Unedited AI-Translation of the original russian book "Истоки моих поступков" by "Никита Капернаумов"
04 april 2026
For those interested in the author"s personality: a reconstruction of the first thirteen years of life up to 2007. One of the largest childhood autobiographies ever (over half a million words across four books). AI comparisons include Proust, Limonov, Knausgård. Here, however - complete anti-literature, no artistry at all, and consistently very deep psychology.
Nikita Kapernaumov, born 1993, from Saratov. Attended kindergarten and school, played sports, rode a bike, saved money. Unrequited crushes from ages 2-3. At 10-11 - broke down. At 13 - involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation, labelled "schizophrenic," and then 20 years in a room in front of a monitor, consumed by destructive envy of other people"s sexual relationships in youth.
__________Book 2
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___Part 17.
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________________Mid-summer 1997 and the rest of the summer
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Part 17, Text 1. Clarifications on the previously written story
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For the sake of coherence, I aligned the funeral episode with the sharks, but in truth, I can"t guarantee exactly when it happened. It was dry outside. But it could have been autumn. Or maybe earlier, in spring. Or even a year before. Same with the sharks. And much else besides.
Now I"ll explain.
I"m writing this insert during the stage of final corrections, when my early childhood biography is already complete up to age eleven. Throughout the preceding events, I removed mentions of my age. The entire skeleton of my earliest biography-which ended at this point-I wrote from emotional memory. All the events, thoughts, and realizations described-did happen. But it was not a chronologically documented chronicle. Now we"re in mid-summer, and the story will continue precisely in "97, when I was four. And if we trace all the New Years back, the level of my thoughts seems logical and timely. So what"s off?
It all began when, after writing the skeleton in which the "Robot Policeman" and the vermicelli episode fell in the autumn of what turned out to be "96, I reached the TV archive and found "Robot Policeman" on 9 April "95. A whole year and a half earlier than in my emotional memory! Right on NTV, on a Sunday (just so my mom and I could return to L"va Kassily the following Monday and enact the whole vermicelli story). With this discovery, I seriously doubted my belief that I started kindergarten when I was four. Mom always said I started at three, but I didn"t believe her. I thought about it a long time, compared, also considered that, according to the laws of childhood amnesia, what is remembered more clearly often happened earlier than what seems later. And I realised that kindergarten did indeed start when I was three-in early spring "96. Yet I also remember that by the time I started kindergarten, I already had a huge pile of beach experiences and all sorts of early L"va Kassily idyll behind me. The beginning of kindergarten, that early first ascent, was hell precisely against the backdrop of that vivid past. And I had already concentrated that vivid past in the summer of "96. I also remember that during the days of "Robot Policeman" I was already old enough to sleep in the bed my father made, not the little cradle-bed. And yet I remember a significant part of the time in the cradle. So, considering that "Robot Policeman" really aired in early "95, I remember a significant portion of "94. My first memories of my aunt and semolina may go back to spring "94. And our walks with mom to the shop with the mirrored ceiling may really have happened with me in a stroller. Riding the carousel with animals with mom may not have been summer "95 at all-it would have been after "Robot Policeman"-but summer "94.
But I assessed my ability to rewrite all this time-which is already a whole big book-and realised I couldn"t. Firstly, I wouldn"t be able to make any single year feel full, so it would read the way you just did, because I simply lack the memories. And secondly, there would be chronological errors anyway, and no documentary accuracy.
So what was decided?
It was decided that I would move "Robot Policeman" from the completely wrong autumn of "96 to where you read it-spring "96-one year later than in reality. I could have placed it in its original time-April "95-but then I wouldn"t have been able to lead up to it, because I only began to fully describe visits to the grandparents, TV watching, etc., towards the end of "95. And that episode required those descriptions already, and I didn"t see how to insert them into the distant past.
The penis-cutting episode, whose date is in the medical record, I placed in the original emotional skeleton where it actually happened-end of September "95. That is precise. The appearance of the inflatable-tyre bicycle is also cross-checked with photos. New Year presents and main New Year details are also cross-checked with photos, though some of the memories described must refer to New Year "94-"95.
In reality, the summer of "95 was full of beach time, and the sisters could have been there then. But I concentrated all the beach story in summer "96. And given how well summer "96 turned out, how illustrative a concentrate of my childhood it was, it was decided to leave it as is and to place the start of kindergarten where you read it-at almost four years old in "97. But it should be understood that no, it actually started a year earlier. I spent not one month but all of spring "96 on that top floor in the first playroom, in that stupor, constantly crying. It was harsh. A lot, by the way, of what I emotionally remember or described was actually harsher. About the penis-cutting, for example, mom says I screamed so much she couldn"t stand it, and she was almost taken out of the clinic to finish it. And yet my episode, as I described and remember it, hardly conveys that intensity.
The transfer to the first-floor group and the clash with Kosarev were therefore in autumn "96.
The zoo trip with Baba Valya to see the lion I went on almost certainly in "95, not "96. Likewise the first circus and various other events. And the trip to the zoo with Grandpa was definitely a year earlier-I even have a photo on film, where I look small, just like in the New Year photos from slightly earlier. I left this zoo trip late too, to maintain the atmosphere of the last times before kindergarten.
I have a very similar situation of an important event being delayed by a year around fifth grade, which I will have to resolve after correcting the entire preschool period. All this consumes a huge amount of time-I have already spent years. It"s not just writing a book. This is a whole detective job and eternal problems of coordination. So here I finished writing in a semi-artistic form and pseudo-present tense; from now on it will be predominantly retrospective.
But I must warn that the rest of the preschool part, especially the near end of "97, may also contain delayed memories that in reality could have been a year earlier. For example, a trip to Grandpa"s work or a walk with Uncle Valera and his sons. But that"s not as important, so it"s no problem.
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Part 17, Text 2. Buying The Lion King with Baba Valya, Spider-Man, leisurely Irina and Lidushka, evening walk with Valera and his sons, shaving a bald patch for dinosaur bones
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One day, Baba Valya and I bought a cassette of The Lion King at a cassette stall near the police station by the Sharik market. I didn"t have a VCR yet, just begged for the cassette. It ended up staying with Baba Klava.
I can"t, without destroying the already chronologically messy narrative, insert Spider-Man into last spring, so I"ll place it here. In "97, on NTV, all spring through the end of June, the most modern Spider-Man series of that time aired. It quickly became my favourite cartoon, even surpassing The Lion King. I was fascinated by the theme of agility, control over circumstances-and the modernity. Spider-Man had skyscrapers and everything like in the movies. In toy shops there were models of Spider-Man everywhere, and I also begged for a decent one, though ideally I wanted him Barbie-scale. I was also drawn to the bright, juicy red-and-blue colours of his costume. I endlessly fiddled with him in my hands, sniffed him. The plastic had a special Spider-Man smell.
Mom, through some line-possibly very informal, not work-related (most of her acquaintances were lifelong friends from school, university, or work)-had a friend named Irina. She looked like Andrey Malakhov-I single out this type as a type of appearance, and I have it for both genders: usually brown-eyed, dark, slightly long hair, glasses like John Lennon. If a man, could be mistaken for a woman; if a woman, always associated with the name Irina. Choleric, extroverted. Women of this type I always associated with asexuality, so I never liked them.
At that time-before Malakhov-this friend of Mom"s reminded me of the song "The Boy Wants to Go to Tambov," which was everywhere then because I apparently saw the video clip, and the singer there was the same type. She was civilised, modest.
And she had a daughter, Lidushka-slightly younger than me, overly timid and naive, a real mama"s girl. Later, Mom explained that she had a mild, but real, delay.
Irina"s father was a musician, a trumpet player in the Engels Theatre orchestra at Teatralnaya Square. He lived at 98 Petrovskaya-a nine-storey brick building. Irina and Lidushka were not from Engels, coming only for the summer from the Moscow region, as I recall from Odintsovo, though maybe not. At that time, I didn"t yet understand all that: I thought if it"s the Moscow region, Moscow must be somehow above, and the Moscow region below.
They also told me that Moscow had everything-I was especially interested in the Bird Market, which made me jealous-but here we had nothing, except the Volga and the beach. And so, from summer "97 (or "96), after some vaguely formed acquaintance, we met and hung out in summer with Irina and Lidushka, and sometimes went to their home once or twice late in the evening.
I was in that child state, sleepy, so I remember little of what happened, except the special feeling of being a guest, which was rare. For some reason, Mom and I were alone in the apartment for a while, waiting for someone. Its layout reminded me a lot of our three-room apartment.
My father later nicknamed Irina and Lidushka "the Leisurelies" for their unhurriedness. Episodes with them will appear later in my story-in school years.
There were some very hot days on Frunze, and Mom"s cousin Valera came with his sons. I mentioned them in a few episodes before. They are among those people in my life I could never memorise well-they were so rarely seen, plus I wasn"t interested. Valera"s appearances on Frunze were generally rare: there was some Frunze tension, partially mentioned earlier, though I only knew superficially. Briefly, Valera"s mom, Aunt Lusya, was at odds with my Baba Klava because of the house on Frunze, which everyone lived in together before I came, and then it was taken over by Baba Klava. But Valera and we, and Aunt Lusya with my mom, got along fine.
In short, after an evening on the bench, late, in the dark, we all-really the whole gang, maybe except Baba or Grandpa-went to see them off towards Aunt Lusya, who lived in a Khrushchyovka in the "Melioration" area, further along Frunze, at the edge of Engels. That night, the moon was full. Along the way, everyone looked at the huge moon, and besides the moon and the black crickets on the ground, what impressed me was a terrifying water tower standing between Melioration and Poligraficheskaya Street, on Sanatornaya Street, along which we walked for the first time for me.
