This is my school

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

“This is My School” is a classic school story. Slowly and in detail, as it was then customary, one academic year of the fourth grade of one Moscow school is described. It takes place in 1950. The schools were then separate - for boys and for girls, so this one is for girls.

At the beginning of the academic year - according to tradition, on a school-educational theme.

In the Cypriot house where I spend my vacation, there is a book by Elena Ilyina "This is my school" in the wardrobe (for lack of a book). It was published for the first time in the mid-50s, I have a modern edition. As a child, I did not come across this book, I once bought it for my daughter, but now, coming to Cyprus, I re-read it every time before going to bed. There is in her an irresistible charm of the 50s that is irresistibly acting on me, as if some kind of light is streaming - kindness, hope for the best, and also the light of reason, the rational structure of the world.

Today in life this light has long gone out and reaches us, like the light of extinguished stars, in vague dreams-memories, in books like this one. And hopelessness reigns in life, general mutual irritation, a willingness to bark at anyone, even a stranger on the Internet, which betrays deep unhappiness and mental restlessness of the barker, and the world appears as a place that is ugly absurd and completely incomprehensible to the mind, and even to comprehend something reluctance.

Here is the difference between the integral perception of the world then and today. That is why I sometimes like to read books from the 50s.

Elena Ilyina (by the way, S. Marshak's sister) is known in my generation for her book about the heroine of the Great Patriotic War Gulya Koroleva - "The Fourth Height", I read it exactly in the 4th grade.

“This is My School” is a classic school story. Slowly and in detail, as it was then customary, one academic year of the fourth grade of one Moscow school is described. It takes place in 1950. The schools were then separate - for boys and for girls, so this one is for girls. A similar story, also about the 4th grade, of the same era - "Vitya Maleev at school and at home" by Nikolai Nosov. We can say the male version. "Vitya Maleev" is literary of better quality (in my opinion), but Ilyina, like any woman, is more perceptive to everyday details, and therefore, decades later, her book has become similar to the now widespread books "The Daily Life of Military / Actors / Merchants / Courtesans of the 20s years of the 19th century ".

The school that Ilyina talks about is located not far from Arbat Square, the students live around the boulevards - Gogolevsky, Suvorovsky, Tverskoy. They live surprisingly light, joyfully, interesting. Although life is very difficult: someone's father died, lives alone with his mother; she works tirelessly to dress and feed the girl. Mom and daughter live, reportedly in a small house in the back of the yard. Probably a janitor's or some kind of barrack-type house: they were demolished in those courtyards only in the 70s. So a fourth-grader girl practically runs the entire household - without amenities, without hot water, etc. The heroine - her classmate admires how she deftly works and even envies in a kind way: she herself, except to wipe the dust and wash the dishes, do not trust anything.

At present, the life of Ilyina's heroines is financially meager. Sometimes details slip by, testifying to the great domestic constraint: a girl student goes to school in an old school uniform, only without an apron; a satin ribbon in a braid (I once woven such ribbons myself) is a great gift for a schoolgirl, not to mention thin stockings for a student girl. But everyone has the minimum necessary: warm winter clothes, decent food. Grandma fries cutlets, cooks soup, and also bakes a lot. I still found it: for the grandmothers of our generation, making pies is a piece of cake, and then everything became somehow difficult and troublesome. As a result, personally, I no longer know how to bake classic filled pies, but I still remember the taste of my grandmother's pies - even fried, even baked.

The heroes of the story all live in communal apartments, this is the norm. The family of the heroine Katya Snegireva occupies two rooms, and in the family there are not many, not enough - six people: three adults and three children. But at the same time, they are not cramped and there is not a feeling of not only poverty - there is not even a lack either. Somehow everything is enough for everyone: everyone is full, makes each other gifts for the holidays, buys new things. Curious: the older sister, a first-year student of the pedagogical institute, buys skates for her younger sister with a scholarship. This means that they paid quite significant scholarships. My own father, who graduated from the university after the war, said that the scholarship was equal to the minimum wage of a worker (this is not a fictitious minimum wage, but this salary was actually paid to someone - nannies, cleaners, laborers), so it is extremely modest, but you can was to live.

And here's what is interesting: the constraint of life is not perceived as poverty. In general, poverty is a feeling. If you feel that everything is enough for you, then you are not poor. Poverty is not an economic category, but a psychological one. Here it is also very important that there is no strong drop in the level of well-being. Or, if there is a difference, so that this difference is felt by the majority as reasonable and fair.

