How much does a person, deprived of conveniences and technologies, degrade?

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

In the middle of the hut, dark with smoke and soot, among the pots, pebbles and rags, a camera is mounted on a tripod. A grimy, bearded man stands in front of her, his dirty hands folded across his chest. A braid descends from under a shaggy hat with a snake on the shoulder to bury itself in the buckle that holds the two parts of the gray woolen cape together. “After five months of the project, we finally achieved what we wanted from the very beginning - speech is very sluggish, words seem to be forwarded across a jelly river before sluggishly falling out of our mouth, - thoughts are occupied only by food, preparation of firewood and sometimes the sun. " An agonizing pause, during which the bearded man's gaze slides through the force of the branches heaped on the floor. "Here".

Meet Pavel Sapozhnikov, a participant in the "Alone in the Past" project, who got lost in time of his own accord and turned for six months into an ancient Russian peasant living as a hermit in an authentic settlement of the 10th century.

House (1) is divided into three parts: on the sides of the upper room there is a barn and a crate for storing supplies. Not far from the dwelling, a glacier bit deep into the ground (2) - here the water freezes in winter, and the ice then allows you to store food for a long time. Several wicker sheds, a well (3), an outdoor bread oven (4) and a tiny soap-room - a black-fired sauna (5).

“Alone in the Past” was invented and implemented by the Ratobortsy agency of historical projects as an experiment designed to find out how people lived before the invention of computers and traffic jams and, not least, how the refusal from constant communication, conveniences and technologies will affect the modern person. As soon as Paul's seven-month immersion in the past ended, we met with him and, looking into his eyes, cautiously asked: "Well, how is it?"

Terms of the project

1 Communication with people, except for a psychologist and a doctor sometimes coming from the forest, is prohibited.

2 Evacuation only in case of a threat to life. No modern medicines can be transported into the 10th century.

3 There is no cable TV, news, Internet and no robot vacuum cleaner. You can only use copies of tools from the excavations, any modern technology is prohibited.

In the beginning there was a field

The farm, torn out of the primeval times by its roots, was built on a field near the village of Morozovo, Sergiev Posad district in the Moscow region. Pavel explained that there is a base nearby, where the "Ratobortsy" are preparing for various historical festivals. The place is uncrowded and at the same time accessible. By the time the construction began, lines of trucks with building materials were drawn there. Everything is strictly historical, no nails and fillers. The tree, smelling of resin, is processed with a scraper, the ancestor of the plane straight from the 9th century; a deer skull is placed on the fence - a talisman against evil spirits. Why did not the choice fall on Siberia or Karelia, where full-fledged hunting and fishing are possible, and a hole in time was drilled so close to a large city? The buildings are planned to be used after the end of the project, and, as experience shows, the houses left by a person quickly fall into disrepair: the first version of the farm unattended was overgrown with weeds in just six months.

From the first person “Honestly, I see no reason to engage in the reconstruction of chivalry or medieval Japan, if our story is no less interesting. Therefore, for a while he became a resident of Ancient Russia.

You don't have to think that I was just brought in and left alone in this artificial past. I have been doing the project from scratch. That is, he prepared it both at the design stage and at the construction stage as well.

I remember the very moment of travel in time, frankly speaking, badly. Before that, I was systematically and very efficiently preparing myself with the help of alcohol, so when everyone left, I seemed to sit by the fire and quickly went to bed. Only in the morning did I realize what I had got myself into."

“I had dried mushrooms and berries. Some fish, which, alas, quickly deteriorated. And, of course, lentils, rye, wheat, barley and peas, which I sincerely hate. Goats gave milk, chickens rushed, although I could not always immediately find where exactly. The diet is rather meager, but did not experience hunger. Incidentally, I quickly began to understand very clearly how much and what I need to eat in order to do certain things. That is, theoretically it was possible to go into the forest and dump such a tree, but after that I would lie at home for a couple of days, unable to do something more important: I simply would not have enough calories. And there was a terrible lack of fruit: oranges, kiwi, bananas. Probably, something was missing in the body. I really wanted a gin! Well, remember, with such a juniper smell."