It was already, as I understand it, the end of summer. One evening I was sitting with Grandpa in the living room on the sofa, and tomorrow or in a couple of days I was supposed to return to kindergarten after the summer break. By that time, I had started getting into dinosaurs; I already had some books-about excavations, about bones. And so, sitting on the sofa that evening, I imagined my hair as dinosaur bones-and cut off part of it from my head, making a little tepee. Within a minute Grandpa came into the room and rather snatched the scissors from me, looking annoyed. I looked in the mirror-and there was a bald patch. Now I expected ridicule and shame at kindergarten.
But nothing serious happened, and on the first day at kindergarten the kind teacher on the first-floor group just made a playful remark, and someone laughed once more, but mostly it went fine-I combed my hair over, and it soon grew back. I should remind that, given how I framed the early story, by this time I had already been in kindergarten for a year and a half. By the time of this hair episode, I wasn"t particularly burdened by kindergarten; there was no strong "knot in the chest." I remember, on the contrary, some social confidence and having companions-even beyond Artyom.
________________Autumn.
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Part 17 Text 3. The swamps... going with Mum to Lipki Park... shoving a girl in kindergarten... pushing a little cat into the drain.
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At some point, a new anxious theme appeared in my mind - swamps. It probably started when I saw the drowning girl scene in that famous black-and-white film The Dawns Here Are Quiet. Then, apparently, on the way to the aforementioned Aunt Lyusya - either visiting her or coming back - Mum and I were on some bus that passed by a district next to Melioryatsiya called "Lyotka." It"s literally just a block from the city stadium - everything was close. In our Engels, one block is called a district, whereas in Moscow, a district is as big as Engels. Anyway, in that Lyotka, at the edge of the road, there"s a reed-overgrown swamp. Mum said it was a swamp. Ever since, I couldn"t stop thinking about it.
Trips to visit Aunt Lyusya, which started around then or even earlier, and happened once or twice a year during my childhood, I"ll describe later.
Once Mum and I went to Saratov, to Lipki Park, and sat in the section with the playground - still there, I think - in its corner closest to Engels. It had slightly more advanced ladders and slides than the usual post-Soviet playgrounds with a couple of rusty bars. There were some wooden ladders, and something looked Old Russian or fairy-tale-like - like a hut on chicken legs - meaning a structure within the playground you could climb or slide from. Although the hut referenced Baba Yaga - the child-eating witch - it had none of that discomforting edge; on the contrary, it reminded me of the film Morozko I"d watched at home at New Year, as well as other fairy tales, Pushkin, and The Green Oak. Later in childhood, thinking about fairy tales, I often recalled that playground and our time there with Mum. We probably went there again.
On the way back, on the bus, I ate peanuts - I remember that. Those were already the last years we bought peanuts, as in, they stopped being a regular thing. Peanuts were a marker of my early childhood. They came in a green, opaque, crinkly packet that you had to tear open, and it was stiff. I think we completely stopped buying them for some reason when I started school.
At kindergarten, on the first floor, there was an episode where I shoved some girl. In the evening, when Dad came to pick me up, the teacher told him. It was incredibly awkward, and I didn"t know what to do. It would have been a worthy introspection episode if I remembered more. But I only remember that the girl was weak, and I took advantage of that intentionally - my main motive being a desire to feel some physical control for once. Dad reacted without approval but without scolding: before my teenage defiance, he tended never to reprimand me.
Although I became a bit more confident in kindergarten - enough for such an episode to occur - the evenings still instinctively carried the same anxiety and nausea in my solar plexus. My innate neuroticism didn"t disappear. I just got used to that environment, and if I"d faced some stressful new situation, I"d be in the same hell as on my first day of kindergarten.
I have one vague memory associated with kindergarten, that first-floor group I attended, and lessons on crossing streets at traffic lights (which Mum had actually taught me before kindergarten, at the light near the monument to Grandma with Children, on the way to my grandparents or the clinic). Most likely, the event that triggered this memory happened a year earlier - in 1996. It was as if the teachers in that playroom were teaching us basic rules of life. And, besides traffic lights, we were taught how to meet new people. Something like: "Hi, my name is so-and-so, and you? Let"s be friends." Or maybe it was my adult self teaching me. Either way, it coincided with my fully developing theme of "strangers," my sense of separateness, and my problem with the tiny likelihood of connecting with those little sisters on the beach. I never saw anyone connect that way. That lesson seemed about civility, about tact, rather than actual opportunity to bond. Later, in the school playground, I watched kids in the playroom and couldn"t see a single moment where someone could approach another and introduce themselves "manually." Everyone was either already playing together or busy with their own things. If someone tried to approach, they"d probably hear: "What"s wrong with you? Are you stupid? Get lost." I kept recalling that lesson, and later in school, attempts at such approaches looked even more ridiculous. That lesson became a symbol for me of adults instilling false illusions in children, and ultimately, even a symbol of the foolishness of placing a child in an institution. Had I not remembered it, I probably wouldn"t have felt so disappointed and resentful later when I wanted to connect with girls but that early lesson kept popping up.
With Mum, in the evenings on L"va Kassil Street, every few days or so, our bathing idylls with toys continued. I had one of those cat figurines from Frunze at home - and it fell into the drain while water was running and got stuck. I panicked, screamed, and Mum said: "Shall we just push it through?" I remembered this in my diary in the context of some psychology - about how sometimes in hopeless situations Mum preferred to surrender. I had heard her say a few times: "If violence is inevitable - relax and enjoy it."
After bathing, her requests to pull my penis so she could wash it continued, and I tearfully refused.
At that time, Mum had installed an iron door in the middle of the shared vestibule with the neighbours - who had previously been hanging around on their haunches in cigarette smoke, sometimes leaning against our front door. Thanks to her connection with Uncle Sergey, she officially claimed that square metre. With the neighbours, there was now a silent tension.
She constantly went out for work, and I stayed home alone, because by then the "Golden Lvakasyl Era" was beginning - when I had long breaks from kindergarten, and just lying around in the apartment watching TV was the best time of early childhood, completely free of stress and unwanted exertions. Even visiting Grandma Valya - under hyper-care - always required dressing up and going somewhere. Here, you just lie down and flip channels. That blissful experience at the dawn of life probably formed the basis for my later reclusive tendencies - which, when realised, led to an absolutely hellish life in other ways.
Once I told Mum in the kitchen the plot of some action movie I watched without her on TV. I mentioned guns, bullets - in the context of our iron door (I perceived the door as a safety measure, not Mum"s impatience with the neighbours). During my ramble, Mum, realizing I already knew what it meant to die, gave a general explanatory speech about death. She ended with: "...so dying doesn"t hurt, don"t be afraid." Of course, this stuck with me for life, but at the time, I was specifically worried about helplessness against bandits with laser guns. In Spider-Man, I saw that with laser guns they could cut through any metal. Against a laser gun, nothing would help.
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Part 17 Text 4. Father to Moscow... balcony glazed... visiting Grandpa at work... with Grandma Valya to her acquaintances.
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At that time, Dad was still selling something by the library, but now he had connections with artists - selling them paints and accessories. For this, he went to Moscow for a few days, and brought home high-quality red-handled scissors for us - the ones we still use today. Before that, they were the iron USSR ones. The red ones weren"t for everything - they had to be preserved.
This was the last known trip Dad made outside Saratov until 2018, and I think it"s the one he told me about in my youth. He said that near the end of his youth, he tried to catch up on what he hadn"t done, and when he was in Moscow, he got into circles of serious billiard men, who dressed him in a proper suit and took him to play, to feel important. He talked about and dreamed of billiards all his life.
I don"t remember if we were still taping windows for winter. Window-taping is associated with the earliest childhood. At some summer, it stopped forever - we just didn"t remove anything from the gaps, and the windows never opened again. Only the small vents.
Around that year, Mum also glazed the balcony. As usual, after staying with Grandma Klava for a while, we returned to L"va Kassil Street - and there was something new. But the frames were wooden. Plastic windows and structures were still elite at the time. Our new wooden sashes stuck, and the far one never opened. We didn"t go to that part of the balcony - it would remain cluttered with sleds and god knows what until the end of the Lvakasyl story. The balcony could barely fit two people at a time.
I continued, though less frequently, to amuse myself by turning on every possible light in the apartment during the day. It felt like being in a lamp and light shop, which I loved - as it was associated with something inexplicable yet better than what we had in life.
As I mentioned, I might delay recalling trips to Grandpa"s work. The atmosphere was similar to visiting Grandma Klava"s workplace, but even worse. In my memory - pure greyness, harsh, industrial. I don"t know exactly where or why. Somewhere at the edge of Engels. As Mum told me in childhood, and as I thought throughout my early years, Grandpa worked in a plumbing brigade - climbing into wells and doing work there. But that day, I was in some industrial building or place - with the hum of ever-running generators, large pipes wrapped in fiberglass, industrial zones and dirt around. It was either pouring rain or even snow. Only later did Mum explain that Grandpa worked at the city power station (CHP), and that"s probably where we were.
Sometimes, for a weekend or a few days instead of kindergarten, I went to Grandma Valya"s during this busy autumn period.
At that time, when we were at Aunt Larisa"s, I visited Igor for the last time. I never saw him again, not even in the hallway. And from some year onward, they would move back to Voronezh, I think. They will forever be associated in my mind with classic 1990s life: an apartment in a grey panel building, toy cars in the boys" room, console games, visiting each other between identical apartments, a neighborhood older brother, embossed brick-style wallpaper, heating pipes, sewage smells, iron garages, kiosks, clattering old lifts...
At that time, in the same area as Aunt Larisa, once I went with Grandma Valya to a similar ten-storey panel building across the street, probably to visit one of her acquaintances. There were souvenir reindeer antlers on the wall in the hallway - serving as a coat rack. These antlers are also one of my 1990s associations.
