Girls and Guys

I learned about these villages from a tourist-water guide I knew. We had a dispute about what was considered real romance - then he said that in the Novgorod forests there are the villages of Parni and the village of Devki and that a river flows between them, across which there is not and never has been a bridge: “The locals swim to each other in a boat, and in the evenings they talk, each standing on his own bank.” That's how it all turned out.

There is Msta, but there is no bridge

Only a great joker could name the villages on opposite banks of the river Parni and Devkino (this is the official name of the second village). But who joked like that and when, neither the local residents, nor the local historians, nor the capital’s toponymy experts know. They say that once Empress Catherine II and her retinue sailed in these places. Suddenly, girls came ashore on one side and guys on the other. And then the empress asked the local governor (here the testimony differs - they say it was not the Novgorod governor, but Prince Potemkin) what the villages were called. He waved his hand absentmindedly: “Here we have... Girls, and here... Guys.”

Parninsky elder Vasily Pavlov, telling me this story, insisted that the governor at that moment was not completely sober:
“He was probably asleep, but when Catherine woke him up, he rubbed his eyes and blurted out: Guys and Girls.” Would a sober person have come up with such a thing?

The story about the empress and the governor can easily be declared a figment of the people's imagination, if not for two circumstances. Firstly, there is no other version of the appearance of Guys and Girls in the Novgorod region. Secondly, Catherine II actually sailed in these places, so to speak, with an inspection, in 1785. She had a large retinue on 30 ships, including Prince Grigory Potemkin, a great lover of wine and extravagant antics. There were also villages on the site of today’s Parney and Devkino at that time.

The river flowing between them is also named symbolically: Msta. In fact, the name just means “black”, and not at all what you might think. There are no problems in the relationship between the Guys and Devkino - there is a geographical problem and, as a consequence, a transport one.

If there is a bus from the regional center to Parney three days a week, then nothing goes to Devkino at all. Moreover, the entire civilization in the form of a post office and a store is located in Parny. The only way for the Devkins to get to the “mainland” is to sail with some kind person on a boat, or, as the locals say, in a canoe. Only at the end of summer does Msta become very shallow and a ford briefly appears right between the villages, through which Devka’s grandmothers go to Parni for groceries. The rest of the time - either by boat or on foot on the ice.

“Sometimes, on the day the goods are delivered to the store, the men gather the grandmothers, put them in one shuttle and take them to Parni,” says Tatyana Fomicheva, a specialist in the Burginsky rural administration. – In winter it seems easier, but in reality it is much more difficult. I feel sorry for the grandmothers to the point of tears - the snow is waist-deep, you have to follow each other, plus the banks are steep, plus a backpack on your back. But they are coming...

Tatyana, me, and paramedic Nadezhda Zinovyeva were unlucky - there were no boatmen in the vicinity, only a lonely empty boat was rocking in the grass near the shore. I had to borrow it. In fact, we simply stole it, but here this is not a very criminal act - if, of course, you then return the vehicle from where you took it.


Just two guys for a divorce

Previously, Msta was navigable, passenger ships sailed along it, and the residents of Parney and Devkino even installed benches on their banks to admire the river and watch passing ships. Well, after each other, of course.

“They communicate here across the river,” says Tatyana, measuring the dark Msta water with oars. - Naturally, one in Devkino, the other in Parnyi - they stand on the shore and talk: “What are you doing?” - “What are you doing?”

According to documents, 14 people permanently live in the village of Parni, and 15 in Devkino. Despite this, they do not look abandoned at all: Devkino is a surprisingly beautiful village - even flirtatious. Parni is simpler, more severe, but still amazes with a neatness that is not typical of a Russian village. And thanks to the summer residents (it’s easier for St. Petersburg residents to go to Parni, and for Novgorod residents to go to Devkino), in the summer life here is in full swing.

Most of the indigenous “guys” and “girls” are of retirement age. There is only one young couple in two villages - the Andreev family. Lena Andreeva is generally the only bride that the village of Devkino has seen over the last ten years. Now Lena is the only young mother: she has twins, a boy and a girl one and a half years old. The stork on the roof of the neighbor's house is a sham in every sense - storks don't live in these places, and there's no one for them to carry children.

“We have a problem with boys in the Boys,” complained the headman Vasily Vasilyevich. - Just girls! My neighbor tried so hard, even an ultrasound showed that there would be a boy, but still a girl was born. In total, it turns out that there are only two guys in both of our villages.


When villages were big

In the 1920s, floods destroyed more than half of Parninsky's houses, and frightened residents began to build further away from the river. Since then, Devkino, despite his dependent position, has been more important than the Guys.

“We had a lot of young people, especially girls,” recalls Klavdiya Dmitrieva. – It was a big village, more guys. Our guys were friends with their guys, but they also fought. Like a holiday, we go with harmony, and wherever we come, there they fight. The guys fought, and we girls hid in ravines and watched. Now who should fight? No one and no one.
Klavdia Ivanovna is over seventy. She was born in Devkino, in her youth she was one of the first beauties, she married a local guy and lived with him all her life. Together they worked at the local forestry enterprise, collecting resin. Several years ago, Klavdia Ivanovna was widowed - since then she has lived alone, waiting for her daughter and grandson to visit. He doesn’t really like to remember his former life – it was a lousy life, he says:

- Poor people. Now everything is better - we receive a pension, we live in abundance. There’s just no health, but it’s good. And not boring. I’m not a sedentary bone, I got up in the morning and went to pick berries. The forest is my hobby, I relax there. I’ll sit down on a tree stump, the birds sing, and I sit. It's just a pity that the forest is being cut down. The forest where we worked when we were young no longer exists.
There is no forest, almost no guys and girls left, but the Guys and Girls – here they are, standing. The Msta still flows between them without a bridge, tourists and governors swim along it, and the Devkinsky bank speaks to the Parnino shore.