Humorous Essays Based on students' memories
"All have died
except for those who are alive, and those whom we remember"Confucius
- From the author
- Review of a book by O.P.Syedyshev "The Guys"
- Copyright
The Guys
Essay 1. How I became a student
Essay 2. Mini-dorm
Essay 3. Arkasha
Essay 4. Ditto
Essay 5. Vagram
Essay 6. Eugene
Essay 7. Slava Sizikov
Essay 8. Batya
Essay 9. Tolik and Vagram
Essay 10. Ilgam and Otari
Essay 11. Petya Kozlov and a pipe
Essay 12. Golubev and Sasha Plokhikh
Essay 13. Serezha Sherbinin
Essay 14. Operative surgery exam
Essay 15. Striptease of Leada Syrkasheva
Essay 17. Pseudo wedding
Essay 18. How I was a trade union organi...
Essay 19. Anatomy
Essay 20. #118 Group
Essay 21. RW
Essay 22. Brothers Romashov
Essay 23. Pharmakology
Essay 24. Sambo
Essay 25. Dimka the Wine-Maker
Essay 26. Brewery
Essay 27. Delicacy
Essay 28. Muster
Essay 29. Festival
Essay 30. Cant wait to get married
Essay 31. Beer at lectures
Essay 32. Examinations
Essay 33. The murder will out
Essay 34. An accident
Essay 35. Vendetta
Essay 36. A lesson to remember for a lif...
Essay 38. A wedding ring
Essay 40. How different all of them are
Essay 41. Product #2
Essay 42. A guitar
Essay 43. A stranger in medicine
Essay 44. Oh, sports - You are life!
Essay 45. Canalis nasolacrimalis
Essay 46. Young Communist League (Komsom...
Essay 47. Unus - one out of five
Essay 48. His Majesty photographer
Essay 49. Three tablets of aminazine
Essay 50. "Nothern Lights"
Essay 51. Gentlemen of luck
Essay 52. Brother-2
Essay 53. Three thanks
Essay 54. Superstitious Beliefs
Essay 56. Satanic Grin
Essay 57. 21 Gurgles
Essay 58. Triplets
Essay 59. Pilau on Issyk Kul
Essay 60. Is speculation business or not...
Essay 61. Bitter Sugar
Essay 63. Cream Of Wheat
Essay 64. Feeling Of Pride
Essay 65. Was It Love?
Essay 67. Examination Paper #13
Essay 68. The Devil of Adventurism
Essay 69. Sketching Characters
Essay 70. An Excursion
Essay 71. Winter examinations
Essay 72. Stierlitz is no match for them...
Essay 73. Inhale through your mouth, ple...
Essay 74. Hitler kaputt!
Essay 75. A second-year student
Essay 76. Mistakes should be paid for!
Essay 77. Four letters
Essay 78. Prince of Imereti
Essay 79. There are too few workers and ...
Essay 80. A pood of salt
Essay 81. A Prankster
Essay 82. Let's Man The Barricades!
Essay 83. Now A Kiss!
Essay 84. Briefs
Essay 85. A Miracle!
Essay 86. A mouse!.. in a hairdo? How ve...
Essay 87. A Born Obstetrician
Essay 88. International Children's Day
Essay 91. Here is the one for you, fasci...
Essay 94. A sight for sore eyes
Essay 96. REAR
Essay 97. And you are a gambler, Paramos...
Essay 98. An Ode to Pilav
Essay 99. Always hungry
Essay 100. Dudes
Essay 114. The night before
Essay 119. An autograph
Essay 130. Déjà vu
Essay 137. Twelve
Essay 141. A password is needed
Essay 142. Home brew
Essay 143. Mind what you say
Essay 144. Experimenters
Essay 145. An autograph
Essay 146. Hydrocele
Essay 147. Clip on the back of the head
Essay 148. Al Qasr
Essay 149. We were optimists...
Essay 150. Despotic and wilful person
Essay 151. With a sickle at the balls
Essay 152. Liquidation
Essay 153. Resonance
Essay 154. Shock therapy
Essay 155. Good luck of Victor Kiss
Essay 156. Herd instinct
Essay 157. Cond'omer
Essay 159. The Gypsy Baron
Essay 160. SI system
Essay 161. Foie gras
Essay 162. Divine disposition
Essay 163. Chizhik-Pyzhik*
Essay 164. Culinary terrorist act
Essay 172. At the world's end
Essay 173. Rupture
After graduation
Essay 37 Whyte chrysanthemums
Essay 55 We Are the Eleventh! So What?
Essay 62 Feinzilberg's Mistake
Essay 90 Betwixt and Between...
Essay 92 Those who are drowning are to ...
Essay 93 People, be happy
Essay 116 Here's a fine how d'ye do!
