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

natural philosophy and believed that it's his duty to balance the dark
side with the bright one. Despite this brilliant hypothesis, Tatarsky had
eagerly "lost" his passport when he was 18 and got the new one with the
name Vladimir in it.
After that his life was pretty ordinary. He entered the technical college
- obviously not because he loved engineering (his major was some obscure
electric smelting ovens) but because he didn't want to go to the army.
"There's a draft in Russia, every male of age 18 and who is not college
student is the subject to the draft" But when he was 21, something had
happened in his life that had decided his further fate.
Being on summer vacation in the village, he read a small book by Boris
Pasternak. The poems, towards which he was always neutral before, shook
him so hard that he could not think about anything else for several weeks
and then began to write himself. He remembered forever the rusty carcass
of the bus, awkwardly stuck in the soil in the forest glade not far from
Moscow. It was this place where the very first line came to his mind:
"Sardines of clouds are flying to the South" (later he began to think that
this poem smells of fish). So, this was a typical case and it had ended
typically: Tatarsky had entered the Literature Institute. He didn't manage
to pass to the Poetry Department though, so he had to be content with
translations from the Soviet Republics' languages. Tatarsky imagined his
future like this: an empty auditorium in the LitInstitute during the day,
the context translation from the Uzbek or Kyrgyz which he must rhyme by
the deadline, and the labors in the name of Eternity in the evenings.
Then one event that was crucially important for his future had happened
almost unnoticed. The USSR that had begun to be remodeled and bettered
approximately at the same time when Tatarsky decided to change profession,
have become so much better that ceased to exist (if it's possible for the
state to get into Nirvana, then it was exactly the case). So it made no
sense anymore to speak about translations from USSR republics' languages.
It was a hard blow but Tatarsky survived it: he still had the work for the
Eternity left and it was enough for him.
At this point something absolutely unexpected had happened. Something
began to happen even to the Eternity itself to which Tatarsky had decided
to devote his labors and days. This was something that Tatarsky had
absolutely no way to understand. Wasn't the Eternity something rigid,
inviolable and independent of volatile Earthly situations? At least he
always used to think so. For instance, if that small Pasternak's volume
that had changed his whole life so drastically was already in there, there
was no force in existence that could purge it from there.
It turned out to be not exactly true. It turned out that the Eternity
existed only while Tatarsky believed in it sincerely, and nowhere beyond
this faith did it really exist. In order to faithfully believe in
Eternity, one needs others to share his faith because the faith not shared
by anybody is called schizophrenia. As for the others, including those who
always taught Tatarsky to believe in Eternity - something weird began to
happen to them.
Not that they had changed their views, no. The very space to which these
previous views were directed to (the view must always be directed
somewhere, right?), had begun to reduce itself and to disappear until the