English / 26.03.2020 / 738
If my parents called me Igor, I'd sit at home. But they named Spartacus. All life is an ad-venture… 
While Spartacus is telling the stories, I remember the plastic clinics in Moscow that are obsessed with service but have forgotten about humanity. The weary doctors there didn't know the names of the patients. They were only interested in speed — to serve as quickly as possible. And in a receipt from the cash register. Spartacus treats patients as human beings, not as units in the business plan...
— I couldn't sleep for shit, — says the doctor.
— Why is that?
— At two o'clock in the morning, the patient woke up... The pain, he said, is wild. Yelling. Well, what should I do? I had to go and prepare my tools.
— Have you cured?
— Yes. But then I couldn't sleep…
Muscovites, having visited Cyprus, often complain about the lack of service. Well, let them try to wake up their dentist at two in the morning... And have him do the surgery af-ter that. No. That's only possible in our Cypriot village...
— The cops put me and my friend in jail, — says Spartacus, another story from his time as a jeweler. — And my friend had long hair, he hid a pencil behind his ear — during the search, the cops did not notice. They put them in jail on Friday. Two days off ahead — nothing to do.
Oleg, a friend of Spartacus, took up painting Jesus on the wall. Then there was the virgin Mary. Spartacus helped. The paintings came out all over the wall.
Then comes a Monday. The cops are coming:
— Who did this?
— God from above... Who-who? Who was sitting here?
The guard left to consult with his superiors. Eventually they gathered a council and called the metropolitan. The church representative silently examined the artists' work... An hour later, a comrade in uniform commands:
— Gather your things and go!
They let the artists out, giving them a farewell parting:
— Get the fuck out of here. And take the metropolitan's card.
The metropolitan wanted a silver prayer scroll...
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The cause of the Great Depression is commonly considered to be an overproduction crisis. I disagree. In my view, the reason for the Great Depression was as follows: the technological landscape changed, but the people were not prepared for it mentally. There was a disconnect between what the people were used to and the new world. Read the history of the First World War. You will see: at first, everyone thought that it would last a couple months. People were used to waging war a certain way. Then, the English had to face the reality that world had changed…
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Far away from the yacht, closer to the shore, tourists were surfing the sea on water skis and jet skis. Children were wading in shallow water, and you could watch them from the little white house on the slope. From this house, you could hear the laughter of the vacationists, the squeals of the children and the roars of the engines. The housing in this area was blatantly called the “Heavenly place”. And in this heavenly place, an older couple was discussing their plans for the day:
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A fat writer Dima Bykov in poor health with his head held high has distinguished himself. He has decided to rank in descending order the passed away colleagues. Some of them has been ranked first, others take second and even third places. Sergei Dovlatov has been taken down a peg next to his classmates. The teacher Bykov gave him a satisfactory grade. He even didn’t hide that he wanted to give him a poor grade.
Dima Bykov has unleashed a war on social media by his ranking. Somebody noticed that the teacher is not good even at his own domain. Someone replied that he have been aware of Dovlatov’s bad marks... I was astonished by the desire to make value judgements about literature and even the literary characters. This approach reeks of the judgments of school teachers. It's not the most pleasant aroma...