Also with Grandma Valya, again in the cold season, we visited: 23 Krymskaya Street, or the neighboring building. This was on the way to Grandma Valya"s dacha - the last residential high-rises before the road over the bridge - uphill and out of town. By the end of my childhood story, this route would become a regular path - which is why I describe it. There was an apartment of another acquaintance of Grandma Valya - either Nina Fyodorovna (mentioned in Dad"s biography) or Taya - a formidable aunt, mentioned in earlier trips to the dacha, whose husband, also a brute, Valera, drove a UAZ and had a brick summer house.
Both Nina and Taya were rare "brick" acquaintances of Grandma Valya. Simply put, not poor. Associated with brick buildings, multi-room apartments, owning a car. Solid-boned, money-loving aunts.
In that apartment, as I recall, there was also a dog - apparently a poodle. And I think there were antlers on the wall there too.
It was the first half of some sunny autumn or early winter day. From the windows - it was the top floor - I saw epic views of the Saratov hills, mixed with power lines and some road junctions. In reality, there was just one road, a bridge, and a small hill, but in my childhood it all seemed like some part of Western Canada.
I don"t remember whose apartment it actually was; maybe it was some other aunt entirely.
By the way, that Taya was the mother of Dad"s acquaintance, Sasha Belyshev. In my childhood biography, he will probably appear only once.
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Part 17, Text 5. On Frunze, pooping under the sink... in kindergarten on the second floor with the boys... returning with Mom from Frunze at the end of the year... about tearing up toys... toy gun... Lesha Vasilyev.
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Because the kindergarten was close by, I spent most of my time living on Frunze.
There, I continued to poop in the potty while sitting under the sink - and then Grandpa would take it out. I no longer said "poo-poo" when straining. One time, a mouse crawled right in front of me from the dirty laundry - sticking its grey little face out. There were mousetraps all over the house. Mousetraps even sat on top of the fridges. There were two fridges in the hallway room, and above them - a clock on the wall that I always watched when lying on our bed there with Grandma. Next to the clock on the wall was an old electric switch - when a similar one was removed and disconnected, you could play with it: press a button, and another part would pop out with a quick click.
The beginning of that winter in kindergarten is associated in my mind with the second floor. There was a small assembly hall where we rehearsed for the upcoming New Year"s performances. I had already developed a friendly companionship with some boys. Besides Artyom, I was in contact with Mark and another boy, Maslyonkov, who lived at the intersection of Persidskaya and Moskovskaya. For my upcoming birthday in "98, I would receive a congratulatory note there on plain paper - written in multicoloured markers, neat adult handwriting, signed "your friends," who didn"t exist, except for these companions.
Meanwhile, leading up to New Year"s, we were learning "A Fir Tree Was Born in the Forest" - along with other collective creative activities. They took a photograph of us in that hall by the New Year"s tree. I was dressed as a "star-gazer." One of the teachers played Father Frost. Grandma Klava later kept that photo.
Dad and I went together to buy a tree on Lva Kassilya and Gorky. When I first wrote these lines, there was an outdoor sculpture in that spot, shaped like some kind of ship or something else - based on a story by Lev Kassil. Dad had modelled it in 3D Max during the coronavirus, at the request of the administration. By the time I was proofreading this text, the sculpture was gone.
On the night of December 30th or 31st, Mom and I stayed over on Frunze. We woke up early - it was still dark outside. Since we were going home for the holidays, they began giving me local gifts right that morning. From Grandpa - or rather, from Father Frost via Grandpa - I received a bag of toys. From Grandma - something else, probably a candy set. At the time, boxes shaped like treasure chests, like in fairy tales, were popular. Inside was a candy assortment. Then, along the still-dark street, Mom and I walked to Lva Kassilya. At home, the floors were washed, and preparations began for the long-awaited evening - which, I repeat, I don"t remember: whether it was that same day or the next. Probably the next day - otherwise, getting up so early, I would have fallen asleep again before evening.
Throughout my story, I"ve often mentioned my tendency to tear up and destroy toys and gifts in a fit of rage, yet I haven"t described a single specific incident. No matter how I dug through my memory, I simply couldn"t recall any concrete events from past years, and I probably won"t remember any from the next couple of years either. Such episodes certainly happened from time to time - as my mom and my two grandmothers have recounted - and some will appear later in my story, but emotionally, it always feels constant, an inseparable part of my childhood. It"s not the specific events that I remember, but the state of mind in which I wanted to rip things apart - that was literally always there.
Mainly - whenever someone gave me something. And the tantrum wasn"t so much because I disliked the gift or the item, but because deliberately destroying it was an easily accessible, effortless way to create a lot of pain for both the giver and myself. It was like a nuclear button - right there at hand. And, as I"ve said, I had habits like sticking my finger into dangerous door gaps - all of that sort of thing, tempting danger, stressing myself out.
The state that gripped me in those moments also triggered a "genital neurosis" - something I"ve already touched on in my story, which will come up more later. Going forward, I"ll write more and more about this topic, and eventually, as it becomes more significant in my story, I"ll even invent other terms and neologisms related to it.
In short, by ruining gifts or planning to, the suffering that triggered the tantrum mainly came from an empathetic imagination of the giver"s feelings about me destroying their gift. And in a tantrum, I sometimes lost control - and did things I didn"t want to do.
From the pre-New Year"s evening, I remember lying on the floor in the middle room, shooting pellets - which gradually got lost - at some targets with a toy plastic revolver. One of Dad"s two acquaintances gave it to me - either Dima Artoshkin or Lesha Vasilyev, both of whom were artists. I need to make a note about them now.
There"s no doubt about the infantile, drinking little Dima Artoshkin. But the second one - strange. The name "Lesha Vasilyev" was familiar to me throughout my early childhood. A man with almost greyed long hair tied in a ponytail, who came to our place for two or three New Year"s in a row - that"s who I always knew as Lesha Vasilyev.
But after writing all the texts, I asked Mom some questions, and she said he never came to visit. Moreover, the Lesha Vasilyev I later learned about - after writing everything - was the husband of a friend of my mother who lived in Saratov on Rakhova, at whose birthday Mom and Dad had met. Mom was friends with her, and Dad with this Lesha, as I understood. I recorded this in my parents" biography during the proofreading stage.
Back to Lva Kassilya and New Year. Dad confirms that Lesha Vasilyev did visit us. Well, of course - I didn"t make it up.
I did a simple thing: I googled "Alexey Vasilyev artist Saratov." It turned up exactly the man I remember visiting us those early New Years - born in 1952, fourteen years older than my parents, a well-known local artist. So why did Mom say he never visited us? I couldn"t ask her direct questions about the past - she would immediately shut down. But at one point, we talked, and it all became clear. There were two Lesha Vasilyevs - a crazy coincidence. Dad meant Lesha the artist, apparently. And Mom had never thought of Lesha the artist since then: he was completely unimportant to her.
Mom said the "main" Lesha Vasilyev had schizophrenia and eventually moved away from his family to a sort of creative retreat. Also creative. He made the jewellery box that stood on our piano.
So, I never actually met the "main" Lesha Vasilyev. Only the artist. The artist has a page on VK. It"s striking to see "online ten minutes ago" and compare it to when he last visited us. That was probably that New Year.
Part 18, Text 1. New Year... Gremlins on Frunze... sofas... there may still be chronological errors... last train ride with Grandma Valya... melancholy... tooth extraction... Titanic - beginning.
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During the holidays, other acquaintances of my parents came - probably that uninteresting girl Inga with her parents. And I fear that I may have jumped the gun recalling the parents" wedding tape. Perhaps it was only brought to us that New Year. In that case, it was my second videocassette, not my first. It just happened to be the first at Lva Kassilya - because "The Lion King" stayed with Grandpa until we got a VCR.
On January 10th, the film "Gremlins" was shown on TV, and we all watched it on Frunze in the evening. By "we all on Frunze," I almost always mean me, Grandma Klava with Grandpa, and Mom. Dad visited rarely - and when Mom and I went there during the holidays, he usually went to Grandma Valya.
The green-cushioned sofa in the hall at Lva Kassilya was already gone - it had previously been moved to Grandpa"s on Frunze, as I wrote. I sat on it in August and shaved a bald patch then. But from that set, the armchairs with green cushions remained. Also, throughout the Lva Kassilya years, the six plaid cushions I used to build a maze remained. The sofa itself - apparently the one Grandpa slept on in the hall on Frunze. At this point in the story, there were two sofas in the hall at Frunze, and it would remain that way until the end.
I mention the cushions for a reason - various episodes in the story will involve them. Part of childhood.
All day long, when Mom didn"t take me to kindergarten and ran errands herself, I sat in the hall, often on these cushions, in front of the TV, endlessly flipping through dinosaur books that I had been given. It was paradise.
Right now - as I"m proofreading - I suspect that I may have shaved the bald patch on Frunze at the end of those New Year holidays, before resuming kindergarten, rather than in September. Perhaps only during these holidays I got my first dinosaur books and discovered the topic of excavations and bones. I sometimes spend a whole day verifying a chronological detail - the past feels so much more important than my shitty present and even shittier future.
In the draft from September 23, there was a paragraph of despair here, hinting to the reader that I was in such a mess it would inevitably affect the narrative. In the proofreading stage, I removed that paragraph but will try to keep the rest of the events up to my school biography at a satisfactory level.
I was at Grandma Valya"s - and we again, for the last of two or at most three times in my life, took the train. There was snow and grey weather. We wandered through the Sharik market nearby - killing time, clearly just before the train, which ran a couple of times a day - and then headed to the station, which I never visited again, called "Primykanie."
A very industrial area - heat pipelines, over-track structures, under a grey sky. While waiting, trains passed, wires hummed, and other melancholy... I didn"t understand geography at all, but apparently, we went either toward Komsomolsky or toward the Polytech district.
