"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Victor Pelevin.

Babylon


Copyright Victor Pelevin 1999
Translation Copyright Andrew Bromfield 2000
FABER AND FABER
Origin: Џ®Є®«Ґ­ЁҐ "Џ"
OCR: Scout






All trade marks mentioned in the text are the property of their owners.
All rights are reserved. Names of goods and politicians do not indicate
actual commercial products; they refer only to projections of elements of
the politico-commercial informational field that have been forcibly induced
as perceptual objects of the individual mind. The author requests that they
be understood exclusively in this sense. Any other coincidences are purely
accidental. The author's opinions do not necessarily coincide with his point
of view.

CHAPTER 1. Generation 'P'


Once upon a time in Russia there really was a carefree, youthful
generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea and the sun, and chose
Pepsi.
It's hard at this stage to figure out exactly how this situation came
about. Most likely it involved more than just the remarkable taste of the
drink in question. More than just the caffeine that keeps young kids
demanding another dose, steering them securely out of childhood into the
clear waters of the channel of cocaine. More, even, than a banal bribe: it
would be nice to think that the Party bureaucrat who took the crucial
decision to sign the contract simply fell in love with this dark, fizzy
liquid with every fibre of a soul no longer sustained by faith in communism.
The most likely reason, though, is that the ideologists of the USSR
believed there could only be one truth. So in fact Generation T' had no
choice in the matter and children of the Soviet seventies chose Pepsi in
precisely the same way as their parents chose Brezhnev.
No matter which way it was, as these children lounged on the seashore
in the summer, gazing endlessly at a cloudless blue horizon, they drank warm
Pepsi-Cola decanted into glass bottles in the city of Novorossiisk and
dreamed that some day the distant forbidden world on the far side of the sea
would be part of their own lives.
Babylen Tatarsky was by default a member of Generation 'P', although it
was a long time before he had any inkling of the fact. If in those distant