The Soviet intelligentsia turned its beloved fiction writers Bulgakov, Ilf-Petrov, Erofeev and Dovlatov into a common place, in a fucked-up, blurred, hidden quote that lost all meaning. It seems to me that this is not a cultural code, but “parasitic words”, bearded jokes, and there are guilt of the authors in this. Not such Chekhov, Akhmatova, Shalamov.