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 43. A stranger in medicine
Are there any come-and-go people in medicine? Yes, as many as one likes! And in Soviet times one could meet a doctor with a vacant look, and now... It is difficult for me to talk about this, as I am a former doctor myself with 25 years of practice as a psychiatrist. Though Vladimir Fainzilberg states that there are no former psychiatrists, I consider myself a former one. Many times I was offered to have a surgery as soon as it became clear that I was a businessman; and some doctors even did not react when I hinted to them that I had a degree in medicine and 25 years of experience. So, a doctor at Kiev clinic "EUROLAB" persistently recommended me to ablate a lipoma of a size of a millet grain, which I had behind my right ear. I told him that I was a former doctor, but he continued even more insistently: "It is even better; you can imagine what will happen, if it starts growing." I replied timidly that I had already had it (the lipoma) for ten years like that, and he: "So what? Nobody knows when it can start progressing, and what consequences this will inflict". He was speaking with confidence, was trying to be convincing, was referring to doctors from Canada and America for some reason, but I could not meet his eyes even once. I am not going to start any discussions; I made up my mind that that was a stranger in medicine. I did not argue with him as well, and was listening to him in silence. I was curious how long he would last and how he would finish our conversation and his proposition. He did not last for a long time, he dashed off our talk and also persistently asked me what I decided. At heart I swore at him, and said aloud that I had to think. That was five or six years ago, I have not observed any progress of the lipoma since then. Though, I keep thinking whether I did a right thing when I swore at the doctor at heart or I should've sworn at him aloud.So Kolya Kovalchuk had decided that he would be the odd man out in medicine even before he became a doctor. Though, I'll talk about it later, first about Kolya.
You just have a look at his photo and you will understand that I am sincere, when saying that he was a handsome guy, tall and slender. By his temper he was calm and had great command over himself. I do not remember any case, when he had a conflict with someone during those three years, he studied together with us. And what kind of study it was! If he stayed at the institute till the graduation ceremony, he could have received a red diploma (a red diploma is given to top students with excellent achievements). And at the same time he was a regular participant of all our parties and feasts, after which he had most awful hangover, no matter how much he had drunk. Kolya even used to say about himself: "I drink in order not to get drunk, but to be sick because of hangover". Kolya was also an active participant of our mischief. Here in the photo you can see our civil defense training. During the training Slavka Sizikov was imitating a wounded in the right arm and as if he had a broken leg. Zhenka and I offered Kolya to tighten knots on Slavka's bandages. And Kolya not only did that, but he even overdid the task. He volunteered to bandage Slavka and not only made the bandages' knots dead tight, but also poured beer on them Slavka was lying with his eyes closed (according to the legend he had lost his consciousness), but when Kolya started pouring beer on his bandages, Slavka smelled beer and opened his eyes. And Kolya also demonstrated good actor skills, he shouted loudly: "I brought him back to his senses, I brought him back to his senses" and gave him a sip from the bottle.
Major Glebov approached them; he reprimanded them for appearances' sake, and then announced that though there were forty minutes left before the end of the class, as soon as all of us were actively participating, he dismissed us; afterwards he warned us that, if we had more classes later, we'd better have no more beer. And he left. From other groups we knew that the scenario would be like that and had brought a significant supply of beer beforehand. And there it started. Part of the students left, though the most active stayed. We were having as much fun as we wanted. It was late spring. It was warm, and the very first birch leaves started showing up. And there Kolya and Valera Kaygorodov, our group monitor, had an argument whether it was possible to climb a birch tree with one's heels over head. Kolya Kovalchuk was stating that it was impossible, and Valera Kaygorodov was insisting that one could do that.
The rest of us were involved in the argument as well, especially when Slavka Sizikov, who was hammered by that time (he always got tipsy quite quickly), announced that Valerka was his best friend, and he would climb a birch instead of him. We made our bets: it was beer against brandy, that he would not climb the tree; he had to climb as high as one's height. Kolya Kovalchuk demanded that his height had to be the criterion, Slavka was objecting. It was decided that the bench-mark would be one meter and fifty centimeters. We did not have a tape measure, so Slavka started measuring with a matchbox; the distance was thirty matchboxes long. Slavka was measuring, and the rest of us were blaming him for cheating and three or four times made him start from the very beginning. Like I said, we had a lot of fun. Somewhere in my photo archive I have the photo of Slavka in a birch tree upside down, but I cannot find it. Well, Slavka lost, to be more exact, Valera lost the bet. Afterwards for quite a long time we were telling everyone how Slavka tried to climb a tree with his legs ahead and even demonstrated that.
Kolya Kovalchuk also excellently shoot Margoline (a small-caliber gun brand), he even had a permanent pass from the Military Department to the shooting gallery of the military unit that was near the Morphology building.
So Kolya believed that he would be a stranger in medicine and did not want to enter a medical institute, but his parents strongly insisted. Kolya loved his parents and agreed to compromise: he entered the medical institute and studied there for three years, but if his opinion about his place in medicine did not change, he would do whatever he wanted. His parents secretly hoped that Kolya would feel sorry for the three years of study, it turned out that they did not know their son well enough. After finishing his third year at the institute Kolya invited our whole group to a restaurant "Kuzbass", and himself paid for the reception (usually we clubbed together to go to a restaurant), and he announced that he had fulfilled his parents' will and was leaving the institute. We sincerely felt sorry, we did not want to part with him, but that was life. Kolya quitted. According to the rumors he graduated from Kemerovo Pedagogical Institute and received a PhD degree.
august, 14 2011
© Copyright: Oleg Syedyshev, 2012
Publishing licence #21204250876
Translated by Viktoria Potykinato content ↑