Essay 131 Feminine logic
Essay 132 Bimbo and, pardon, balls
Essay 133 Forty years later
Essay 134 Product #2 again
Essay 136 Striptease of Fomitch
Essay 138 Love and gastric ulcer
Essay 139 A victim of essays
Essay 140 Sleep!
Essay 158 Help-it's a panic
Essay 165 A Hen
Essay 166 The first vacation
Essay 167 Tails
Essay 168 PEA
Essay 169 Sochi
Essay 170 VOLGA
Essay 171 Muriuk
Essay 174 Bear's disease
Essay 175 An escape
Kitchen talks
Essay 39. A brick on the top of the head
Essay 89. Guriev Porridge (or conversati...
Essay 113. Prosperity of Russia
Essay 135. A Prescription
Beyond the Horizon
Essay 16. Its a small world
Essay 66. Paris, Paris...
Essay 95. Milan is a Lucrative City
Essay 102. A Look and Something
Essay 103. Tango 'Magnolia'
Essay 110. Buddha is smiling
Essay 128. Red Light District
Essay 44. Oh, sports - You are life!
Kemerovo State Medical Institute
weight lifting combined team at a beach in Chelyabinsk
A member of the team was one of my first acquaintances at the institute Zhora Chernobay from Kuban, you remember him from my other essays. I did not mention that in the story "A Mini Dorm", and that was the following: every time Zhora went out of a bathroom, Kolya Kozlov and Zhenka Romashov asked him: "Well, the weightlifter, have you established a record in a jerk? (In Russian the word "jerk" and a spoken name of a "toilet" sound the same). How is the equipment, did it stand it?" Everybody was laughing, and Zhora gave a good-natured answer: "You are fools..." At first I did not dare, but then, too, started inquiring about Zhora's achievements in a jerk. In the team there were several guys I did not know well: "Yasha Kutsenko, Kim or An, Serezha Markov and Volodya Terekhov. So the Kemerovo State Medical Institute (KSMI) team went to a Siberia and the Urals weightlifting Championship among the medical schools. Zhora Chernobay was in the second heavy weight, and in the light heavyweight there were two guys: Terekhov Volodya and Tolik Lopatin, and there was nobody in the first heavyweight. And there the most active sports related activities started. It was good for the team to be presented in all weight categories; so V.M.Kalinin pointed at Tolik Lopatin and said: "You must gain five kilos for three days, to be registered in the first heavyweight".
A Don Cossack F.G.Lopatin
A Don Cossack F.G.Lopatin
Though, we could have had two first prizes and the resulting second place for the team. And there our Zhora Chernobay made an exhibition of himself. He lost the first prize to his contestant by the number of approaches to a weight. I would like to tell you about the very first approach and a jerk. After all the peripeteia with Tolik, Zhora got a bit excited by his wit and Tolik's gratitude and Kalinin's praise. That excitement played a mean joke on Zhora. There was a jerk, which Tolik was especially good at; he knew the technique, and mastered it excellently as well as a "low seat" method, but not at that time. Here is the sequence of Zhora's acts. The weight to start with was the one for children - 115 kg. Zhora nicely and even a bit theatrically performed a technical move "low seat". Kalinin flourished; that well Zhora performed everything. And there the unimaginable happened: Zhora kicked his sneakers against a bump of the platform and fell forward, on his belly. The audience shouted: "Ouch!!!" The weight, because of the jerk, went backwards and fell on his back and pressed his waist down. Zhora's belly flattened out almost along the whole platform. And what was the most important, Zhora was not in pain, but could not get up by himself. The weight turned out to be between a messive back and even more messive buttocks. When the audience saw Zhora stirring and that he had not been hurt, it started laughing, and when the assistants freed him from the captivity, the audience burst into storm of applause.
Tolik Lopatin when he was young, or since the moment I got acquainted with him, produced an impression of a calm guy, who possessed great self-command and lacked any adventurism, but as they say, nobody's perfect. Suddenly Tolik showed his other side. It was before the spring examinations for the first year. The KSMI combined team went to a regional championship among universities. That time Tolik was competing in high jumps. It was his, so to say, winning kind of sport. He told us that at secondary school his class teacher had said: "All kids have an awl in their buts, but Lopatin has a spring there". It turned out that in the KSMI team there was no one who could compete in pole-vault. The coach offered Tolik to perform the pole-vault. Perhaps because he was absolutely ignorant about what that was like, Tolik agreed and took his position at the starting line. Just imagine a guy, who took in his hands a pole for the first time in his life and went to perform a pole-vault. He bravely approached the starting line, toll the pole, made his run, pushed off from the ground... and the pole froze in precisely vertical position, and on its top at about four or four and a half meters above the ground, there was "the baby" , whose height was one meter and ninety centimeters and weight - just a bit less than one hundred kilos. The audience at the stands was laughing loud. Tolik jerked, because he felt offended, the pole bended a bit, Tolik unclasped his hands and landed on the other side of the high bar. The judges registered that the bar of three meters was cleared. His friends greeted him, were shaking his hands, and the coach praised him. The next height was 3.5 meters, but Tolik firmly said: "No!" And none of coach's persuasions helped. Those, who are Tolik's friends, know that Lopatin has a heart of stone. If he said something it was invariable.
