"Viktor Pelevin. Generation P (fragment, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

transferred to the huge heavenly advertising agency..."

Morkovin's prediction started to become true - there was less and less
space in ad business for loners and little by little Tatarsky's career
halted. All work was drawn to the agencies that had their own staff
copyrighters and so called "creators". These agencies multiplied really
fast - like mushrooms after the rain, or, as Tatarsky wrote in one of his
concepts: "Like coffins after the Leader" "word game here... 'coffin' and
'mushroom' as well as 'rain' and 'leader' sound quite similar in Russian".
In the meantime, the Leader was finally leaving Russia that he got so much
used to. His statues were transported out of towns on military trucks
(they said that one colonel got an idea to recycle them into non-ferrous
metals and earned a fortune until he was 'banged down'), but some scary
dullness was coming to replace them. Surrounded by it, the soviet type of
soul was quickly finishing rotting and was just falling inside itself.
Newspapers were assuring that the whole world lives among this
dreadfilness for a long time already and that's why there's so much money
and goods in it, and it's only the "soviet mentality" that prevents to
understand it.
What exactly "soviet mentality" or legendary "sovok" is, Tatarsky didn't
completely understand, even if he used this expression often and with
pleasure. Although, from the point of view of his new employer Dmitry
Pugin, he even didn't have to understand anything at all. He had to have
this mentality. That was the very goal of his work - to adapt the Western
advertising concepts for the Russian customer's mentality.
Pugin, the man with black moustache and sparkling black eyes that looked
very much like two buttons, appeared quite suddenly, during the party at
the common friends' place. When he learned that Tatarsky works in ad
business he expressed a modest interest towards him, while Tatarsky
immediately got a feeling of irrational respect towards Pugin - he was
awed by Pugin sitting by the table and drinking tea right in a long black
raincoat.
That's when the talk about the soviet mentality started. Pugin confessed
that he himself had it before but had lost it completely after working as
a taxi driver in New York for several years. The salty winds of Brighton
Beach blew all rotten soviet constructions out of his head and infected
him with an irresistable aspiration to success.
- It's in New York where one can especially well understand, - was he
telling Tatarsky while they were having some vodka right after tea, - that
one can spend all his life at some small stinky kitchen, looking outside
the window at the shitty dirty yard and chewing on some fucking cutlet. So
you'll stand by the window like this, will look at all this shit and junk,
and your life will pass little by little.
- Interesting, - replied Tatarsky thoughtfully, - but why to go to New
York for this? Or...
- Just because you do understand that in New York, and in Moscow you
don't. - interrupted Pugin. - Right, it's much more of these stinky
kitchens and shitty yards here, but here you would NEVER understand that
your whole life will be spent in them... Until the moment when it will be
really spent. And this, by the way, is one of the main traits of the