The person who came up with the very memes

The poet and media philosopher Igor Antonovsky died. He came up with an advertisement “Azino three axes”, memes about panels and led Instagram Shnurov

In the evening of November 13, it became known that Igor Antonovsky died of a stroke. He was 36 years old. Outside of St. Petersburg, few people knew him by name and surname, but any resident of Russia aged 15 to 55 knows him from business. This Antonovsky came up with viral advertisements from the pirate film services “Azino Three axes”, which eventually became the main hit of rapper Viti Act. Antonovsky stood at the source of the Panel worship, creating the public "sleeping areas of the OZ country". Finally, it was Antonovsky who led Sergei Shnurov Instagram when his posts collected millions of views. And Antonovsky was a poet and, as he called himself, a media philosopher. At the request of the Cold, journalist Nikolai Ovchinnikov, tells what Antonovsky did for the current Internet and not only culture.

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“I saw a picture with a crocodile Gena playing a post-rock. And I realized: here it is! At the same time, my hopelessness is happy. Usually this is sadness to nowhere. And I have urban longing, very bright, not vanilla, while meaningful, ”Igor Antonovsky told me in 2013. We met in a cafe, of course, at one of the far stations of the St. Petersburg metro. He wore sweatpants and a funny hat and looked great against the background of the outskirts of the outskirts. He seemed to remain forever in them.

10 years ago, there was a fashionable melancholy in fashion: all these memes with panels, quotes from a rock, a Despair filter for instagram, gray and drug Vinnie Pooo. As a rule, this Internet yumor removed a person from the reality ridiculed by him. Antonovsky found the subject of sincere love in the endless post -Soviet htony.

At first there was a public “sleeping areas of the country OZ” . There, the realism of the gray outskirts, country trains and dark courtyards became magical, magnetic. Antonovsky knew how to pull out of the reader not just an underlying craving for his native darkness, but nostalgia for him. Many of those who first read it, and now writes the texts, grew up among these yards, trains, garages. We watched the “6th channel”, laughed at the show “Caution, modern! 2 ”, tried to play a penny indie rock in the Petersburg club MOD. Antonovsky described all this and sung.

Then Igor with his memories was in the publication "Paper". One of the best St. Petersburg media shrugged the speakers, but for Antonovsky made an exception. After all, “paper” was also always (and remains) - about the flowering diversity of St. Petersburg life, about the lack of pathos and love for every brick from which this city is built. Igor’s non -parade Petersburg became a place no less important for his history than the Vasilyevsky Island, Smolny or Cafe “Saigon”.

Antonovsky has never been part of what is commonly called a derogatory term "party". He deliberately tried to get himself out of our media blessed man. He grew up on the Afisha, but has never been part of her "generation". He looked wider. In his world , Radiohead and the series “Copes” , post-rock and eternal Russian popes, “Real Detective” and ensign of the back of the backbone easily coexisted in his world. Now young people are no longer embarrassed by their love for low and high. I know those who have learned this precisely on the texts of Antonovsky. What - I myself, brother, of these.

Antonovsky did not divide people into tops and lower classes. “There is a demarcation. Here, in sleeping areas, there are no classes, no fashion cafes-2010s have not come here. Well, except that the broadband Internet was held. And all these public spaces are located on another planet. No need to share people on the principle of “we eat Mitball, and you throw Ziga”. After all, these are your neighbors throw Ziga! Find yourself a normal position and do not say that you are not like that! ” - He said in 2013.

It was important for him to love such a neighbor, find an approach to him, sing him, put him on one shelf with lovers of meatballs. For the past 10 years, many publicists have tried to consider near those people next to whom they live - Igor did this without snobbery. Because he himself was the one who stood in lines at the Russian Post, watched cable television and early Russian horror . Where the “cold” found and finds the best topics for his longrids, Antonovsky found poetry, the rusty charm of gray everyday life. He showed that in the darkest gateway there may be light in the simplest photograph of Andrei Grigoryev-Apollonov-the redhead of Ivanushki-with a beer can be a reason for fantastic lyrics.

Love for his neighbor - and very Christian, although Antonovsky did not stick out this part of his nature - was in many of his texts. He proposed to love not only another person with his cracks, but also his own shortcomings: “It seems to me that the ideas invested in the“ sleeping areas ”are an answer to how to avoid depression. Love her. "

The sensitivity and supermopathy allowed Antonovsky to become the author of things that penetrated immediately into all segments of the population. Azino three axes , the posts of Sergei Shnurov are also Antonovsky. A little later, Igor writes the best apology as the leader of Leningrad, who has not yet crossed, did not become Prigozhin's henchman. A little later - he will take the most human interview from the purulent and making at the time of their peak hype - much better than the Dud . Because he is one of them - the same person from the outskirts of a large life, who was in the right place by the will of fate and at the same time did not make up and did not turn into a parody of himself .

It is now the aesthetics of the “panel” and late Soviet brutalism went to the people, became a meme not only for the inhabitants of the former USSR. Antonovsky was not just standing at its origins, he was one of the few who found a great emotion in this, and not just a meme.

I was not a close friend of Igor, but-like many journalists of St. Petersburg of the early 2010s-he knew him, drank with him, talked with him and, like many of my acquaintances and friends, not that he admired his work, but found some outlet in it. His texts helped to survive the spiritual and creative crisis, to find a way out in endless panel hopelessness. I definitely. And not only to me.

He was a funny, but with sad eyes. He could captivate the conversation on the most crazy topic - and argue until blue. He knew how to come up with crazy things and fly with them where ordinary people were not allowed.

In the love of demand, there was little demand - and Igor seemed to go into the shadows, continuing to engage in series, video and write texts in which he tried to return the reader to a wonderful country. In this eternal 2007 in a cheerful village with its warm air and a pre-heavenly sky. He held to the last.

Alas, the sleeping areas of the country OZ became sleeping areas of the country Z. But thanks to Igor Antonovsky, I want to believe that this is not forever.