University Stories

9 hrs. 36 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Author Dmitry Yemets

Narrator Alla Chovzhyk

This book has an interesting story. At one time I worked at our main university, in the department of the history of Russian literature, as a lab assistant. It was a pointless job, not say it was difficult, but it was busy and varied. Printing study guides, writing meeting protocols, preparing conferences, and much more. Back then there were still professors who, when a floppy disk wouldn’t go into the computer willingly, would shove it in with a Dal dictionary. So sometimes you had to work simply as a “typist.” In the evenings, to take a break, I wrote “University Stories,” which in the first version were called “Marasmus Stories” and were a genre strongly similar to the well-known stories by Kharms. A few years ago I decided to revisit them to see if anything useful could be taken from them. I started reading the stories I still remembered with the warmest feelings—and suddenly realized they were very silly and trivial. Out of a hundred stories, at most two or three really appealed to me, and the rest were very “so-so.” It seems there was a petty malice of the graduate student—someone who thinks that he is working for everyone alone. I began rewriting them from scratch, gradually posting them on my network page—and suddenly, it really took off. I got carried away. The characters gained new traits; the stories were redesigned. In general, everything now looks the way it looks. The stories continue to be written and added constantly.

1. University Stories 2. University Days (narrated by Alla Chovzhyk)