We got out, and right nearby was a nine-storey building. Again, the theme of "everyone"s got the same" - all the entrances, apartment layouts. We visited an acquaintance of Grandma Valya. The apartment was just like Aunt Larisa"s neighbours" - all dark, facing the shady side. Even then, as always later, I thought how some people must suffer in such apartments compared to our sunny Lva Kassilya or Aunt Larisa. It"s a completely different mood, a completely different life - living on the shady side.
Once again, I was sitting on the kitchen, gnawing on something, and a tooth started to wiggle. And again, Mom and I went to the city children"s dental clinic. I already knew what a nightmare it would be - and it was again.
For my falling teeth, we went to the dentist about six times, and there was never any anaesthesia, and I always screamed, yet surprisingly: I never developed a fear of dental treatment, while that bullshit with my penis pretty much shaped my life.
In February that year, "Titanic" came out in Russian cinemas - probably causing a stir. I recently read that our TV channels were too stingy for many years to buy the rights to show it, so at that time, a two-part precursor was broadcast on TV. But I was still too young to know all this.
Mom and I were at Grandpa"s on Frunze, and it was the evening of February 19th. That"s when I first heard the word "Titanic." It was shown on Channel One after the evening news. At the time, I thought this was the actual new film. There was a scene where the main, as I thought then, hero threw chairs to those drowning in the water, saying, "Grab these, they"ll help you." Only later, when I watched the main film, would I realise that Grandpa had shown something else that evening.
My thoughts that arose that evening - that brief viewing - even though it wasn"t the original "Titanic" and thus not the original Jack Dawson, not really Jack Dawson, I recorded separately in my diary in early 2017 and autumn 2021. Both records concern the psychology of my complexes. Jack Dawson and "Titanic" are strongly tied to my sense of inadequacy. Here"s a snippet from 2017:
"...with things like this film, with such content and such a hero as this Jack, one could as well slap on a "Parental Advisory" or "don"t try this" warning in bold letters, which, regarding characters like this Jack, would say: "Do not let yourself dream of being like him, because if you aren"t already, you will never become him.""
Also in 2017, I noted that based on this "Titanic" and similar dramatic love-story films, I naively perceived a pattern: that for romantic happiness, one must suffer seriously. I foolishly applied this idea in reverse in my youth: seeing my lack of romantic happiness as hope that fate would credit me for it and spare me other suffering or a painful death. Obviously, it was absurd, but, perversely, circumstances unfolded exactly that way - I was literally lucky in almost everything else - and so I didn"t rush to educate myself or purge these fanciful beliefs.
And in 2021, I wrote about all this in general - and about how in "Titanic," it wasn"t the ship sinking for me, but my self-esteem.
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________________I am five years old.
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Part 18 text 2. Birthday,,, end of the first kindergarten,,, first day in the second kindergarten,,, everything melting everywhere,,, I lay in hospital with Mum,,, the polyclinic and Mum"s reverence.
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Birthday - five years old. Some guests. Until about the age of seven, Mum always invited guests for my holidays. More and more new books about dinosaurs. I was switching more and more from mammals to reptiles, though I kept drawing tigers and other cats. In general, I drew a lot. Many primitive drawings have survived. Mostly animals and dinosaurs. Properly worked‑out drawings with shading would only start to fascinate me in the first years of school.
At kindergarten they were already taking us for walks closer to the far end of the yard. Behind a simple chain‑link fence you could see the yard of a private house inside the block - not the house that actually faces Persidskaya Street, but one inside the block - and I was always interested in how one was supposed to get to such houses. I never saw any little driveways leading into the blocks. And yet there were plenty of such wide city blocks packed with obviously internal houses and courtyards. Even right in the centre: the whole pentagonal block bounded by Lev Kassil Street, Khalturin Street, Teatralnaya Street, Kommunisticheskaya Street and Freedom Square was huge and clearly contained hidden private properties inside it. But I had never been anywhere inside there.
Among the children in the kindergarten, as I already mentioned, there was Maslyonkov (or Maslyakov). By now it was already March - it was getting warmer, there was sun and a clear sky, though there were still snowdrifts and snow. And once during a walk this Maslyonkov scooped snow into his palms and melted it into water, and when they asked him why, he said: "Where else would you get water if there was suddenly a war?" I often picked up other people"s behaviour - I"ll mention that more than once - and that day after kindergarten, on Frunze Street - the sun was still out, they must have picked me up early - Alina and I were hanging around in the snowdrifts near my house, and I copied and performed for her that Maslyonkov melting‑snow‑in‑the‑palms routine and the explanation that went with it.
From what I remember, that day with the snow melting in our hands was already one of the last days of me going to that kindergarten on Telegrafnaya Street. Mum had apparently enrolled me in that kindergarten so far away because there were no places closer. And now - there were.
My second kindergarten was at 10 Lev Kassil Street - just one house away from ours. It was all hidden behind trees, and among the trees there was also a gazebo‑veranda, and next to it - a frightening sculpture of Baba Yaga, which I was always afraid of.
I remember that on the first day there was a training session in a small little gym. The floor was rubber and it smelled of rubber. I think they were teaching us to do the birch‑tree pose, but I already knew how to do it. During the walk - it was already warm and we were in spring jackets - on that first and the following days I, as usual, stood aside by the mesh fence there as well and looked towards the yard of my house - there is a passage there from Petrovskaya Street, and Mum could even have walked through there. When they led everyone back into the building, there was a knot of anxiety in my chest because of the coming lunch, just as there would be all the rest of the time in this second kindergarten, but that first day was sunny, and in general the whole year afterwards in this kindergarten is associated for me with sunshine - which is why this kindergarten felt much "lighter" to me than the first one.
I"m not sure: did I move to this kindergarten already in the spring or only at the beginning of autumn? It seems to me it was still in the middle of spring - somewhere in April - and I went there until the break for summer. And summer itself, in my memories, was very Lev‑Kassil‑and‑Frunze‑centred; no kindergarten is remembered at all. Nevertheless, other events connected with this second kindergarten I will begin only after the summer.
Everywhere the snow was melting, the first grass. Mostly Frunze Street, Alina. Perhaps I"m hurrying one year ahead, but it seems that already then I could write something, and I walked along the thawing Frunze with Alina and, with a businesslike air, wrote something down in a notebook or at least sketched things naturalistically. Once Mum and I were walking to her workplace in the centre, and I was scribbling something along the way, walking along Persidskaya.
During those days on Lev Kassil Street I fell ill, but instead of lying it out at home for some reason they called an ambulance. Mum and I were taken to the city children"s hospital, which you can see from our window - five minutes away. Father came on foot afterwards. The admissions ward - instant stress, instant fear that they would separate me from Mum. But they didn"t separate us. They admitted us together. This was my first time in hospital. In the ward there were several beds, and other mothers with children.
There were injections and constant stress and fear. Fucking white coats, the fucking clinking of glass test tubes. Blood taken from the finger. All that fucking crap. But it was good that Mum was there, because I already knew that in adulthood you"d have to lie in hospital alone - and that"s completely fucked, I didn"t even want to think about it.
Gradually I even started playing there with some boys. Father brought parcels and came to the window and waved. We lay there for about a week. Returning home felt like heaven - there"s no better feeling.
For a long time now I haven"t devoted any significant passages to the polyclinic, but that doesn"t mean it wasn"t there. My medical file is stuffed with sheets covered in illegible doctors" notes dated to those years, and in my memory the polyclinic is the third most significant place in Engels after Lev Kassil Street and Frunze Street.
You constantly had to undergo examinations: any admission to kindergarten, school and so on, as well as routine mandatory check‑ups, meant the same forced routine for a week and a half or two weeks for the sake of some fucking certificate. But it didn"t end there. The doctors would always find something and prescribe coming back again after some time. That was how an endless bondage would begin.
Meanwhile the polyclinic supposedly gave Mum a sense of support, protection, relief from parental responsibility. She had no support otherwise: Granny only panicked and confronted everyone, Grandad stayed silent and was useless, and my father - especially on serious matters like health, where he had his rastaman‑style views - simply wasn"t taken seriously. She had neither the time nor sources of information to study anything on her own. So she relied on those women in the consulting rooms, who moreover were often old enough to be her parents and inspired trust on a personal level as well. But that was only supposedly the reason. The matter went deeper. She might not treat herself and might let things slide with her own health (which she later did), but with me - even without neglect, merely if she missed something somewhere - the controlling authorities could already intervene.
Veiled even from herself under that feeling of support, she had a reverence before the state. That was what I always sensed intuitively, and it was the key reason for that knot in my chest in kindergarten. My whole childhood story, and especially towards its end, when I would be controlled by a state body that does not develop a person but suppresses him and his rights - is tied to this thing. Father feared psychiatric hospitals and the police even more, and it is curious that none of that prevented these two system‑phobes from deliberately giving me the most vulnerable possible status inside that very system.
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Part 18 text 3. Nosebleeds,,, films,,, childhood cartoons,,, about Granny,,, about Grandad.
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I counted how many words there are in the text for each year described, and this ninety‑eighth year - especially its spring (at this point I had wanted to move on already to the summer) - is the shortest part. So I decided to gather all the small scraps of memories that I couldn"t find a place for and insert them here now. There may be abrupt jumps from one topic to another.
I noticed that I had never mentioned my nosebleeds in the biography at all. Twenty times or more throughout my childhood my nose bled, and it would only stop around the age of nine. And I"ll jump ahead right now, because I can"t guarantee it anyway and won"t describe it in detail: there was apparently an episode somewhere around the first or second year of school when, during lessons or simply during an argument, Mum smacked me in the face and my nose started bleeding as well. That could very well have happened, because with those fucking lessons anything could happen, and there will definitely be an episode like that later in the childhood story.