Tit menu

Paul is exploring a new place. Sometimes, returning from a walk in the woods, he puts his hand on a log of a log house heated by the sun to feel how his new home breathes. The house, by the way, has already acquired some kind of decorations. “I've made new friends. Good Man and Bite. They are very nice and you can talk to them. " Pavel maintains a blog on the project and at the end of the day he records himself on camera. "Friends" - the numb carcasses of tits with open wings suspended from the ceiling. Two are just enough for a pot of stew, so today the carefree cackling chickens are safe. He catches birds not because of a good life: he really wants meat, and cutting layers means depriving himself of omelets and scrambled eggs.

Inspection of the pantry is the first step. There are enough reserves, but they are threatened by time and rodents. The grain sprouts, naked rat paws stomp on jugs of cranberries, dried apples are covered with fluffy mold.

According to the idea of the organizers of "Alone in the Past", the hero can, if necessary, fish and hunt, he was even given a bow for hunting. It is doubtful, frankly, that modern man will survive by earning his own food in this way.

From the first person “But once I even saw the tracks of a hare! Well, in general, what did you want, this is the Moscow region. What kind of hunting is there?"

* * *

“I chose the most delicious herbs for myself and brewed them in different combinations and proportions, not paying much attention to their properties. Yes, and you can read a little there on this birch bark, it’s dark”.

“Do you know what annoyed me the most? Until winter came, people passed by my dwelling several times. Mushroom pickers, apparently, or fishermen. And at least someone looked at all this with interest! As I understand it, lovers of boletus and crucian carp are terribly purposeful people: they will bury their noses in the ground and go about their business, pretending that there is nothing unusual around. How did it happen? You leave the forest - there are medieval buildings. An earthen roof at the house, everything is low, squat."

Facilities in the yard, neighbors bleat

With obvious historical inconveniences, Pavel painlessly squeezes himself into the framework of ancient Russian life. He even allows himself from time to time some delights - contemplation of the sunset under a mug of fragrant broth. I don’t want to go into the house before the cold came: the hut copies archaeological finds from Veliky Novgorod, and the dwellings were not very comfortable at that time. In the center is a nine-meter room in which the subject sleeps and takes food. In winter, there will also be a working workshop. Bunches of grasses and homespun bags of grain, marked with birch bark labels, interfere with leaning your forehead against the low ceiling beams. All this sways at a height inaccessible to rats and mice and exudes an aroma that can drive herbal medicine adherents crazy.

The walls of the upper room are generously covered with soot from the stove, which has settled down like a stone slide on the floor and, mercilessly smoking, cooks food and heats the house. Next to her is a small table; to turn it into a dining room, you need to dust off the floor with a special feather.

From the first person “You don't have to scare anyone about smells or incredible dirt. For some reason, there was no feeling that it was dirty. In the city at the end of every day I want to go to the shower, and there I just calmly washed myself once a week. And it was not because I felt this stickiness, as in a metropolis, - I just understood that it was necessary. I washed my head three or four times during the whole project. So, for real, with ash. Hair, in my opinion, only got better."

* * *

“For some reason, many are sure that during the moments of rest I thought a lot. But after about a month, my thoughts disappeared almost completely. It was very hard to think, it became serious work. It was easier to chop wood. We are accustomed to the fact that everything around gives information: books, magazines, television, the Internet. You analyze it, and the head works correctly. But when you live alone in the forest, there are no special informational reasons. I could not seriously analyze such events as the blowing of the wind or the movement of foliage. That is, in the past, probably, this was enough for people, but now it is not enough."

