…Crying parents come to the guardhouse at the foot of the mountain and say:
– Yesterday our son went to the mountains to ski, and he still hasn’t returned!
– Wait a moment. What is your son’s name?
– Vasya Pupkin!
– Yandex, come to me!
A healthy St. Bernard runs up to him:
– Vasya Pupkin, understand? Look!
After some time, Yandex comes back and says:
– Your search didn't find anything in the mountains of the RuNet. I found 283,265 Vasyas and 222,388 Pupkins. Maybe you should search the valley of the Internet?
(Computer tales)
For the query “Vasya Pupkin,” Yandex's search results are: 1,059,012 pages, at least 1,588 websites. Google's search for the same query returned 244,000 pages.
So who is this famous Vasya Pupkin? Let's turn to Wikipedia :
Vasya (Vasily) Pupkin is a modern folklore character. For a long time, his origins remained a complete mystery. The mystery was solved when information about the character's origins was published in the October issue of “Y2K” in Hacker magazine (however, the veracity of this information is somewhat questionable).
The founder of the Pupkin family was a Viking, Earl Pupkur, who arrived in Rus' in ancient times. There, he married a Russian girl, and from them came the Pupkovich line. Tsar Peter the Great even gave them a large plot of land in Siberia for their services. The city of Pupkinsk, which later disappeared, was founded there. There are also legends about the mysterious land of Puplyandia, located somewhere in the Amazon jungle, where, according to rumors, part of your (the Pupkin) family lives, having migrated there during the Age of Discovery, but we have never found any concrete confirmation.
There is evidence that Vasily Pupkin compiled an arithmetic textbook for gymnasiums, published in the Russian Empire. In Sergei Lukyanenko's book “Transparent Stained Glass,” we read the following:
Poor Vasily Pupkin, author of an arithmetic textbook for parochial schools! He had no idea how cruelly his students, exhausted by problems about swimming pools and trains, would deal with him. They would make his name a household word, worse than any Mr. Smith.
“Vasya Pupkin” is an exemplary name used to describe an unknown or anonymous individual. It's typically used to describe a certain type of self-assured writer, political scientist, etc., as well as a self-assured participant in online discussions and forums. Typically, they're not burdened with intellect.”
Vasya Pupkin is considered the average RuNet/Internet user (many consider him the most legendary figure on the RuNet!). This is how people usually introduce themselves (in chats, on forums, in correspondence) when they don't want to reveal their real name…
Incidentally, Russian television journalists recently finally found a person with the same full namesake as Vasya Pupkin. He's an elderly Russian farmer. He was very surprised by his worldwide fame…