And in moments of idyll with Mum, as I call them, our shared vocabulary kept filling with more and more little words. Things like tsyts and kozashtra, hound - usually about young male cats - and many others that I will mention later. As well as phrases and intonations that only the two of us understood.
Together with Morozko, ever since the earliest childhood my favourite domestic film was The Incredible Adventures of Italians in Russia. When I stumbled upon it on some channel, especially if it was just starting, it was a little holiday. From that film Mum and I laughed at the lines "By the matryoshkas!" and "Grandad, you"re a born racer." The film created the idea of a merciful and indulgent mentality among Russian people. Everyone is naive, comical, as if performing for one another. No one is truly strict or dangerous to anyone else. Giuseppe will be forgiven everything. The mafioso will only blow up a car - mere hooliganism. The lion will not attack. The grandad, a born racer, only looks angry. Olga only pretends to play hard to get with Mironov. Everything is just for the sake of play. Everyone chases everyone else, and in the end some fair adult will arrive and divide everything equally among these children who never grew up. That was how it all seemed to me. Thanks to the dubbing - to those intonations and timbres peculiar exclusively to the S‑S‑S‑S‑R mentality: as if everyone were Levitan. And above all thanks to the absence in the script of any truly serious harm to anyone, as would happen in an analogous Western film. After all, even in the closest comparable French comedies with Pierre Richard there is still plenty of real damage and negativity. Russian comedies in general were like Italians in that respect. And this was reinforced by reality, where everyone everywhere looked after me, except for a few fuckwits among my peers, like Kosarev.
Different, special, which I saw on television from the very earliest times - from around 1994 - was the cartoon with Crocodile Gena and his accordion songs. I already hinted that it was for me the perfect example of the Soviet puppet animation that I could not stand. And it was the most Lev‑Kassil cartoon imaginable - perfectly fitting that living room, with me sitting there, playing with buttons at the age of two, perfectly fitting that grey television set and the same associative row where all those grey coats of Mum"s also belong. I remember how I - still not knowing about any other animation at all, not even about colour television - sit watching the final song about the blue railway carriage - and everything is simply grey. This should have been inserted into the paragraph where I spoke about Mikhalkov and his I Walk Through Moscow. That cartoon made you not want to live, though I didn"t yet know such a thing was possible. And it forever linked trains with sadness for me (almost the same atmosphere as in the film The Thief - I will mention it too), forever created a visual association with something post‑Soviet, some suburban landscape of decay and railway tracks under a grey sky. I remembered that cartoon again when I travelled by train to Kaliningrad in my youth.
And yet the melodies from it, despite the associations, are still among those I call genuine hits, and I can cite them as examples of something valuable when I hate the meaningless set of notes that most music in the world is for me. And Cheburashka, because of the brown eyes and those little dot‑like eyebrows, was always associated for me with that girl Lidushka, about whom there will be more later.
Another cartoon I hadn"t mentioned before but which also belongs to my earliest childhood memories is the one about the parrot Kesha. Mum told me that he was voiced by Khazanov. I then saw Khazanov on television, and after that every time I remembered the parrot Kesha I could never shake the image of that big man in glasses, who even looked somewhat like the parrot. I didn"t understand any of those cartoons at all. But a little later, in that same year 1998 perhaps, I remembered one particular episode from that cartoon. When the parrot Kesha starts going hysterical: "I can do it. I"ll prove it. I"ll show them. They"ll hear about me, they"ll talk about me." That was exactly me.
Another thing I couldn"t shake off, like that association with Khazanov, were certain obsessive thoughts. At the time described I already knew about death, and somewhere I also picked up the theme of the desert, thirst, and that a man dying of thirst would drink anything. Since then all my life, looking at rotten puddles or filthy water in a toilet bowl, I would think - would I drink that if I were dying of thirst?
Since early childhood there stood in the wall unit on Lev Kassil Street some Soviet children"s book about the tropical forest. For some reason it was called Behind the Glass. Half a year later, when I learned to read, I would read there about a naturalist pushing through the tropics who was swarmed by a million mosquitoes and crushed them by the thousands at a time, ending up completely smeared in dirt and blood.
Although for a while - from the summer of 1997 to the end of 1998 - I was immersed in the theme of Spider‑Man and fictional superheroes in modern cities with skyscrapers, technological mutations and laser guns, in parallel I was still following my original naturalist line, and I needed to become capable one day of going out "into the field". For instance, I thought that somewhere in tropical lagoons I would need to dive for long periods. I began to train holding my breath. As with all the other skills from that series (later there will be jumping from heights, throwing knives), I would never achieve any success in it: the standard one and a half minutes was my childhood record, and after that I was afraid of dying.
My collecting of accessories for life in my own cottage, which I would someday have, also continued. I had started this theme in earlier years with the inventory of unused dishes in the cupboards. Now, in particular, at Granny Klava"s place on top of one of the two refrigerators in the middle проходная room there appeared a water filter. For those years - a novelty. Someone must have given it as a gift. I eyed that filter like a predator and let Granny Klava know that when I grew up I wanted to take it. In such situations she would say, "Well, that"s after me," and when she was especially categorical (usually during quarrels with Mum) - "only over my dead body."
One evening I was running from the living room into that проходная room and deeply cut my leg on a piece of metal sticking out near the floor behind that refrigerator. I immediately fell onto the bed, screamed, burst into tears, and they bandaged me. The first scar on my body.
In the small room there always stood a hockey stick, or rather a walking stick. Great‑grandmother Shura used it to walk. I wasn"t planning on becoming a decrepit old man, so I didn"t consider it as something I might need.
I don"t think I have mentioned this before: under the entire house on Frunze there was a crawlspace. There were two openings into it: one in the small room and another in the kitchen. Grandad very rarely crawled down there with his torch - mostly to access the drainage pipes under the kitchen. The linoleum would be rolled up, the old men would lift a large board we walked on, and there was at least a metre down to the unpleasant earthen floor. I never climbed down there and it disgusted me even to watch where Grandad was fiddling about. That concerns the opening in the kitchen. But in the small room a similar board was lifted, and there were jars of jam there - only half a metre to the ground at most. The most frightening thing was to think about the crawlspace under the living room, because most likely nobody had been down there for a hundred years, and who knows what might have settled there in all that time?
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Part 18 text 4. Little things at Grandad"s,,, the cemetery visit,,, about Oleg Nikolaevich,,, about Ghost,,, about Larisa,,, about early theatre with Granny Valya,,, about Vanessa‑Mae.
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Grandad had a workshop in the yard - I mentioned it only in passing. He sharpened knives there, made various contraptions. My father, when later - after Grandad - he was drawn into helping with some of the house"s utilities, remarked on various innovative inventions of Grandad"s there, what you"d call made out of bits of shit and sticks. But I think that was just my father"s envy - he had always dreamed of having both a house and a workshop. In my early childhood Grandad and I sometimes did things there. There was a vice, a grinding machine. There was almost nowhere to stand; the light came in only through the open door, and most of the workshop was piled with all sorts of technical junk, behind which along the far wall stood nothing less than a Jawa motorcycle. I only saw its rear wheel, and I liked both its shape and the name "Jawa" (it went nicely with "Jamaica", which I was becoming interested in together with my reptile‑fascination) - and so the Jawa motorcycle became my favourite. As I remember, the old men even said I"d ride it when I grew up. Yeah, right...
Sometimes, especially at the breakfast table, Granny would stir Grandad to life: "Vovk, tell Nikita what we"re called in Japanese." And Grandad, having picked up this information from some newspaper, would pronounce our names with the suffixes. I would be Nikita‑san.
Mum often recalled the same stories of Grandad"s, of which there seemed to have been only a handful in his whole life. One of them was about what kind of wave there would be if the Balakovo dam burst. Grandad said it would be exactly as high as the sixth floor of the building on Lev Kassil Street.
Granny Klava told more stories. Once we were walking from her place to the city centre, and instead of Persidskaya Street we went via the mosque and along Nesterova Street - there were more streetlights and passers‑by there in the evening. And near some kiosk she told me that earlier someone had been blown up there with a grenade. In Engels, and even in Saratov, it turned out there had been their own gangs - I only learned that later in my youth. But back then, in childhood, I thought all that existed somewhere in other cities. So I didn"t really believe the story about the grenade, especially since it was incomprehensible anyway: the story must have been told before I had learned about death.
But somewhere after I already knew about all those coffins and corpses, apparently in that very spring of ninety‑eight, we had another visit to the cemetery. It started at Aunt Lyusya"s place. Most likely it was some Easter, or whatever day it is when all the Orthodox flock to the cemetery with offerings - it was grey and muddy. I was with Mum, and it seems even Granny Klava came despite her quarrel with Aunt Lyusya. We gathered in Aunt Lyusya"s yard and, together with other little clusters of elderly people passing by - all those old women in headscarves and men in old people"s clothes - surrealistically moved towards the cemetery through the courtyards. A mass of old people, all going in one direction. Like the cows moving through the Frunze passage.
We arrived at the cemetery; Uncle Valera was there (among all those aunts he was the main instigator), there was a grey sky, there were little gatherings around a table near someone"s grave, eating boiled eggs and cheap sweets. I was bored out of my mind. But Mum, of course, understood that, and we left earlier. Since then I have never again been to a cemetery.
Everything in the district beyond Poligraficheskaya Street was associated with pensioners and Khrushchyovka blocks.
Many days, probably even weeks in total over the whole childhood, were spent covering the three‑kilometre distance from Frunze Street to Lev Kassil Street. Every bump along the way was already known. But sometimes Mum and I would go out to Poligraficheskaya and Nesterova to take a bus. Once, just as we left Frunze heading for the stop, bird shit landed right on Mum"s head, and we went back home. And she again remembered how once a bat had got tangled in her friend Shurygina"s hair, which had been a horror for everyone.
