders of many of them - intelligence, dips, denunciations, arrests, camps, and rehabilitation. They walked themselves in this building with embrasure windows, from which the Light -bearing Kremlin was clearly visible. Most teachers honestly taught their subject, but kept a distance with students, and were avoided by third -party topics. You never know what ...

But the east of the East still assumed human otherness. Few people heard about yoga then, she was not forbidden, but the authorities looked at her with suspicion - in the teaching of yogis nothing was said about the upcoming communism. But in our Iviva Indologist A. N. Zubkov, he easily gave a public lecture about yoga. The audience was filled to capacity. The lecturer talked about the yogi wonders, showed several exercises. He also told about one who quarreled him with a friend - a journalist from the army “Red Star”. In the midst of their joint feast, Zubkov boasted that he could instantly sober up him, a friend did not believe, but made the proposed exercise and became sober than the object glass. “What have you done! You let our money into the wind! And now, to run for the addition? " He asked angrily.

Despite the requests from the hall, Zubkov refused to demonstrate the exercise in the university walls. Soon, in the magazine "Rural Youth" he began to publish yogis complexes. I obediently did them and got rid of without any drugs from the beginning of Gastritis. But the "rural youth", fearing popular anger, also refrained from the publication of a sober exercise.

In the left wing of that old university building there was a philological faculty with charming young ladies. The girls were hardly accepted in the ears. In a fine day, we all poured into the yard in search of light, tenderness, couples. Divorced on different sides of the square, concrete monuments to the bosom friends Herzen and Ogarov looked at us with envy. Then the Philfak was moved to a new building on the Sparrow Mountains, and this greatly impoverished both philology and oriental studies.

* * *

I was terribly lucky, and I ended up in the first group of Soviet students, who were sent for an internship in Japan. We studied at the Tokai Private University exactly six months. The term was due to the fact that when the country was in the country of more than this time, according to Japanese laws, it was supposed to take fingerprints, and the Soviet government considered it “offensive to Soviet man”.

The owner of the university was Matsuma Siegheshi. He decided that it was time to finish with the Cold War, and arranged a student exchange. I am extremely grateful to him for what he did for me without knowing me. I studied for free, but Japanese students paid a lot of money for studying. 1974 - almost the end of a powerful wave of the student movement tinted with anti -Americanism, but rallies were still in the university campus against raising education fees, toilet cabins were dotted with prosperity, like: “Matsumae, die!”. Matsumae, however, did not die, having lived safely until 1991 and having managed to do a lot of good deeds - including building a baseball stadium in the Moscow State University campus. But the student movement was exhausted - looking at the current greenhouse species of young people and occasionally shaking their cutlet pen, you can hardly correlate these hydropone creatures with their loud grandfathers. The truth is that in Russia, baseball has not taken root and became most known not in the game itself, but by baseball caps (for dandy), and by beats (for bandits).

Inside the concrete box of our hostel, everything was arranged conveniently arranged, but faceless. You can populate people into such a space, or you can put machines. In Japan, it was all the time to surprise me how in such ugly buildings people manage to do such elegant and comfortable things. Each of them was supplied with detailed use instructions. Both the wristwatch and the tape recorder relied on a multi -page brochure. Since I suffer from technical cretinism, I liked it - not a single step missed, it is impossible to get confused. But even the instructions for using the toilet that hung in each toilet cabin of the hostel and throughout the rest of the Japanese land seemed unnecessary to me. The Japanese lived and live according to instructions that provide the predictability of being. In the same areas of life where instructions are impossible, they are made uncomfortable. The Bulgarian coach, who worked with a university football team, admitted: “I have never had such obedient players - they are not lazy and they perform a cool training exercise, much better than ours. And how to go to the game - the eyes would not have watched. "

Subsequently, I stopped laughing both at the instructions of the Japanese and their “strange” habits. Faced with “absurdities”, I was looking for an excuse and came to the conclusion that culture is not a set of “high” truths, but a catalog of prejudices. You can write from left to right, but you can from right to left. You can eat with a fork with a knife, or you can stick with sticks. Japanese students just like ours, at that time had the habit of plugging books by the belt, but they shut them in front, but behind their backs. Watching other people's prejudices, correlating them with their own is an exciting, soul -sailing lesson. It gives an idea of ​​the relativity of our own customs. It makes it possible to look at yourself from the other side, smile at your own limitation and remain the same - just because it is so familiar. Without prejudice, there is no person, without them he is an inappropriate nothing, without them he is bored. Until the prejudices are not related to the aggressive denial of the way of other peoples, until you think that your prejudices are better than “people”, they paint and diversify the world. Guided by just such attitudes, I wrote in the late 1990s the “Book of Japanese Tales”, and then its expanded version is the “Book of Japanese Symbols”. These works are heartfelt gratitude to the Japanese for the difference in tastes, habits and addictions. Loving myself, I fell in love with others. Having fallen in love with others, he did not fall in love with himself. What can be better to warm the soul?

With my partner in a dormitory room named Shura, we lived in the soul. We really liked one local habit: if the Japanese in a Petite establishment ordered a bottle and did not finish it (and he usually did not finish it), he left the faster capacity in a multi -heating rack located behind the bar. The rack was blocked to the departments with the names of the drinking, where the bottle was put. It is very convenient: I went in the next time, your package itself stands at the place put by the name to it and is poured for free, without requiring either a check or a personality certificate.

We were then fond of the Italian vermouth - a drink in the USSR inaccessible. So we went to the bar next to the hostel, ordered Chinzano. When the bottom was already barely splashing, Shura suggested stopping. I objected, Shura easily allowed himself to persuade. They took the second bottle - exactly with the same outcome. Only now Shura objected, and I easily agreed with him. In general, we liked the Japanese habit, but we, as truly Russian people, did not manage to use it, we didn’t set such experiments on ourselves anymore, and empty bottles from under the vermouth were stored on the balcony of the hostel of the University of Tokai. In the Soviet Union, few people heard about such a university, but many were familiar with the fortified Hungarian wine.

* * *

Once I studied, then I began to teach myself. Including at a once respected university in which my daughters studied. When the rector replaced there, the new boss arranged a meeting with the teachers and began to tell how the university was bent before him, and he would flood with him. Then his thoughts lost, he threw a piece of paper and admitted that the leadership and teachers have different interests. You, they say, bake about the quality of education, and it is more important for us to fulfill the instruction of the Ministry of Education and you, teachers, to suck, because too much of you divorced. At the same time, he was certified by the philosopher. Before becoming them, he commanded a military unit.

Together with the new rector, new trends came: the teachers fell silent, and the staff serving them entered into force. Here I am going to the university corridor. Purely, light, ancient statues, Renaissance statues. Copies, of course. I go to the toilet. In a suit and tie. There, the cleaning lady is dumb. Watching how I head to the booth. He throws it in the back: "You are not past." I turn around, I don’t find words. But in the gaze, it seems, a protest. The woman mands: “What do you see? Many are pushed by. " Nevertheless, I go to the booth. Above the tank inscription: "Do not throw toilet paper into the toilet!" To the left of the toilet, a plastic bucket with scraps of the used paper was hanged with caustic time. At the face level. This is if you sit down. It’s good that I managed to stand up.

What seemed impossible yesterday became possible today. This is called in their language progress.

Alexander Meshcheryakov