Kirill Kobrin: Hello, Boredom

Everyone is talking about a crisis in Europe, but no one knows how it looks. On TV, EURDERS with a preoccupied look interprets finances. Journalists stick to the so -called “ordinary people” with questions about the sad - and, of course, get sad answers. Even on TV, you can see the struggle of the workers for their rights, anti-capitalist demonstrations, farmopilian phalanx of the thyroid police, cobblestones-weapons-testis. All together fits into a general idea of ​​how the bourgeois world of difficult times looks like; This image almost completely developed more than eighty years ago, during the global economic crisis and the Great Depression - and since then only details have changed.

Meanwhile, the West has become completely different, and there is no crisis today-there is a sluggish recession plus the failure of the budget adventures of some European countries plus the general lack of optimism, faith in the future and desire to do anything (the latter usually accepts the population of the population for the values ​​of the market economy). However, if you look more closely (and then think about it, the first without the second is pointless), you understand: the European recession has its own style. Perhaps even she is a style .

I have just returned from Lisbon, where I spent the post -people's week. This does not mean that below the reader will find some letters of a Russian traveler or dialogues with geniuses of places and towns, by no means, I will try to sketch out some style features called “European recession” using an example of a single small Pyrenee country.

The Bellen district in the west of Lisbon was once a suburbs. In 1755, Belen was lucky-a terrible earthquake sung by the volter, which turned the Marquis de Parkbal into a great reformer, almost completely spared the suburbs, primarily the famous monastery of the Jeronymiths, a delightful building in the Manueline style, which today serves as a kind between the national pantheon (and in Lisbon there is a real pantheon, precisely in this, precisely this. The monastery is buried by almost all the Portuguese Great, from Vasco da Gama to Fernado Pessoa) and the Kremlin (here in December 2007 the unfortunate Lisbon Treaty on the Reform of the European Union was signed).

There is a coastal tower in Belena in the same Manuelian style, there is a middle hand of the fascist monument to the creators of the Portuguese Empire, other ridiculous Salazar attempts on the Imperial Spirit, there is a promenade along the embankment of the Thezha, a military museum with Italian howitzers at the entrance, and an amazing beauty recently built, a huge oncological center with an open. The amphitheater of an incomprehensible purpose, a terrace as if from a “magic mountain”, lecture halls, restaurants and other ventures. The word "empty" is key here. A few years ago, Belen clearly tried to make a “good area” for the “middle class” - here is the river, the port, and museums, and parks, and the center is not very far away. Everything that around historical monuments and Salazar architectural ventures is so asks for a pencil of the developer, yells about partying.

The collapsed half -barrels of the nineteenth century. A packgauza abandoned for many years. The bourgeois development of the line of the year before last and last centuries, shabby, picturesque, shrouded in a heavy musty smell of neglected basements. The houses of the twenties and the thirties, clearly already the fruit of social policy of the longest European dictatorship. When money was still found in Portugal (read, in the European Union), here in Belen, they should have been the basis for the future improvement of the growing creative (and not only creative) class, to become a platform of a happy post-modernization.

The monuments of this recent era are right there-new high-commerines, such that you can see in London, and in Berlin, and in Prague. They are all empty. On some, even announcements of rental cannot be found, you see, they removed it away from sin. And Belen continues to exist in his (at first glance, eternal) time, in which the nineteenth century and the twentieth mixed: a pair of glasses, a couple of folk tables, rummaging a tram, at a stop of a steam, a melancholy layman checks the number of a lottery ticket with a newspaper, a large, a decolled lady peers out the second floor window, like in the second floor, like in the second floor. The neo -realistic film, dejavu only spoils the mobile phone ringing in his full hand.

If you go through the quarter is already a slumber, you go to the highway. Here the world of industry reigns, the sixties and seventies of the last century, along the road, however, folk gardens stretch, the layman is picking, he does something with a potato bed. On the other side of the highway - Promenades, Italian tourists travel to rented mopeds, on the go, taking off attractions on the go. There are few tourists in general. Winter and crisis.

As mentioned above, I am not writing a traveler and not an article on a socio-economic topic, in this note I try to chaotically determine (more precisely, describe) the “Euroressia style”, which it consists of, what it smells, what taste has. I have already mentioned the smells, add a stink of garbage to them, which does not clean all day, from dog shit on the pavement - all this in the center of Lisbon. Taste is even more interesting. The Euroretsia in Lisbon is a celebration of national cuisine, peasant, rather primitive, “old-food”: a lot of bread, meat, fish, sugar, that used to be a symbol of contentment and even prosperity, and now poverty.

In the current progressive Europe, all this is harmful, cholesterol, culinary-naval, low-tech, “immature”-was brought into a special sociocultural ghetto, a mixture of exotic and prompted conservatism. The power was seized by various networks of pods, caffeen, tea, places where you can eat safe (albeit a little plastic) food, sit with a shaggy of some safe non-alcoholic drink, work on a laptop, or even just talk on Skype or put a photo from a party. This is in the European Union "Modernity", "Style of Eurorosta", and just "Euro -Forestry". We will not forget, of course, to supplement the picture with ethnic fast food, from kebabs to Chinese eatery.

So, there is almost nothing of this in Lisbon. For a week I came across half a dozen eastern fast foods, one Indian restaurant, two "Starbax" and one institution under the symbolic name "Vitamin". Everything else is traditional (or pseudo -based) taverns, cakes for workers and local picturesque old men with old women, canteens, where “horns with meat gravy” smells of an unforgettable Soviet dish. The point here, of course, is not in culinary or social conservatism (although it is impossible to deny its influence in Portugal), the fact is that the modern revolution of the gastronomic relaxation and cafes-sulfide lifestyle clearly came here just a couple of years before the start of the recession-and did not have time to do.

It turns out that the Euroretsia does not destroy the old one, but the new one, returning the continent society by the usual way of life.

But the peculiarity of this “familiar way of life” today is that its “familiarity” is a phantom. The traditionalist performance is played with cheap requisite produced in Southeast Asia and bought at a flea market in Euro-provisions. And the clothes are from the same, where are fake iPhones: T -shirts Dolce & Gab E Na and sneakers Nika a . “The Style of the Euroretsia” is not a class war, not the struggle of the workers for their rights, not the muddy conversations of economists about the budget deficit and measures of savings, but the boring picture of slow immersion in the spontaneously developed traditionalism, which, however, has no real tradition. Here, in Lisbon, in the Belen area, in thousands of other Belen, a proud European utopia about pure, green, useful, technological, and fair world ends throughout the continent.