Medieval routine

While the sun still has time to warm the air, before painting the tops of the trees pink, Pavel prepares for winter: he is storing firewood, re-caulking the walls of the house with moss. The usual routine is also enough: replacing and drying straw insoles, mending clothes (shoe belts rot from dampness), cooking food on fire, war with rodents. Everyday worries to the taste of a modern person are strange: for example, in the list of Paul's household items there is a comb with frequent teeth for combing out lice, if such decide to join the project.

The initial joy from the realization that you have been transported into the past, over time, dissolves into difficult everyday life. Sometimes you don't want to get up in the morning at all, Paul forces himself to go into the forest or chop wood. However, he understands that he will pass very quickly if he is exclusively engaged in everyday life, so he sometimes plays with goats. It would probably be more fun with the dog, but it has already run away for several months.

The usual economic problems, for which the organizers were preparing, faded into the background. Foxes appeared on the farm.

The arrival of mice, rats and foxes, who began to ruin the economy without any doubt, annoyed not only Pavel the peasant, but also Pavel, an inhabitant of the modern metropolis, who no-no, and woke up in it. How? Is he, a person familiar with the Internet, cars and 3D printers, being eaten by some rodents? This is war!

From the first person “If a household like mine is approached thoroughly and correctly, it will take up all my free time - it's true. But when a blues came over me or there was no desire to do something, I understood that if I went for a walk, then nothing critical would happen. I even came up with several games, for example hide and seek with goats: they got used to me very quickly and started yelling if they could not find me. Well, the game usually went on until they found me or I could no longer withstand their heartbreaking cries. In general, at some point it began to seem to me that I can distinguish emotions on goat's faces. It is difficult to describe, but one could tell whether it was pretty animal or not. It's such a complex combination of eye, cheek and beard expression."

“The foxes stole the chicken and the rooster away from me and, in general, quite often impudently circled around the house. For some reason, I made the fight against them a very important thing for myself: I set snares, I made various traps, I even made a spear. And they are very smart, they bypassed everything. But one morning he left the house and saw that the fox was sleeping right in the hayloft. He grabbed the bow, it was hanging on the wall, the only arrow, ran up and fired. I used to train a lot and I was sure that I was good at shooting a bow, but when a cat-sized animal trots thirty paces away from you … In short, the arrow remained sticking out in the ground, but the shaft turned out to be covered in blood. Probably, somehow it passed.

“In order to somehow diversify my life, I talked with goats. True, they did not answer, but later I noticed that I was giving them all human traits. Once I was telling Gorky's poem "The Song of the Falcon", and the goats turned around and left. I was terribly offended by them - I sincerely believed that they had offended me, they deliberately left without hearing! It took two or three days to boycott them. Then, however, I realized that I was losing my mind, forgave the goats and began to communicate with them again”.

Silence

When purely utilitarian issues are resolved, then, making sure that their time has come, psychological problems arise. Most of all, Paul is annoyed not by loneliness, but by information isolation. It is sometimes so quiet on the farm, as if someone had hammered moss into your ears for caulking a log house. Because of this, the sudden cackling of chickens seems unnaturally loud, and the rustle of rats running under the floor can be heard even outside. Time seemed to have lost its way and now blindly wanders somewhere nearby, bumping into birch bark tuyeski and slipping on liquid mud. Pavel wanders for a long time in the forest or, leaning on a fence, examines a vast field, on the edge of which there is a farm.

And then winter came

The cold whiteness stretched to the horizon. The wind tries to squeeze between the logs of the hut, and in despair, angrily begins to pound on the door. Pavel leaves the house less and less, sometimes after collecting brushwood, his fingers become so numb that he cannot strike a spark for a long time and sits in a cold, frowning room.

The mental state of the time traveler is monitored by an expert psychologist Denis Zubkov, who visits him once a month. “One of the most serious tests for Pasha on the project was the depression, which rolled in full force closer to the middle of the project. It was difficult to carry out daily activities, it was difficult to get used to, and then learn to feel good in the conditions of loneliness."