We, "Soviets", began to feel poor and even beggars when they explained to us how poorly and poorly we live and instilled in us previously uncharacteristic needs. Not even needs, but dreams and aspirations. It happened, probably, in the 80s, and began in the 70s. Well, with Perestroika, it began to roll up and down. Objective, physical, well-being - grew, and the feeling - showed the opposite. “We are beggars,” the well-fed and well-dressed inhabitants of comfortable apartments, whose children went to schools and even studied music, began to talk about themselves, and in the future they could enter Moscow State University. Previously, a person traveled by train, I myself went for a sweet soul - well, nothing. And at some point the same person felt like a beggar because he did not have a car. And then because there is no prestigious car. Well, it started.

My Tula grandmother, an elementary school teacher, lived in a log cabin with no conveniences, with stove heating and running water. Her salary was small: teachers were never paid much. But she felt her life was very prosperous. Still: she has her own house in half with her sister, a large garden with flowers, raspberries and apples, she is busy with what she loves, everyone respects her, she was even entrusted to teach young teachers her craft, her daughter became an engineer, her son-in-law is the director of an important plant, granddaughter studies successfully. It's a strange thing, she, a modest teacher, always came to us with a pile of gifts: she knitted wonderfully, and I walked in her products from head to toe, bought me my favorite Mishka sweets - in general, she was imprinted in childhood memory as a kind sorceress. She knew how to do everything: sew, knit, grow flowers. I even knew how to keep apples in the underground until spring: for the last apples I climbed into a scary dungeon during spring break. I remember how my mother and I were once traveling by train from the south at the very end of August, and my grandmother brought a huge bouquet to the carriage, intended for me to school by the first of September. The bouquet was so huge that I divided it into several and distributed it to my friends.

If someone told my grandmother that she was poor, and even more so “beggar”, she would not understand this person. Not that she rejected with anger - she just would not understand. She felt rich and her life abundant and beautiful. My recollections date back 15-20 years later than the life described by Ilyina, but the general psychological background, the integral sense of life, the spirit of the times were still here and there, and my grandmother was one of its last carriers and guardians.

The organization of society is also important here. I already once wrote in connection with Cuba that there is socialist poverty and capitalist poverty.

Under socialist poverty, seemingly simple things may not be enough, but people have access to things that the "capitalist" poor do not even dream of: teaching children music, going to the theater or conservatory, reading classics. Under capitalism, these occupations are "assigned" only to the upper classes of society. The "socialist poor" do not feel poor, and in some strange way they do not notice the physical poverty of life. Life is not the main thing, this is how it feels. Rather, they do not associate their self-esteem with property. And the bourgeois consciousness - connects.

When the well-being of Soviet people objectively increased - and they began to bind; everyday life became the main thing. And people felt poor. And then the "beggars".

Let's return, however, to Ilyina's story. Adults work very hard in it - it is simply unimaginable these days. Such, for example, an episode. A new teacher comes to the class to replace their original teacher, who has become ill for a long time. So this new teacher works simultaneously in two schools - this one and in the second shift in the boy's. That is, she gives at least eight lessons daily, including Saturday. And imagine, if this is not the same class: that means two preparations for lessons. It is no coincidence that she leaves in the classroom a hydrangea in a pot given to her by her students on March 8th: she says there is no time to look after, I almost never go home. You can imagine!

Or here is the dad of the heroine Katya Snegireva, a geologist. On January 1st, he sits down from lunchtime to prepare for an important report on the expedition, which is scheduled for January 2nd. No time to waste: celebrated - and for work. And this is the most normal norm, but how else is it? If these people were told how their children and grandchildren walk for ten days on New Years, they would have thought that communism has already been built, in every settlement there is a garden city, the rivers have already turned to the right place, highways have been laid everywhere, the working day has decreased until four o'clock, and the workers are engaged in free arts in the crystal palaces of culture. Otherwise, they could not explain such a waste of the main vital resource - time.

Katina's mother is a fabric artist, works for a weaving factory, a homeworker. It is the homeworker who is not a freelancer. She uses all the social benefits that the factory gives: she sends her daughter to a pioneer camp, she herself gets a ticket to a sanatorium in the Crimea. So this mother, according to the plot, goes to the factory on Saturday afternoon to hand over her work. Yes, on Saturday - worked; the day was, however, shortened. Two days off has become a year since the 70th.

