This Week's Book. Issue 6. Mikhail Zoshchenko. Selected Works
"Here recently, Ivan Antonovich Blokhin, a painter, died of illness. And his widow, a middle-aged lady, Marya Vasilyevna Blokhina, arranged a small picnic on the fortieth day.
And she invited me.
"Come," she said, "to remember the dear departed with whatever God has sent. We won't have any chickens or roast ducks," she said, "and there won't be any pates either. But drink as much tea as you like, to your heart's content, and you can even take some home with you."
I said, "Although there's not much interest in tea, you can still come." Ivan Antonovich Blokhin, I said, was quite kind to me and even whitewashed the ceiling for free.
"Well," he said, "all the more reason to come." I went on Thursday.
And a lot of people showed up. All sorts of relatives. My brother-in-law, too, Pyotr Antonovich Blokhin. A venomous man with an upturned mustache. He sat down opposite the watermelon. And only "You know, all he cares about is cutting a watermelon with a penknife and eating it." (M. Zoshchenko. "The Glass," 1923)
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"We wanted to find out why remarkable people sometimes die so early. We came to the conclusion that they die from a nervous disorder, which subsequently disrupts the functioning of the entire organism. And that this nervous disorder occurs for two reasons.
The first reason is mental conflict, that is, various kinds of contradictions, both of a high social order and personal, everyday nature. The mechanism of this suffering is that the brain becomes overtired from these constant obsessive or difficult thoughts and thereby (being a kind of regulator of the entire functioning of the organism) confuses this work and creates a habit of incorrectness.
The second reason is professional—that is, professional overstrain of the brain, which creates a similar picture of the disease.
However, the professional cause has sources that lie not only in the inability to manage oneself." (M. Zoshchenko. "Regained Youth." 1933)
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"So, our brain has two floors—a higher and a lower.
Life experience and conditioned habits coexist with hereditary experience, with the habits of our ancestors, with the habits of animals.
It's as if two worlds are contained within the complex apparatus of our brain—the civilized world and the animal world.
These two worlds are often in conflict. Higher forces struggle with lower ones. They defeat them, push them even lower, and sometimes banish them altogether.
It would seem that this struggle is the source of much nervous suffering.
However, the troubles lie elsewhere...
Without taking into account the laws of conditioned reflexes, it is impossible to discover the exact causes of nervous suffering.
Without taking into account the mechanisms that arise, Freud saw other forces at work in both normal and pathological situations—a conflict between the higher and the lower, a clash of atavistic drives with a sense of modernity. civilized man.
Freud saw the cause of psychoneurosis in the prohibition of these drives.
But the prohibition of these animal drives and the entire struggle in this sphere is merely a moral category. It should lead theory to a search for moral suffering.
This is precisely what happened. And more than that. Confronted with forces other than sexual, theory began to subordinate these forces to forces of a sexual nature. Even in the feeling of hunger, theory saw Eros. In the fear of losing nourishment, theory discovered the fear of castration. (M. Zoshchenko. "Before Sunrise." 1943)