Konstantin Dyachkov

Series  Summer residents

Vladimir Konstantinovich, a famous in St.Petersburg design engineer and also my neighbour in the country, is seventy five. About ten years ago he had an infarction and needed a surgery to prolong his life. The surgery would cost twenty thousand dollars. The old man decided not to pay, quit his job and moved to his inherited estate in Liuboni village, Novgorod region. Ludmila Nickolayevna, his wife, told me long time ago that he was a Chechen of noble birth – from a family that surrendered in the nineteenth century and swore allegiance to the emperor. Potatoes, carrots, orchard, mushrooms and berries, bath, fishing, beautiful wife and two neuter cats – this is almost the complete list of present concerns Vladimir Konstantinovich has.

On the other hand, the law punishing for not working in a specific place ceased to exist about twenty years ago. It meant that since then young and middle-aged people could seek both inner and outward freedom. From then on they did not have to tie themselves to a strict working schedule and three weeks of paid vacation. Nowadays the vast expanses of villages are not only inhabited by retired people and alcoholics but also attract young people full of energy and ideas. Inversion of postindustrial society takes off the tension of Russian original xenophobia. Local young people go to Moscow and St. Petersburg in search of television happiness and become a dead weight there. At the same time young inhabitants of large cities, grandchildren of the revolution, come to villages to restore what their grandfathers and fathers destroyed for decades. On summer weekends the village life is brightened with newly-made ‘office stewards’. These city-dwellers come to the land of their ancestors to relieve themselves of stress they get in their career.

Also, in our land there are many good and kind people, who come here to live a simple and honest life, to have a primeval freedom peculiar to those who build all they need with their own hands. You have it when you eat food grown by yourself, when you understand that you are surrounded by nature and people that live without hand-made laws, without any thought of rules and order, and without any violence. They just live and are content with exactly the share the Lord God gave everyone.

Konstantin Dyachkov

Previous     Next

Page     from 5

Designed by Noga / Fantasy Design