In general, all the characters are constantly busy: adults work at work, grandmother is busy with the housework, children are preparing lessons or attending extracurricular activities: all of Katya's friends are engaged in some music, some drawing, some dancing. And everyone has time to do everything. Perhaps because there was no such time eater as a TV, and even more so - the Internet, social networks, etc.… The TV itself was, but not all of them. It is curious that even then he showed his "animal grin": one girl is a very bad student, because she is irresistibly attracted by the "blue screen", as they said then, and she does not have time to prepare lessons. But in Katya's family, thank God, he is not. Family members read, do useful handicrafts (mother sews clothes for children, pulls the sofa herself), talk. It's a rainy Sunday afternoon, I don't want to go out. All the houses, busy with pleasant things, tell each other the news, consult on how best to act. Today, families talk much less (if at all). Either they watch TV, or they bury themselves in gadgets.

Curious that children learn much more than they do today, not to mention the students. The older sister of the heroine, who entered the pedagogical institute, not only writes down lectures in the process of listening to them (which was already far from a universal phenomenon in our days), but also when she comes home, she rewrites her notes, giving them a more literary form. Yes, it was! It even had a title: overwhite lectures. Obviously: a person from this one case has already memorized everything. It is not for nothing that many books, for example, the works of Klyuchevsky or Hegel, were published from the notes of their listeners. It seems that Hegel himself wrote only the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Law, the rest was written down by the students.

The work of adults is perceived by children as very important. And at the same time it is understandable, its value is obvious; today go and explain what some office manager or financial analyst is doing, and even more so - why? Then such questions did not arise: all the works were clear and obviously useful … For example, Katina's mother is involved in making beautiful fabrics; a friend, seeing my mother's drawings, is surprised: “Wow, but my mother has a dress of this color”. Fabrics were then highly valued: they were natural and of very high quality: wool, silk, cotton. They were relatively expensive, they ordered dresses from a dressmaker or sewed them themselves: many women knew how. They dressed thoughtfully and "to the face". The women knew what length suits them, what sleeve, neckline, what colors.

Today this knowledge has been lost: since clothes are bought, not sewn, so to speak, ad hoc, it is almost impossible to choose the length, neckline, and color to match. This is only possible with custom tailoring. From mother's dress, it happened, then made a pretty suit for my daughter. I still found home sewing. And tailoring at the dressmaker too. My mother sewed something for me - as much as my eyesight allowed.

And from the "back" of my mother's old satin dressing gown, I remember, just came out of the pillowcase. As a child, I myself participated in its manufacture: do not disappear quite strong fabric, because in a dressing gown it is worn in front, and the back is almost not. One of these pillowcases has survived and lives in my Cypriot house, where I brought my old linen stocks. In the case of our family, these alterations were not a harsh necessity - just such were everyday habits. I still have a sarafan, which I sewed in 84 from my mother's preserved crepe-gorget dress of the 50s. Again, I did not sew it out of poverty, but simply liked the "little material", as they said then. Then my daughter wore this sundress. And at least henna material. In modern consumer society, there is no place for such long-lived items: you need to put them on a couple of times - and in a landfill, otherwise the wheels of capitalism will stop spinning.

The grandmother of one of the girls is an old textile worker, who worked even “under the owners”. Moscow and the Moscow region have always been a textile region, until Perestroika, when Russian textiles killed the Sino-Turkish confectionery. The workers feel that their living conditions have improved compared to pre-revolutionary times. Perhaps this feeling is facilitated by the fact that children and grandchildren go further along the social and life ladder: they study, get intellectual professions, someone becomes a boss. This is an important factor in social well-being - that children will go further than us.

The dad of the girl Katya is a geologist. The importance of his work is also clear to everyone: he is leading exploration work for a future canal in the desert. Spends long months on expeditions, where dunes, camels, dust storms. But soon water will come there and - everything will magically transform, turn green, fruits will grow.

