"Manyunya" by Narine Abgaryan, summary

This autobiographical novella was written in 2010. It is a light-hearted chronicle of a Soviet provincial childhood in the Armenian town of Berd in the late 1970s and early 1980s, filled with family humor, colorful traditions, and touching coming-of-age experiences. In 2011, the work won the Russian literary prize "Manuscript of the Year," and in 2021, it was adapted into a popular television series. The novella opens the author’s trilogy, the first volume of which later includes "Manyunya Writes a Fantasy Novel" and "Manyunya, Ba’s Anniversary, and Other Worries."

Meeting families and a failure on stage

The story begins with a description of life in Berd. In 1979, during a town festival, the music school choir performed "Buchenwald Alarm." Right in the middle of the song, the wooden bench beneath the choir members cracked, sending the children tumbling to the floor. A plump girl, Manyunya (Maria Shats), was frightened and urinated on the thin girl, Narine Abgaryan, lying beneath her. This curious incident marked the beginning of a strong friendship between the two families.

Narine went to visit the Shats family to meet the head of the household — her formidable, domineering, but sincerely loving grandmother, Roza Iosifovna (Ba). After passing a rigorous politeness test, the girl received a signature shortbread cookie, and Ba became friends with Narine’s mother.

Dangerous Tricks and Blue Heads

Suspecting they had lice, the friends decided to dive into the bathtub for an hour to drown the parasites. An attempt to light the gas water heater resulted in an explosion, burning Ba’s favorite pantaloons. The enraged grandmother washed the girls with ice-cold water and laundry soap and fed them stewed vegetables.

The friends actually got lice from the neighbor kids. Grandma mercilessly shaved both of their heads and applied a mixture of egg yolks, blueing, and sheep droppings to their scalps, using a recipe from a friend in Novorossiysk. The girls’ heads turned bright blue. To hide their bald spots, their mothers sewed them ridiculous Panama hats from old pillowcases.

A hunting rifle and a bowl of jam

Narine’s father, Yura, a dentist, received an IZH-27 double-barreled shotgun as a gift for his work. Left home with their sister, Karine, the girls decided to take revenge on their annoying gym teacher and informer, Martyn Sergeyevich. They loaded their father’s shotgun and fired from the balcony toward a neighbor’s house, 300 meters away. The gym teacher was unharmed, but the bullet pierced a kitchen bucket in the Abgaryans’ apartment. Their mother punished them by throwing the bucket right at Narine’s ear, and their father quickly hid the gun with a colleague.

In the height of summer, Ba was making her signature apricot jam. Any rustling near the copper basin was punished with a slap on the back of the head. A gypsy woman peered through the open kitchen window, offering to tell her fortune and brazenly asserting her right to steal. Ba’s patience snapped: a well-aimed throw of a cast-iron frying pan knocked the uninvited guest unconscious, cutting her forehead.

First love and trips to the mountains

The Abgaryan family went to their dacha in the mountains, where the shepherd Suren brought fresh sour cream daily. Manyunya fell head over heels in love with a twenty-eight-year-old Muscovite named Oleg, who was visiting the neighbors. To attract his attention, the girls first planted a stone covered in leaves in his ditch, disguised it as dolma, then dragged a pile of garbage to the fence, and finally, Manyunya decided to give him a golden family amulet. Oleg’s haughty wife knocked the amulet to the ground and rudely called the girl a name. Deeply shaken, Manyunya vomited right there in the yard. Disappointment in their feelings ended their romantic streak.

Later, Narine recalls her childhood love for a boy named Alik and the story of her electrician neighbor, Aram, who was struck by lightning. After his miraculous rescue, Aram developed a clairvoyant aura, forcing the family to hastily move to Vladikavkaz.

Difficult tours and woolen captivity

The Berdsk music school choir was sent to perform in the village of Movses for the collective farm’s fiftieth anniversary. Due to a bus breakdown, the children and their instruments were loaded into the back of a dirty GAZ-63 truck. The bumpy road ruined their costumes, the piano in the village club was out of tune by a drunken tuner, and Narine, in a panic, forgot her sheet music and played the opening of Beethoven’s "Für Elise" eight times in a row.

At home, Ba began washing sheep’s wool for blankets. Seeing the dried, snow-white clouds, her friends began jumping on them and sprinkling them with sand from the cellar. Upon returning, Ba, furious, beat the mischievous girls with a vine and locked them in the cold, dark cellar, threatening to wall them up alive. Only in the evening did a neighbor help open the heavy door, after which the girls spent a long time scrubbing with a washcloth and were forced to wash all the wool again.

A Tbilisi voyage and an unfortunate haircut

Narine’s father and Manya’s father, engineer Mikhail, drove their brand-new Zhiguli to a football match in Tbilisi. The car was stolen right outside the stadium, and the owners were forced to pay a ransom of 1,000 rubles. The men’s relationship with technology was comical: their old GAZ-69 SUV, nicknamed Vasya, constantly broke down outside the neighborhood, and an attempt to steal wine through a cellar grate ended in the destruction of the wall.

Because of Narine’s nasopharyngeal complaints, her father took her to Yerevan to see the renowned doctor Samvel Petrosovich. Before leaving, her mother gave her husband a crooked haircut with tailor’s scissors, giving him a bowl cut. In the doctor’s office, Narine threw a tantrum, clutching the doctor’s trousers tightly and tearing them. The next day, her father, with his disgraceful haircut, caused a sensation at the funeral of the head doctor’s mother-in-law.

Cinema hype and the birth of Petros

The Indian film "Zita and Gita" was brought to the city cinema. The girls skipped music lessons, endured a brutal crush in the box office line, a fight with locals, and a row with a goat. After the screening, an enraged Ba caught up with them.

Ba’s long-standing feud with her grumpy neighbor Valya ended unexpectedly. Valya’s secretive daughter went into labor quickly. Ba and her visiting grandmother, Nastya, rushed to help and safely delivered the baby, whom they named Petros. The birth of her grandson softened the neighbor’s heart, and the long-standing feud came to an end.

Late-night dining and fashion testing

That night, the friends, along with Narine’s father, secretly ate the fried chicken they’d cooked for breakfast, leaving the pot perfectly clean. Another time, after reading a Polish fashion magazine, the girls decided to tackle their unwanted hair. They shaved each other’s faces with a dull razor, then burned Mikhail’s imported electric razor while trying to shave a stuffed bunny. Grandma punished the mischief-makers with the cord from the broken razor.

Before the wedding of Agnes, a neighbor girl, her friends learned of a false myth about conception. Ba personally took the crying children to the source of the rumor to put an end to the nonsense.

The final on the Adler coast

Before leaving for the Black Sea, Manyunya poured the failed dough into the toilet and clogged the drain with a ladle, then jumped from the second floor with an umbrella. The trip went ahead: both families, along with the four Abgaryan daughters, flew to Adler to visit the music teacher’s relatives.

On vacation, the youngest, Gayane, regularly stuffed beans and sea pebbles up her nose, her father nearly drowned while trying to teach her timid mother to swim, and Ba scared off persistent suitors on the beach. The vacation ended with a warm feast in the southern garden, leaving behind fond memories of a strong friendship.