From the first person “The house was sometimes very dark. It's such a special, thick blackness, especially on starless nights. But the sounds frightened me the most at first. I could not understand their source: forest, animals, knock on a cover. You know, according to my calculations, some goats are capable of making about fifty unusual sounds that may be similar to everything in the world. It was very much later that I began to distinguish a hen that had flown off its roost from a goat, which decided to scratch itself on the fence. And first I had to go out into the street or prop up the door with something. The inability to turn on the light or even open the window was also depressing - it was not there! There is no flashlight or mobile phone at hand so that you can illuminate the corner in which someone is scratching. For the tiniest light, you first need to strike a spark, catch it, fan it … And at this time someone is wandering around the house … In general, yes, it was sometimes creepy."

“I somehow had a psychological breakdown, as the psychologist later explained to me, and I killed one goat. They climbed into my house and broke a lot of dishes, but there was nowhere to take a new one. And something found: I started shouting at one, for some reason grabbed an ax and chopped off her head. Then I just thought: what have I done? But you can't put your head back, you had to butcher the goat and salt it. I ate for a whole month. But at the same time it was terribly sorry for her. It's still a pity. Glasha's name was. True, all my goats were Glasha. This, by the way, is very convenient: you call one, and everyone comes.

Imagine, it turns out that killing goats is very stress relieving. I had enough until the end of the project, I was calm. But at the same time, I didn't have a single plate."

Impossibility of civilization

Although spring drove away the cold blues with scattered bird chatter, it brought its own headache. The stove was crumbling, which all this time successfully created the atmosphere of a smoky hookah in the house. Fortunately, the frosts are no longer so strong, and Pavel does not have to bask in the still warm insides of a freshly slaughtered goat. And now you can walk again without fear of frostbite fingers. Perhaps the hermit ends up being the most brutal of the terms of the project. It was much easier for a resident of the Old Russian state to survive in the community. It was possible to share responsibilities: while some are preparing bread, others are preparing, say, firewood for stoves. Doomed to loneliness has a much harder time.

First person

“I had a lot of plans that never came to fruition on the project. Let's say I was planning to get a horse to help me drive the forest. It's great that I didn't - she would have starved to death. I also wanted to build a smithy, they even made a shed for it. But already on the spot I realized that this does not fit into my schedule of the 10th century. While I’m making it (and what’s forging there? For whom?), I don’t have time to milk goats or cook food. Towards the end of the project, I really wanted to take a bath. Do not wash, but sit in hot water. Then I did not act quite sportingly: I went to the village and stole a huge wooden tub there. Moreover, I carefully planned the operation, waited for the darkest time of the day, when, as it seemed to me, people were sleeping especially soundly. I drove away a huge, very heavy oak tub. He wrapped himself all over, cursed everything while pushing in front of him. When I rolled her home, it was already starting to brighten. In order not to postpone bathing, he immediately began to fill it with water. While getting the first bucket from the well, I figured out how many buckets of water I needed. It turned out something like 350, while 200 buckets had to be hot. It's still cold outside - when I heat up the 200th, the first will become ice. I dropped everything, sat down in this empty barrel and stared at the sky for a long time. I remembered Robinson Crusoe and his boat, which he could not launch and which became a monument to impotence."

Last day

Pavel is not eager to return to Moscow, but continuing to live on the farm, in general, does not make sense anymore. The supplies have come to an end, the hardships of life in the 10th century are accepted and realized. The romance of plunging into the past settled on the walls of the log house, eaten into deep notches on the logs, which marked the days before the finale. Pavel begins to reluctantly transport things to the city apartment.

The hole in time in the Sergiev Posad region has closed up. The farm stands, but a bearded man in a greasy gray shirt and a disheveled fur hat no longer walks on it. The buildings are planned to be used for new projects. Perhaps a smithy will be completed for them. The animals did not pay attention to the change of scenery and now live in the 21st century. One of the goats gave birth.