This was just the era of the so-called. Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature: they planted forest belts in the steppe, the pioneers collected acorns in order to grow young oak trees from them. All forest belts in the Salsk steppe, where our farms are, were planted at that time - in the 40s - 50s, and in the era of democracy and human rights they were only cut down and fouled. And around our village near Moscow, many forests are planted. Now some of them are scraps, most of them are sold out for cottages. Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature was a grandiose project - not only economic, but also spiritual. It is no coincidence that poems, plays and even oratorios were written about him - for example, Shostakovich's oratorio “Song of the Forests”.

When a person plants forests, he thinks about the future, his time horizon expands to at least fifty years. In general, the sense of life of that time was much more spacious than today. The man lived in a room in a communal apartment, but he had his street, courtyard, city - it was all his. It was friendly - OURS. We owned it all, it felt like we owned it. And today even a very wealthy person owns only a piece of territory, enclosed by a tall brick wall-fence, at a price comparable to the price of a house. Not to mention the city dwellers, whose territory ends with a powerful safe door. In some old ad it was: "The door is a beast." A very accurate image! Here is this evil beast sitting on the threshold of your hole, ready to pounce on any intruder. And behind the door is an evil, hostile, dangerous world, an enemy world.

Stalin's plan for transforming nature expanded our world to the size of an entire country. And it gave an amazing feeling of spaciousness - spaciousness in space and space in time. It is no coincidence that during Perestroika, all land management plans, canals, reservoirs, in general, everything that somehow goes back to this Stalinist plan - all this was viciously and indiscriminately abused, spat upon, declared Bolshevik idiocy, communist malicious delirium, which was invented for that, to kill as many Gulag slaves as possible.

I remember that Hydroproject, whose building stands at the fork of the Leningradskoye and Volokolamskoye highways, was declared an enemy not just of the people, but also of the human race. I remember that academician-philologist D. Likhachev repeatedly cursed the project of the Leningrad dam, which was supposed to protect the city from floods. He scolded her simply out of those considerations that it was a damned communist venture with the transformation of nature. Then the dam was nevertheless quietly completed, and it came in very handy.

How did the fourth-graders study? Very diligently. Study issues were constantly discussed at the pioneer training camp. Then everyone, especially the pioneers, vested with elective powers (detachment commander, line commander) felt their responsibility for the academic performance of the entire class. Hence the now forgotten practice of pulling up Losers-C-A students. Today, the student's progress is his own business, well, even the parents who can hire a tutor. And then it was a common cause. I still found this practice.

The heroines of the story help the weakest girls. This is very useful for both. Nothing helps to understand the material so well as to present it to a poorly understanding comrade. Then they still try to understand what is the reason for the poor performance of their friends. It turns out that they are different - the reasons. One simply cannot organize her working day: during the day she walks or watches TV, and sits down for lessons when it’s time to sleep. Another is crammed by an overly strict dad who makes her memorize without consideration. Having found an individual approach to each (in which the teacher helps them), the girls perfectly prepare all the failing students for the exam and they pass it for four and five.

Yes, there were exams in the fourth grade! Written Russian, oral Russian along with literature, written mathematics (more precisely, arithmetic). I think this is very cool! This is a holiday of knowledge, an account of the past, summing up the results of the annual work. Then the first exam was in the 4th grade, and then in all. My Russian teacher said that it was very good: the students pulled themselves up, brought into the system in their heads what they had learned.

Another curious thing. It is generally accepted that in Soviet times everyone was cogged down, and then American gurus came and began to teach everyone leadership, team building and other advanced materials. But in fact, everything was almost exactly the opposite. Fourth-grade girls, at least some of them, are real leaders: they organize small-group exam preparation classes, build friendships with the orphanage. My mother-in-law told me that this was exactly what happened. They were true masters of life, they felt responsible for what was happening - first at the level of the class, then - at the level of the country. Already in our childhood, this feeling has undergone a fair amount of corrosion. People began to think more about themselves and their successes, and not about the common cause. The result was not slow to show itself.

Another curious thing. Girls are characterized by self-criticism - in the sense of the desire to analyze their actions, and the identification of what was done wrong. This contrasts with the current trend, when children are usually praised with enthusiasm for any kalyak, and they themselves are taught to constantly be delighted with their bright individuality. This is a completely different style, approach, atmosphere. At the same time, they do not “spread rot” to anyone, but simply evaluate them correctly, thereby helping to become better, to rise to a new level of development.

Here is a book I live in Cyprus. I love her for the spacious, bright world that is described in her. Was he like that? My mother-in-law, who was several years older than these girls, says that it was.