I couldn"t tell it earlier because I was writing in the present tense, but back then, during that visit to the gymnastics training, the coach there - Oleg Nikolaevich - rejected me not so much for the pull‑ups as, as Mum later recalled with irritation, because I didn"t have a father. And therefore, supposedly, there would be no backbone either. I think Oleg Nikolaevich saw right through me, and the real issue was precisely the backbone. I think he mentioned my father only as a convenient excuse, while in reality that part didn"t matter - he simply saw my psychological type. Olympic champion Nikita Nagorny is also a "mummy"s boy", even a granny"s darling. And his coach is a woman. Yet look at him. It"s about the psychological type. And bullies saw straight through me in exactly the same way, that I was touchy and reactive, and that"s why they went for me.
Watching the film Ghost, apparently for the first time on Frunze Street, together with Mum - who had already seen it - and with the grandparents, was a special episode. It seems this was already after I knew about death, and the film plays on that tear‑jerking idea of a soul after death that cannot reach the living. Somewhere much further on in the biography I think I already described the mechanics of tear‑jerking sentimentality - in any case I analysed it in detail in my diary, though I don"t remember for which year or how to find it... Damn it, I have millions of words. Well, I"ll return to such themes many times towards the end of the childhood biography...
The film, in general, left a strong impression - one could even say it caused a trauma - and it would have been better not to watch it and not to know about death at all. Better to be an animal, and ideally not to be born in any form.
In Ghost there was a short‑haired actress, and my Mum too was beginning to gravitate towards that style. And once the topic of models came up - some Miss Russia or other - and I instantly declared: "We should send our Aunt Larisa there." Mum said, "Is she really beautiful?" I said, "Of course." This was around ninety‑eight, when Mum was already thirty‑one and Aunt Larisa twenty‑six. That blond Aunt Larisa, who neurotically fussed over her appearance, seemed to me the standard of model beauty. Only several years later did I realise that what I had said might have hurt Mum. Especially since Mum actually saw better and later more than once pointed out Aunt Larisa"s overly large head and short legs. Mum didn"t have that neurotic race for appearance. She had a small section with women"s tubes and cosmetics in the wardrobe in the corridor on Lev Kassil Street, but she only lingered there before the most important outings, like going to the theatre with me.
I didn"t mention it before, but Granny Valya, roughly around the time of the baptism episode, took me to the Saratov Drama Theatre. They were staging The Scarlet Flower. For some reason I have the memory that right after that performance there was suddenly a concert by none other than Vanessa‑Mae. When I later watched her most popular video in the Royal Albert Hall on the internet, I had the feeling that I had seen exactly that live back then in childhood in a dark concert hall with Granny Valya. More likely the concert was simply shown on television around those days, on some advanced channel like Second Sadovaya (there was a local channel with that name), and that created this illusion in memory. Those few main compositions of that violinist became tied in my mind to the centre of Saratov, to the words "Second Sadovaya", "Bolshaya Sadovaya", to autumn Saratov parks and cultural places. These are exactly the compositions I spoke about in the episodes of walking around Saratov with my parents. Interestingly, only now I learned that Vanessa‑Mae actually came to Saratov in the year 2000 and performed in the Ice Palace.
And afterwards, from that drama theatre, Granny Valya and I left by tram, and it was obviously number nine, because it went through completely unknown places to me - meaning the upper of the two routes from the centre to the industrial district. I never travelled that way again until I was fourteen, always along Chernyshevskaya Street.
At Aunt Larisa"s place at some point I watched the film The Abyss - another film Mum already knew and often talked about, especially when we spoke about the Mariana Trench. About the trench the adults told me that it was as deep as the distance from Frunze Street to Saratov railway station.
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Part 18 text 5. A lot of Uncle Sergey,,, at Uncle Sergey"s workplace,,, buying a VCR with Uncle Sergey,,, picking up a kitten with Mum,,, the chapiteau and the last time at the circus.
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Uncle Sergey, Mum"s teacher from her student years, was now fully established as the chief architect of Engels, living in Saratov and driving from there in his grey BMW - which I soon understood to be the coolest car of all those driving around the city. In fact Mum worked and drew at home, and when I say "Mum is going to work", I mean either that she went to measure plots with a tape measure and discuss things with clients building cottages around the city, or that she went to Uncle Sergey"s workplace. His signatures were needed, and he gave them to her without any queue and dealt with all the other bureaucracy. Because of this the other professionals in the city, to put it mildly, did not like Mum.
I"ll devote a passage to Uncle Sergey"s workplace. It was a branch of the city administration located on the second floor of a building at the corner of Teatralnaya and Kommunisticheskaya Streets, house number forty‑three. The entrance door was next to a bread shop popular with us. Important people would go in there and climb to the second floor, where there was immediately a stinking toilet full of cigarette smoke, and to the side - a door into a corridor with offices. Here it was cooler, and here there was what became my visual association with the concept of an "office": everywhere cabinets with files and folders, office desks, all that clerical paraphernalia; those with more important positions had swivel chairs on wheels.
And the most important thing was that a couple of people there had something called a computer. It was unclear what it was or what it was for, but it was like in films. I still hadn"t fully realised, by the way, that the films and series I saw on television were not simply not here or in neighbouring cities, but actually on the other side of the globe. Why not here? Look - the same offices, papers, paperclips and staplers, and the men in the same shirts and jackets. Only in films there were skyscrapers, and here - a three‑storey building. The planetarium and books about space already existed in my life, but I hadn"t yet formed any understanding of what was where and in which countries.
Somewhere in the middle of the corridor there was a door, and behind it was the most important office - with Uncle Sergey. Actually he didn"t sit there immediately. When you entered, his secretary Aunt Katya sat there at a desk (she seemed like an aunt to me, but she was about twenty‑two) - without a computer of course, only papers; on the sides there were chairs and a sofa for those waiting to be called. And to the side there was another door, behind which was the office with an air conditioner and Uncle Sergey sitting at a computer. When we came there, I mostly sat on the sofa with Aunt Katya while Mum went in to Uncle Sergey. Everything was civilised: when he came out and passed by, I would greet him, and he greeted me too. It was impossible to imagine that someday in the future I would be masturbating in shit and posting videos of it on VKontakte so that at least some girls might hear about me.
I often waited for Mum on that sofa for a very long time. While sitting there I thought about the future, about skyscrapers and about how I would drive a car. Afterwards Mum and I usually stopped to buy bread and a sunflower‑seed bun, which I ate immediately on the way.
There started to be a lot of Uncle Sergey in my life. One day the three of us drove in his BMW to a home‑appliance shop in Engels, near School No. 1 - at 67 Engels Avenue. It was the first time I had been in a huge electronics shop, at least it seemed huge to me. Washing machines, televisions... I had a strong premonition that something cool was about to happen - and I was right: we walked around and around - and bought a VCR. It felt like the beginning of a new life.
Uncle Sergey drove us with the purchase to Frunze Street and left. He himself, by the way, never got out there or interacted with the grandparents - all because of Mum"s abortion in the past.
We carried the purchase into the house, and soon the main Gavela came, and he tried to connect it. Something didn"t work, something was missing. And so the VCR began standing there on Frunze not functioning yet.
I constantly trailed around with Mum on her boring errands. Once we were walking from Frunze to the centre, and we took a rare route - through the clearing between Persidskaya and Nesterova Streets, right in front of the bathhouse. Along that clearing flowed the so‑called Rotten Stream, with reeds on both sides. Along it ran a wild path into thickets of trees and bushes - in general, a super‑dangerous place, not for children.
And there, on our path, there was a kitten. It looked like it belonged to no one. We picked it up and went on with it to Uncle Sergey"s. I sat beside Aunt Katya holding that kitten. And then in the evening we went back and left it in the same place where we had found it.
I can"t figure out what I looked like in ninety‑eight, and so I"m not sure when the memorable last trip to the circus happened. There"s a photograph where I"m sitting in winter clothes with a peacock on my lap. Either the beginning or the end of ninety‑eight. And that determines whether the last circus visit was in the summer of ninety‑eight or ninety‑nine. Just in case I"ll finish with it already here.
It was already hot - either still spring or already summer. And although we ended up in the Saratov Circus, it all started with a chapiteau, again near School No. 1 in Engels. It was my first and last chapiteau - I didn"t know then, and still didn"t know then, that that was what this word meant. We simply arrived there with Father and Mum, almost across the road from the same electronics shop, and on a large lawn there were travelling attractions, and among them - a big round yellow‑and‑blue tent.
But we never paid or went inside it; instead we decided to go to Saratov, where a circus had also arrived at that time. We took a bus to Saratov right from there and, with the familiar elements that accompanied every trip to Saratov and which I"ve described a hundred times already, we reached Chapaeva and went to the circus. Everything there was as usual - first a performance with people, then with animals, and afterwards, when the circus ended, you could approach the lion"s cage standing at the edge of the arena and take a photograph with it in the background.
From that photograph one could probably determine the time, but I don"t know where it is. In it I"m standing with Father with that lion behind us, and behind the cage in the distance you can see Mum, and I think she had some funny expression on her face, because that photo made us laugh later.
Almost every trip to Saratov traditionally included walking along the entire Kirov Avenue. Along both sides of the avenue there were mostly two‑storey old houses with archways into courtyards, and there were no gates yet. From some point on Father and I began going into the courtyard of house number twelve or ten and pissing against the wall of some house there, and we went into paid toilets less and less often. And we never in our lives went into the blue portable toilets.
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___Part 19.
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________________Summer.
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Part 19 text 1. The boredom of existence on Frunze,,, with Alina and Anya,,, wandering around the yard while the adults are away,,, hooliganism with Uncle Tolya and punishment,,, "The Wind Blew from the Sea",,, concerts by the bench,,, dancing and my complexes.
