Translated material
Gleb Morev. Norms and anomalies
Norms and anomalies
Gleb Morev
Publication date: November 16, 1999
N. B. Lebina. Everyday life of a Soviet city: Norms and anomalies. 1920-1930s. - St. Petersburg: Magazine "Neva" - Publishing House "Summer Garden", 1999. 320 pp.; 2000 copies
Gleb Morev
Publication date: November 16, 1999
N. B. Lebina. Everyday life of a Soviet city: Norms and anomalies. 1920-1930s. - St. Petersburg: Magazine "Neva" - Publishing House "Summer Garden", 1999. 320 pp.; 2000 copies
As is known from the memoirs of Boris Pasternak, “there were two famous phrases about time. That life became better, life became more fun, and that Mayakovsky was and remained the best and most talented poet of the era.” N. Lebina’s book opens with a quote from Mayakovsky, which helps the author clearly formulate the idea of the work, which is based on the concept of “what is good and what is bad” (otherwise - the dichotomy “norm-anomaly”) and its transformation in the era The 1920s-1930s, when they learned about the quality of Mayakovsky’s poems and the life around them not from Pasternak, but directly from the author he quoted - I.V. Stalin. It is clear to everyone, and not only the reader of Vladimir Sorokin, that Soviet people have a special relationship with the concept of “norm”. N. Lebina goes into the details of these relationships, demonstrating on the material of everyday life in Petrograd-Leningrad how “good” before historical materialism later became, accordingly, “bad.” Just as before 1917 it was considered normal to live in a separate apartment, celebrate Christmas and Easter, buy food and clothes in stores, go to the country and, finally, be buried in a cemetery, so after - to huddle in communal apartments, celebrate the day of the Paris Commune, get rations from distributors, dream of a leather jacket and be burned in the “pulpit of godlessness” - in the crematorium. Except that the dacha remained an eternal companion for the townspeople. Today, life has naturally become better and more fun, and more than one dacha brings us closer to the universal human norm, but it’s still especially funny, when reading N. Lebina’s fascinating book, to notice that, for example, the current warnings “Moulages are displayed in the window” are not which is nothing more than a modification of the NEP “The cheeses displayed in the window are wooden, and therefore thieves are asked not to worry.”