"Viktor Pelevin. Code of the World " - читать интересную книгу автора

Viktor Pelevin.

Code of the World


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Published: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.02.2001.
Translated by Kirill Zikanov
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A man is half of what he is, and half of he wants to be, said Oscar
Wilde. If that is the case, then the Soviet children of the sixties and
seventies were all half-cosmonauts. I know this for sure, since myself, at
the age of seven-eight years I was such a half-cosmonaut. It is strange, but
already then I surmised, that this is all a child's delirium that will pass
with the years. At the same time, I told myself: "I know, everyone wants to
be a cosmonaut. But this is completely different for me! I actually want to
become one, for real! And if this passes for others, please! Not for me!?
I think that many of my peers, dreaming of flying into space,
penetrated the same depths of self-reflection. A few even held the oath - a
few cosmonauts, after all, actually existed. However that may be: at that
time, we all, from young to old, lived with one foot in the cosmos. The
cosmos was everywhere. In school books, on the walls of houses and on the
mosaics in the Moscow metro: a snub-nosed cosmonaut, behind the glass of his
helmet- aquarium, was doing some symbolic work - planting a small green
sprout into a dimple on Mars, or reaching a satellite to the stars. In the
fumes of the cities he was always and everywhere, so he became to some
degree a constant witness of all that was happening, a constant "third", the
same kind of hypostasis, as that Lenin, who is dragging that log during a
subbotnik. In this case the adults assumed him, in all likelihood, for the
inevitable boon companion, who although made no contribution to the purchase
of the bottle, also did not drink much. It could be that the couple of
drops, that the alcoholics ritually sprinkle on the earth before the bottle
makes its first round, are dedicated to him.
Under the windows of the five-storied khrushchevoks stood models of
satellites. In the tear-off calendars, one spaceship was followed by
another. The flow of space allusions opened, so to speak, the road to the
future during the Soviet working days, and did not let the stink of life
strike the nose. The world around seemed to be a tent camp, in which the
people lived only temporarily, until the sun city is built. And the fact
that this camp existed almost eternally, we did not remember, in the
apotheosic moments of our space illusions: on television they were showing
the launches from Baikonur. These were the moments, when the cosmonauts from
the friezes on the houses came alive. In their suits and hoods, with
microphones by their lips, they waved with their hand to the viewers for a
last time, before turning and walking to the white phallus that stood ready,
aiming into the dark-blue Kazakhstan sky.
One accessory from the cosmonaut equipment seemed especially mysterious
to me. They carried with them small, pot-bellied suitcases that shone steel