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As I said, especially before the start of the beach season - which began roughly in mid‑June - it was a very "Frunze" kind of summer. Anya, Alina and I spent whole days there outside. Near Anya"s house there was a huge pile of sand - we were always building something in it. But the reader shouldn"t expect much Tom‑Sawyer‑type adventure or anything particularly exciting in my memories of how we spent time on Frunze. The girls seemed quite content with life, while for me there was simply a hellish boredom and emptiness, in which nothing remained except to stare into the distance toward Saratov, dreaming and inventing for myself some thrilling future based on what I saw on television. But that is precisely what matters - that is exactly what shaped those inflated expectations of life and the painfully harsh disappointments later.
Besides boring games of "mothers and daughters" and hide‑and‑seek, we had plenty of completely made‑up amusements. For example, fortune‑telling of various kinds. You pull the skin on the side of your hand, and supposedly the outline of the name of your future bride appears there. Or even better: you pour sand - either into your palm or somehow onto your hand - then spit on this little mound of sand, fiddle with it a bit, and wherever the wet lump rolls, that"s how things will turn out. Brilliant...
As for the dacha theme and animals? At first I was still more interested in snakes, but that summer I must have been switching more and more to lizards. At my grandparents" dacha there were especially many of them in the spot where some boards lay at the edge of the plot. The lizards were beautiful - descendants of dinosaurs - and I wanted to be with them and to be like them. Their life seemed interesting.
Just as on Lev Kassil Street, I now stayed alone for very long stretches on Frunze as well. There I could watch television to my heart"s content, and that was the best thing of all. BabKlava, it turned out, was still working, Grandad too, and Mum as well. Those were the busiest architectural years of her career. I would wake up and there was no one in the house; I"d eat something, and I could go out into the yard. It was the beginning of summer there, and everything connected with nature was coming alive. Spiders, mole crickets - all sorts of things. For the first time I saw a spider with a cocoon from which a whole swarm of tiny spiderlings came crawling out.
In the yard, on the side closer to the Fatyushkins, the ground had been dug up - Grandad was building a garage there. In that heap of earth I found a plastic figurine of a squirrel with half its head sliced off. Probably cut by a shovel. I showed it to Mum later, and she said it had been her childhood toy.
Once, still before noon, Alina and I were racing around Frunze and generally fooling about. Behind the fence from us was that neighbour Uncle Tolya - the husband of the fat Fatyushkina, who was always drunk and staggering about. As I already wrote, he was half his wife"s size, with whitened hair, and he also stank of sour rot - which made it easy to laugh at him and joke. He was doing something in his yard. Alina and I - either through some hole in the fence or somehow else - stood there calling out to him and pestering him. At the same time we were a bit afraid of him, and whenever he moved in our direction we ran off. Most likely we called him a fool, and for calling someone a "fool" Mum and Babka punished me strictly. I probably should have introduced the punishments earlier in a separate passage - because they had been punishing me for a long time already - but I don"t remember anything before this episode.
What happened next with Uncle Tolya I don"t quite remember: either he himself came to BabKlavа to complain, or Fatyushkina told her - though she was kind, and if she"d known how it would end she probably wouldn"t have said anything. Or maybe BabKlavа herself came out into the street and saw us tormenting Uncle Tolya. In any case, I was soon summoned into the house. Fatyushkina was sitting there, and Babka in the kitchen slapped me across the lips and scolded me. I burst into tears. She told me to go and apologise. And so I went, tearful and guilty, and that Uncle Tolya - apparently already a bit drunk, but kindly - said something to me, and I remember the words "Alinka‑malinka". As I understood it then, the point of his speech was that I shouldn"t pick up bad behaviour from Alinka‑malinka. I felt sorry for him in his naïveté, because in reality I had been the main instigator. But perhaps his meaning was subtler - that my hooliganism, even if I were its main "parent", would still have remained "unconceived" if I hadn"t been keeping company with someone equally capable of mischief.
Summer, with all its Engels heat, was already in full swing, and the girls and I would sit for hours in the shade of our front garden: sometimes on the bench, sometimes on the little fence, and I - often up in the bird‑cherry tree. Saratov glimmered blue on the horizon. Everyone had the radio hit "The Wind Blew from the Sea" in their heads - everyone was humming it, especially Alina. Back then I didn"t know who performed the song, and it was amusing in adulthood to see how much that singer, Natalie, resembled Alina. Alina might have loved the song partly for that reason too, if she"d seen the video on television. Anyway, I hummed it as well - you could say I hummed it endlessly. So much so that that entire summer and that whole period of life are forever associated for me with that song.
And then there was this toastmaster Anya - constantly taking initiative in respectable directions. She was a proper mummy"s girl, capable of proposing some help for the adults or organising other acts of diligence. Or, for example, rehearsing and staging a concert for the adults when they all sat on the bench in the evenings.
We started rehearsing. To sing "The Wind Blew from the Sea" and various other things. We prepared for a week or two. Anya told us who should come out "on stage" and when - the stage being the space in front of the bench - and we even had to perform some dances. Dancing bored me terribly; I didn"t see the point of it. But even then there was another problem for me in this whole matter. Dancing is a purely bodily thing. When someone sings, the listener"s attention goes to the voice, or at most to the singer"s face. But with dancing people look directly at you physically - at your body. And the problem wasn"t the fear of violence, of someone taking your body away from you as in the clinic, or interfering with it. That had already happened there anyway. The problem was that twirling this body - which people who feel full control over it are supposed to do - in my case looked like bravado. As if I were in control of my body. And I wasn"t in control of a damn thing. The very next day, at another visit to the clinic, I might burst into humiliating tears from some pain. Or I might suddenly have a scuffle with some Kosarev and he"d throw me to the ground. Or right there on Frunze by the bench the word "fool" might slip out of me, Mum or Babka would hear it, slap my lips, and I"d burst into tears in front of everyone. What kind of control over my body was that? I wasn"t my own. Dancing was absurd for me.
Later, in my school years, there would be more and more episodes connected with this theme. It is almost the main line of my story.
But I still had to dance. We even rehearsed some partner thing, and I even touched Anya"s waist while she was teaching me. But those were brief moments during rehearsals, lasting only seconds, and nothing sexual awakened in me then. I rehearsed the dances in the house with Mum in the living room too - she showed me the most primitive sort of waltz.
I no longer ran around the table with the adults, but I still sat on the floor like a little kid, fiddling with nonsense like plasticine, and from that place on the carpet where Marsik had vomited a year earlier there was still a rich smell.
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Part 19 text 2. The romance of Saratov in the distance,,, Lyosha Fatyushkin again,,, Ghostbusters,,, a neighbour on Frunze lends a bicycle,,, cosmic themes on the square and in the park,,, a boy with swagger - and I pick it up,,, Mum and I buy an enormous bicycle,,,
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It was already fiercely hot - blazing heat - and Alina and I, just like the year before, slid down the straw and messed about near the Chizhi place, though most of the time we simply sat there talking and dreaming. For the latter, that particular spot by the Chizhi wasn"t ideal, because there were trees ahead and no view of Saratov. When I dreamed, I wanted to look at Saratov. All my dreams were there, not in boring Engels. That summer, by the way, I didn"t see the sisters on the beach anymore and didn"t miss them.
Lyosha from Novorossiysk - Aunt Valya Fatyushkina"s grandson - came to visit again. I still had no idea what Novorossiysk actually was, and the name didn"t impress me as much as Moscow because of its too‑Russian ending, but Lyosha himself - having come from somewhere I knew nothing about, meaning he had seen more than I had - impressed me anyway. And he was older than me, tanned, with light hair that was darker than mine and tougher, slightly wavy - he seemed almost like the type of those daring boys on the pier of the brave. And since he wasn"t malicious and treated me almost like a teacher would, I didn"t feel envy toward him; rather, I saw in him an example of what I wanted to become, and even hoped I would.
His father, incidentally - as Mum later told me when I was grown up - had been exactly the opposite in his childhood: a real hooligan boy, and it was precisely with him that my uncle Valera had been at that moment when he climbed on my mother with sexual intentions.
Lyosha mostly hung out either with the Bobry boys, whom I didn"t even remember by face because they hardly ever came near our house, or with the two sons of the Petrovs, who lived after the Fatyushkins. And Lyosha also kept going with his father to the Volga - naturally he knew how to swim - and all that impressed me too.
The fat girl Katya also started appearing again at our bench. But that was the last summer. She lived permanently in Saint Petersburg, and it was because of her that I first heard about that city.
One evening at my grandparents" place we were all watching television, and close to bedtime I begged to watch a bit more. There was a strange film where some odd ghosts were flying through tunnels; they had tails and heads like light bulbs. They were all grey, and among them there was this youngest one whose name sounded something like my surname, and his head especially resembled a light bulb, so someone in the film even called him Lamp‑Head. Ghostbusters. I began to want to watch it properly, from start to finish, without any of that "go to bed". The most interesting films always came on when you had to go to sleep.
The Fatyushkins lived without a television and without any conveniences, in one half of their house. In the other half lived another family - a man and a woman - and they seemed to live even worse, and the man drank. They had no children or grandchildren, so they mixed less with the neighbours, and when they were outside they always sat on their own bench.
But once that man dragged a bicycle from somewhere, and through my adults he lent it to me for a while. It was a primitive Soviet teenage two‑wheeler with medium‑sized wheels, and when I tried it I could barely reach the ground with my feet. I still couldn"t keep my balance myself, and Mum pushed me along by the handlebars. Lyosha, naturally, already knew how to ride. I kept trying endlessly to ride it on my own. For a couple of days the bicycle was completely at our disposal, and we could even take it into the centre.
