Alexey Roshchin: "Loser Lukashin"

“With some amazing consistency, every New Year, mass denunciations of Zhenya Lukashin appear on social networks. Spiteful critics, among whom, as I could see, there are approximately equal numbers of men and women, with inescapable rage, just like the first time, call the unfortunate character Andrei Myagkov names.” "loser", "boor", "scoundrel" and "mama's boy". Where does this come from? And the main thing is that literally all the accusations are absolutely unfair! " - writes a social psychologist in LiveJournal .

“For example, it has been very fashionable for the last 15 years to blame Lukashin for allegedly living with his own mother in the same apartment. That is why he is both a “loser” and a “mama’s boy.” However, this is something like incriminating the modern average man in the street in “poverty”, because he does not have his own villa. It was almost impossible to buy an apartment in the Soviet Union; very few people were able to build a cooperative; the institution of renting housing practically did not exist at all, so Lukashin could not simply “leave his mother and rent an apartment.” So, in fact, he had no choice but to live with his mother - and they were lucky!

In the Soviet Union, it was a completely common situation when two or even three generations of one family lived together (on top of each other) in one small-sized apartment. By the way, I can’t remember what kind of apartment Lukashin (and, accordingly, Nadya’s) has - a two-room apartment or a one-room apartment? If it’s a two-room apartment, then Lukashin is, by Soviet standards, an eligible bachelor: Moscow registration and his own room in the same apartment with a single mother - the conditions are FANTASTIC. This is just a prince from a fairy tale, not a “loser”.

Young people, however, will no longer understand, thank God, what the magic words “Moscow registration” meant - well, God forbid, they will never understand, as they say...

It’s also quite interesting how many people today call a “loser” a person who graduated from a medical school and works - and very professionally, as one can understand - as a surgeon in a city clinic. Apparently, this reflects the steady decline in the prestige of the general work of a doctor as such in post-Soviet society. However, even in Soviet reality, doctors had not yet reached the current state of pariahs and outcasts, enjoying universal contempt! In the late Soviet era, of course, doctors had already begun their “path down” - but still, at the time of “Irony” they were still only at the beginning of this path. That is, they already understood that they were getting pennies, but the general Soviet equalization somehow smoothed out the unpleasant impression.

And, of course, all these attacks about Lukashin’s “loserism” show at the same time how poorly “Western values” are embedded in the consciousness of modern Russian society. Because, from the point of view of the average American, calling a certified surgeon (!!) a “loser” is generally some kind of nonsense. And here they call it in full consciousness of their rightness...

Well, about “rudeness”, of course, is a separate story. Today's enraged ordinary people call it "rudeness" that Lukashin dared to act contrary to the "established order" and rebelled against routine - that is, in essence, they deny not so much Lukashin as the very idea of ​​the film "The Irony of Fate" that at least once It is POSSIBLE to break the canon and break out of the rut. Apparently, gentlemen of the critics would be much more pleased to watch a film about how on one New Year's Eve the men would go to the bathhouse, drink moderately there, and then everyone would decorously go home, celebrate the New Year there with their fiancées, and the next morning they would submit applications to the registry office. Plus the so-called “good humor”, for example about the mother-in-law and about sanitary pads.

However, there are enough such films even without “Irony” - “Matchmakers”, “Voronins” and there are countless of them, 364 days a year non-stop. Why “Irony,” which happens one day a year, is so annoying, I don’t understand.”