If you need to form a team to win in pole-vault, you should look for a guy who can pole-vault seven feet high, and not seven ones, who can jump a foot high each. Somebody wise said that. I recollected the expression and liked it, and I took it as an epigraph to the final story.
A Don Cossack F.G.Lopatin
Tolik could carry to successful completion what he had started. And how eager he was to win! He was longing for victory in spite of anything. The following is for you to judge. Lopatin was a second year student of Medical Department and was preparing to take an anatomy exam; at his group the exam was conducted by the notorious Faradey. So on the eve of the examination Tolik went to a store to buy some bread; the lot fell on him. Tolik's roommate was Vagram; they cast lots when there were any chores to do. The lot to get some bread fell on Tolik. And it happened so that on his way he met Volodya Kardashov, who was taking examinations as well, but was more interested in various sports competitions, he was a walking poster. Volodya enlightened Tolik that at a gym of a secondary school #54 there was conducted a "Jumper's Day", to be more exact a high jumps open championship of Kuzbass. "It's cool! That's how I've got some bread", - Tolik thought. (Perhaps, it was he who made the expression popular). "Tonight I'll stretch my muscles, and there are three full days left before the exam". Tolik did not walk, but flew as if he had wings back home. Though, he calmed down at the entrance. Vagram was waiting for bread, he was already cutting sausage to make sandwiches; a kettle was already boiled. And when they were devouring the sandwiches with the "Doctor's" sausage, Tolik, innocently asked Vagram for an advice: "Vagramchik, don't you think it would be good, if I stretch my muscles?" and told him about the "Jumper's Day". Vagram himself liked to go to Russian baths together with me before his exams, so he replied without a moment's thought: "Yeah, go, do it, but do not come back without scoring a victory". Tolik even stopped chewing; one could not overeat before the jumps; he quickly put his red T-shirt in his bag. And Vagram continued making fun of him: "And take yellow boxers". Tolik was surprised: "Why yellow? I've got white boxers and socks". Vagram was laughing loudly and promised to tell Tolik the reason why after the competitions. Tolik grabbed his sneakers and his training suit and quickly left. It was a short walk. Tolik did not notice how he got there. He was not a beginner at that kind of competitions, so he knew all of his potential competitors.
The best Kuzbass students - high jumpers
Yura and Kolya were nice, friendly guys, so Tolik confessed to them that he had gotten sick and tired of that anatomy, and decided to stretch his muscles and do something different. So the competition started. Tolik was at his best, and cleared the first three heights of 170, 175 and 180cm from the very first try, playfully and with significant potential. Kardash was raving on his bench; it looked like he had something else except his beer. A height of 185cm was set; that was Tolik's best result, and he cleared it from the first try as well. Yura Lobastov and Kolya Teplyakov had cleared the height too, but from the second and third tries. So the bar was set at the height of 190. And as Tolik said afterwards, he even had not thought that the height was seven centimeters higher than his own height, and that that was his personal record. Generally speaking, he came to stretch his muscles, and not to compete. He ran up, jumped and heard the enthusiastic yell of Kardash: "He's cleared it!!!". Kolya, too, cleared the height of 190 from the second try, but Yura failed. And then they were shaking in their shoes, the height of 195 was not cleared neither by Tolik, nor by Nikolay. Tolik won by the best tries summed up. Like I told you, he was a Cossack, a Don Cossack, dashing Cossack. "Have you had a good warm up?" - was the only thing the guys managed to ask him. Don't forget that at that time the fosbury flop technique was not developed, the guys were jumping the regular "throw-over" way. Tolik barely managed to get rid of Volodya Kardashov, who was demanding to have a party to celebrate his victory; when he got home he announced to Vagram that his requirement to score a victory had been fulfilled, and it was Vagram's turn to explain why he had suggested him wearing yellow boxers. Vagram again was laughing for a long time, and then told Tolik a joke about Chapayev and Pet'ka (Russia's Civil war, 1918-1921, heroes, main characters of series of jokes), the one about Chapayev's red shirt and his yellow riding breeches. That time both of them had a good laugh.
The facts for the story were kindly given by A.G.Lopatin.
august, 16 2011
© Copyright: Oleg Syedyshev, 2012
Publishing licence #21204250880
Translated by Viktoria Potykinato content ↑