I should have described all this earlier. I had a note here - about some boy somehow connected with the bicycle... and something about space. But by the time I actually got around to describing it, by the end of 2024 I didn"t remember a damn thing anymore. Which bicycle exactly, which boy exactly... it had all vanished to hell.
I only remember the space theme, and even that associatively: a hot day, me on the bicycle in the square while Mum is off on business at the administration building; something about the park; some monuments, boards of honour and images of cosmonauts somewhere... maybe on some concrete wall in the park. And all of it tied together with Gagarin, with that song "The Final Countdown", with the planetarium, and also with the space section of the Engels museum, where I had already been and where there was a spherical capsule for returning from space. All of it mixed together into one cosmic stew in my head and was perceived not as something historical but as something mythological. Imagine the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, only instead of all those Isildurs and Middle‑earth there are cosmonauts, rockets and space. Something that had sunk into history and become legend.
And about the boy - perhaps I meant the following. He was some boy connected with that Lyosha, slightly older than me, who came from another street. Or maybe he was the one with the bicycle who let me try riding it. Although he was almost my age, he was even more of a street kid than Lyosha, and certainly more than me. That must have been my first contact with a completely unfamiliar boy - someone not connected by our parents" acquaintances, nor by neighbours, nor by kindergarten. He chewed gum and had a kind of relaxed swagger in his manners. And I, as always, wanted to seem grown‑up and confident and, as I wrote, I tended to pick up other people"s manners - so I picked up his swagger and later, when the adults came out to the bench, I demonstrated it in my behaviour. BabKlavа was sitting with someone - probably with Fatyushka - and said to her reproachfully: "Look how he picks things up."
Despite the fact that I still didn"t really know how to ride, and certainly needed a smaller bicycle, Mum and I once left Frunze, walked along Poligraficheskaya Street toward School No. 1 - there, in the area called "The Living and the Dead", in a Khrushchyovka block along the road, there was a shop on the ground floor that sold bicycles - and something happened to Mum there, or they talked her into it, and in the end we bought a huge, ugly bicycle with the biggest wheels imaginable. It had no top bar and it folded. Judging from the internet, the model was called Salut. Big saddle, luggage rack, tool pouch. A proper kolkhoz bicycle. We brought it back to Frunze, maybe went somewhere nearby with it once, and then it stood in my grandparents" garage for the rest of its life. Only once more would it appear in an episode during my school years.
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Part 19 text 3. Last visits to Semyonova and pentatonic evenings,,, the rabbit on Frunze,,, Mukhtar bit me,,, video on the street,,, the woman with the bucket of leftovers,,, me as a rhinoceros idiot and shame in front of Anya,,, note on shame and disgrace.
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Most likely, this was already the last summer we visited my mother"s classmate Semyonova and her daughter Yana. In those years, on birthdays - mostly mine - they would come to visit us at Lev Kassil, and my father would see Semyonova too, because later, when she was mentioned, he often joked about the size of her gum - twice the height of a tooth. As for their house, number ninety-three on Revolyutsionnaya Street, there"s nothing new to recall. While my mother chatted with her, I got bored somewhere near their front garden under the poplars, and in the distance from their hill, you could see Saratov. The visits to Semyonova usually took place in the evenings, when a haze from backyard fires hung over the entire neighbourhood - everywhere, people burned brushwood - and its smell would forever be linked in my mind with summer evenings in low-rise areas, with summer itself, with the girls, and for some reason, even with the forest, and something old-fashioned - some kind of paganism, or just Slavic traditions - and also with pentatonic flute melodies. The connection to Slavic culture might have been reinforced by repeated trips at that age to the museum in Engels, which had exhibits of bast shoes, hut models, and other wooden artefacts.
Also on Frunze, there was one day when a white rabbit appeared from somewhere. I fussed over it in the house, carried it around, even though I was scared it would bite my finger. And that same day, Semyonova with Yana, or Marina with her daughter Olya, came by. Marina - I mention her for the first time - was a blonde classmate of my mother. She appears only once more in my childhood story, I think, during school years. She had a daughter, Olya, similar to Yana - a couple of years older than me - whom I had only seen a few times in early childhood and with whom I didn"t really interact.
So either they or the Semyonovas dropped by briefly at our Frunze place, and this Olya or Yana, fussing with the rabbit, picked it up by the ears. I protested: "You can"t do that," but she said it was okay, that this is exactly how they are handled. Then the rabbit was left to sit in the garage we were still building, and I got distracted - maybe for lunch or the TV. Later, it turned out the rabbit was gone. I cried, and for some reason the Petrov neighbours came, and their heavyset matriarch, Aunt Tanya Petrova, comforted me, saying that they had taken it because they had livestock and other rabbits, and it would be better off there. Later, it became clear that the rabbit had probably slipped out of the garage and ran along the path toward Persidskaya Street, where their aggressive dog constantly ran out of the Petrov yard, and that"s what got it. The Petrovs apparently gave us a replacement cat, but it disappeared quickly too.
Once, with Alina, Anya, and already Alyona, we were playing some kind of "mother-daughter" games as usual - and despite the adults being watchful, something happened involving Mukhtar, the dog from Anya"s yard. They either let him loose to run in the yard or something else, and I - which was rare - ended up in their yard behind the gate. He came up close to me, and I instinctively got scared and ran away, even though I knew you shouldn"t run from dogs - and he barked loudly behind me, all black and loud, right at my rear, so he didn"t even need to bite me - I had already started crying anyway. He didn"t really bite; I didn"t even understand what happened. I was just scared and confused - and cried in front of Alina, and most importantly, Anya and her strict mother - behaving like a small child with no control. And crying, as I said, doubled the shame. It left a scar, in general, and a decision to be more teasing toward the dim Alina for this. In my "Weakness" boat, I felt alone, and I needed companions.
There was a brief episode with someone"s TV and our VCR taken outside. Probably it went like this: Gavel had a portable TV, or just a small one, and in their yard, there was a long extension cord. Some adult suggested we try taking our idle VCR outside and play The Lion King again (everyone knew I had longed for it). It didn"t work - blue screen again. But I kept talking about the cartoon, and I told Alina that after The Lion King, there was supposed to be a dragon cartoon, which - relevant to my lizard obsession - I wanted to see even more. She agreed. Months later, when I sorted out the VCR and tapes better, I realized she probably didn"t understand what I meant, and just agreed without thinking. There were no dragons - it was just a tape with two cartoons in a row, apparently Yana"s.
When we played with the girls, at lunchtime, a strange small woman constantly passed by, holding an enamel bucket with a lid. Such buckets are common in canteens, hospitals, and kindergartens - inside, there was first-course soup for many mouths. We knew that inside were some food scraps, most likely from the hospital on Poligraficheskaya, so she was disgusting to us. It was unclear where she was taking it - on Frunze she always just passed and disappeared under the hill, toward Persidskaya. I guessed it might be for feeding pigs.
The woman was mute, and we teased her childishly - saying mischievous things, and she couldn"t reply. I mean, Alina and I did this - only when Anya wasn"t around. With proper Anya, such antics could even have caused a quarrel. Also, the woman looked strange and wrinkled. Since then, I"ve noticed how neurological and physical troubles often come in pairs.
One day - I can"t remember for what occasion - the whole extended family on Uncle Valera"s side came to Frunze. Adults prepared a feast in the yard, and out of boredom and a desire to stand out, I grabbed a narrow plank and, like an idiot, ran around the yard holding it to my forehead - imagining myself a rhinoceros. Eventually, I found nothing more interesting than pretending to ram a brick wall with my "horn." It ended with a wound on my forehead - I held it with my hand, and I was ashamed because Anya saw it.
A small note on my use of the words "shame" and "disgrace." In the Mukhtar episode, I wrote "shame," though I referred to the balloon episode, where I used the word "disgrace." I am very weak in the semantics of words, but ideally, shame is about self-reproach, and disgrace is about experiencing mockery and censure.
Until recently (as I write this in the editing stage), the word "shame" barely appeared in my text. Though, in fact, I should have used it exclusively, not "disgrace." Because, as you might have noticed, there was not a single instance where, in a situation I called "disgrace," anyone outside really mocked or reprimanded me.
It"s a very tangled psychological knot. Everything is mixed: from what I described at the very start about the psychology of crying, hiding my genitals on the beach, to practically any other part of my story, even those not seemingly related to shame and disgrace. Because it"s just life - just what exists. What"s involved in everything.
And this "what exists" - my experience of shame as disgrace - could roughly be called a "delusional belief" (and where it"s maximally delusional, for example in the Mukhtar episode, where nobody even thought to mock me, I still replaced "disgrace" with "shame" to avoid any suspicion of irony). But it"s not nonsense. It"s simply what would require an explanation spanning my entire biography - and it would have to be written in reverse.
But why do that when you can read it linearly in the right order and, if you have brains, feel the answer yourself? By the way, some things can only be understood by feeling.
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Part 19 text 4. Fantasies about friends while home alone,,, scared of a frog and crushed it,,, ate all the cervelat recklessly,,, hooligan Sergey on Frunze,, fight.
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I think by then the grandparents were already retired, and they spent the first half of the day at the dacha. As I mentioned, my mother often wasn"t home until lunch, so I sat alone in the house - the greatest happiness I could have then was not to be alone, but with a peer I liked. This is not a "grown-up" remark with a tone of regret, but my actual fantasies from early childhood, from which I suffered nothing. As I said, when alone, I was always mentally with someone. Even in adulthood, after youth, when fantasies are no longer possible, I still tend to roam the apartment imagining scenes of youthful domestic romance. In childhood, I might have even spoken to imaginary invisible companions, and from the outside, I might have seemed schizophrenic with voices. There was self-tickling, running, jumping, and frolicking around the house. And all this was with imaginary companions, not just by myself, though in the narration I attach the prefix "auto-" to these activities.