Stocks and quilted jackets

The rumor, which is now called the Internet, often ascribes to us the authorship of the term “scoop” with Vile. I can say with full responsibility that this is not so. For the first time, I heard this word on Brighton Beach, where they called relatives who came from the USSR. Having hungry for people's goods, as well as any other consumption, they swept everything from the shelves, for which the locals called them “vacuum cleaners”, reduced in “scoops”.

Another thing is that a few years later I wrote an essay on “scoops”, where I described the bohemian eccentrics grown by the Soviet government, leading a strange way of life on the sidelines of society. In an interesting polemic with me, the thesis about the "metaphysical aspect of the sowing" was picked up and developed by Victor Pelevin. “Supe,” he wrote, “I wore his days very far from a normal life, but not far from God, whose presence he did not notice. Living in the closest to Edem Garbage, the scoops poured their forced spiritual eyes with port“ Caucasus ”.

Over time, however, the term has evolved with nostalgic allusions, in any case, those who do not consider it unconditionally offensive. I would say that at the current stage of its development, a scoop is a kind person in a washed T -shirt, who will lend a ten to a neighbor, even if you have to pass empty bottles for this. Relatively speaking, the scoop resembles the heroes of the artist Evgeny Leonov and is perceived with a good -natured grin.

In a metaphorical quilted jacket, not a style is important, but material: cotton wool here is not only on the back, but also in the ears, for the quilted jackets hear only themselves and, even worse, they believe themselves

It is understandable. From the difficult XXI century, the Soviet past is even more ferocious, the poor, poor, but honest: early Christianity of late socialism. In such an interpretation, the scoop turns from a national caricature into a friendly cartoon that facilitates the life of feuilletonists. Like the other only the initially pezhrative images, like a thick -bellied Englishman John Bul or the lanky Yankee, Uncle Sam, the scoop in the eyes of many became an acceptable personification of special Russian history.

The new term “quilted jacket” seems to be the same ambivalent. On the one hand, it is clothing that symbolizes the sacrificial past and reminds of the Gulag. No wonder Solzhenitsyn was going to put on a camp quilted jacket at the Nobel Prize ceremony. On the other hand, the quilted jackets were worn not only by those who were sitting, but also to those who guarded them. Moreover, a quilted jacket can be proud. So, as I learned from the same Internet, Vitaly Tretyakov, in whose “Independent Gazeta” I was proudly printed on the hottest days of perestroika, now suggested that the “Vatnikov March” “march”. In this purely Russian outfit, he sees universal magic clothes that protect from rain, frost, bullets and sanctions.

However, it seems to me that in a metaphorical quilted jacket, not a style, but material. Vata here is not only on the back, but also in the ears, for the quilted jackets only hear themselves and, even worse, they believe themselves. However, the quilted jackets are by no means an endemic phenomenon, because today they are also found abroad. I found out in New York on the example of my ancient comrade, in the past of a dissident who distributed the same Solzhenitsyn in the USSR. When he wrote on Facebook this winter that on the Maidan of the CIA he gives to the Kiev, psychotropic substances that are crazy, giving the power of demonstrators to fight Yanukovych, I tried to cool his imagination. “Spreading such nonsense,” I wrote to him in a friendly way, “you can go crazy yourself, and then you will imagine green men.”

Well, who was right? - My former comrade could answer me after Crimea, but by this time we had already stopped talking.

Alexander Genis is a New York writer and publicist, author and host of the American Hour program on top of the barriers

Opinions expressed under the heading "Law" may not reflect the point of view of the Radio Liberty editorial