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# From the famous Prigov: “Just stepped out of the bath, and already I remember nothing”
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/iz-znamenitogo-u-prigova-tolko-vyshel-iz-vannoi-i-uzhe-nichego-ne-pomniu/
- Published: 2026-04-30T16:25:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:11.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Archive, Faith, Books, Moscow, Museums, Science, Education, Ethnography

From the famous Prigov: “Just stepped out of the bath, and already I remember nothing.” A month is built much the same way. So let me propose recalling the main things from April's publications in the digest.

🎭 At the Taganka Theatre, Alexander Zolotovitsky has [staged](https://theparnassian.com/pomnite-kak-bylo-u-zhenovacha/?ref=theparnassian.com) “Three Sisters”, in which the sisters strain to get from Moscow to Moscow, and a laid table amid a building site turns out to be the last bastion of dignity, exactly as in Knabe, for whom Rome perishes not at the hands of barbarians but at the moment when things cease to mean what they once meant.

🎓 The Fourth Moscow Gymnasium on Pokrovka [produced](https://theparnassian.com/sredi-kazionnykh-moskovskikh-gimnazii-chetviortaia-stoiala-osobniakom/?ref=theparnassian.com) Zhukovsky, Stanislavsky, Shakhmatov and Alexander Puchkov, the man who devised the comb-plates at the ends of metro escalators and the three-sided bottles for acetic essence. The building survives, but that gymnasium is gone, and in the public memory the Trubetskoy townhouse is not associated with its history.

🩻 Over 130 years of study, the Turin Shroud has [undergone](https://theparnassian.com/v-1898-g-fotograf-sekondo-pia-sdelal-snimki-turinskoi-plashchanitsy-i-obnaruzhil-chto-izobrazhenie-vediot-sebia-kak-fotograficheskii-negativ/?ref=theparnassian.com) radiocarbon analysis, X-ray diffraction, DNA metagenomics and comparison with a tenth-century Byzantine coin. Each new study calls the previous one into question, none overturns the dating of 1988, and the Vatican, as it never spoke, still does not speak.

✝️ In 1929 the philosopher Alexei Losev and his wife secretly [took](https://theparnassian.com/3-iiunia-1929-goda-filosof-aleksei-losev-i-ego-zhena-valentina-taino-priniali-monasheskii-postrig-ot-afonskogo-startsa-arkhimandrita-davida-s-imenami-andronik-i-afanasiia/?ref=theparnassian.com) monastic vows from an Athonite elder. Of the whole habit he wore only a small black skullcap, which for half a century everyone took for an academic cap: one of the best-known Russian thinkers of the twentieth century concealed his monasticism by means of academic fashion.

📜 At Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, archaeologists have [extracted](https://theparnassian.com/v-egipetskom-oksirinkhe-ispano-egipetskaia-ekspeditsiia-barselonskogo-universiteta-zavershila-ocherednoi-sezon-raskopok-i-vernulas-s-chem-to-po-nastoiashchemu-strannym/?ref=theparnassian.com) a mummy of the Roman period with a papyrus inside it bearing the “Catalogue of Ships” from the second book of the “Iliad”, the very passage that ancient readers generally skipped as tedious. Why Homer ended up inside a body with a golden tongue in its mouth is unknown, but two traditions of immortality, the ritual and the literary, met in a single burial.

🐒 Gibraltar's macaques have [learned](https://theparnassian.com/na-gibraltare-zhivut-edinstvennye-dikie-obeziany-evropy-berberiiskie-makaki-okolo-230-osobei/?ref=theparnassian.com) to compensate for tourists' ice cream and crisps by eating red clay, and they pass this habit on by watching one another, not by instinct. One troop prefers tarmac with road tar to clay: cultural variation works among primates no worse than among us.

✏️ The most popular [text](https://theparnassian.com/pervyi-zadokumentirovannyi-sluchai-podlizyvaniia-k-uchiteliu-sokhranila-dlia-nas-shumerskaia-slovesnost/?ref=theparnassian.com) of the Sumerian school curriculum is a poem of around 2000 BC about a boy beaten daily for everything under the sun, until his father invited the teacher to dinner, gave him a ring and thereby made his son top of the class. In four thousand years the principles of meritocracy have not changed.

👑 In his will of 1389 Dmitry Donskoy for the first time legally [designs](https://theparnassian.com/a-peremenit-bog-ordu/?ref=theparnassian.com) the world after the Horde: “And if God change the Horde, my children shall not be obliged to pay tribute to the Horde.” The formula would be taken up by his great-grandson Ivan III, who replaced “God will change” with “And when I, the Grand Prince, shall not pay tribute to the Horde”, and with that “when I” begins the Russian idea of sovereign will in international affairs.

🃏 From the false Formosan Psalmanazar, who lectured at Oxford, to the Piltdown skull, which deceived British palaeoanthropology for forty years, and the Sokal hoax in the humanities journals, the [history](https://theparnassian.com/okolo-1700-goda-po-evrope-stranstvoval-molodoi-chelovek-neiasnogo-proiskhozhdeniia/?ref=theparnassian.com) of academic forgeries has proved a long one. A fresh episode: ChatGPT and Perplexity confidently tell of a fictitious illness, “bixonomania”, from which 90,000 people around the world allegedly suffer.

📖 In a library in Rome, a twenty-second manuscript of “Cædmon's Hymn”, the oldest poem in the English language, in which an illiterate herdsman praises God for making heaven a roof, has been [discovered](https://theparnassian.com/nyne-vosslavoslovim-vsevlastnogo-neboderzhtsa-gospoda-vsemogushchestvo-blagoe-premudromyslie-i-sozdane-slavopodatelia-kak-on-gosudar-predvechnyi-vsiakomu-chudu-dal-nachalo/?ref=theparnassian.com). One of the two oldest copies, incidentally, lies in Saint Petersburg, after the French monastery where it spent a thousand years was plundered by a revolutionary mob in 1791.