First-person perspective “I thought there would be no problem with returning. But, perhaps, due to the unexpectedness and unpreparedness, everything went wrong: adaptation is very difficult. Work, personal affairs, relationships with loved ones, relationships with everyone else, plans, rhythm of life - in almost all respects everything is bad. I'm too used to doing everything myself and taking responsibility only on myself. A separate item is money - a resource that I have completely forgotten how to use."

* * *

“I am sure that if a modern person falls into the past and is free to use modern technologies there, then he will seem like a superman. I can imagine how dark people were. How slowly their heads worked - without education and constant streams of information. After six months, I became dull, but I just come to my senses.

After the project, my relationship with time has changed a lot. I realized that taking a bath in half an hour or the next day are about the same order of things. There is no need to rush to do something. And in general he became very patient. I learned to cook better. I definitely began to take care of things more carefully, because I didn't have so many of them. I realized that there are three basic things that are important to any person: dryness, warmth, and fullness. Everything else comes after. If at least something is not fulfilled, everything else loses its meaning. If you are in the forest, wet and hungry, you will not give a damn about all the benefits of civilization. It's rather difficult to accept without feeling it."

After the project

189 days is, of course, overkill. Just enough to deliver and give birth to a high quality mental disorder. But if we were in the place of the organizers of the project, we would have arranged from this farm a treatment and prophylactic boarding house for citizens, mortified by civilization.

Tired of crowds of people, of the subway, of an overabundance of information, of the hustle and bustle, of the asphalt under your feet?

A couple of weeks of lonely meditation on the blockage - and now the metropolis with all its restaurants, cinema, hot baths and the absence of mosquitoes seems to you the kind of paradise it is. And most importantly - there are people! Real! There are many, many remarkably live, talking people, all the splendor of which can be understood only if you are deprived of their society for a long time.

What if the apocalypse?

Just in case, we decided to ask Pavel a question that worried us after watching several disaster films. What can an ordinary person do if a universal conflict breaks out and civilization ceases to exist?

“Perish. Quite inglorious, moreover. I am not an expert in the field of survival, I just have some understanding of my capabilities. Even firearms won't help the average person. Rather, it will aggravate his situation. And all kinds of survival kits, dugouts and buckwheat supplies are simply ridiculous."

Specialist comment

Oleinik Tatyana Matveevna, art critic, employee of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art.

The evolution of the hero for the entire time of participation in the project

In the 60s and 70s, during expeditions to the Russian North, I often had to spend the night in poultry huts that still remained in some remote villages. And I have always been amazed at the engineering precision with which these dwellings were created. The smoke went to the chimney holes, never falling below the level of the upper rims, separated from the lower hut by raven-like shelves. Below was perfect cleanliness, not a speck of soot. With all due respect to the authors and participants of the project, I must say that they initially made a number of fatal mistakes, primarily during the construction of the hut. In the Arkhangelsk region, there are architectural reserves, for example the Oshevenskaya Sloboda, where you can get acquainted in detail with the structure of such a dwelling. The chicken hut of our ancestors was much more functional and convenient for life, and in general the peasant life, with all its difficulties, was extremely reasonably equipped, which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the life of the hero of the article.

We must understand that any items of national everyday life (stoves, beds, grips, tuesques, spinning wheels, chests, bast shoes) are things that have been tested and tested over the centuries, providing people with the most comfortable existence for the appropriate conditions. But making them is not so easy without the experience gained from childhood, even with samples and drawings, and you need to use them skillfully. Dirt, dampness, cold and darkness were not at all indispensable companions of our ancestors. In the conditions in which Pavel lived, not a single economic man of that era would have found himself: he would have been much better prepared for both physical labor and household work. Probably, it would be worth choosing a person with experience in agricultural, carpentry, carpentry, tanning and other work for the role of a tester - it would be easier for him to adapt to the environment.