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

in. Tatarsky realised, however, that this rule did not apply to everyone.
The true virtuosos of the genre, whom he saw on TV, somehow managed to sell
off all that was most exalted every day of the week, but in a way that
provided no formal grounds for claiming they'd sold anything, so the next
day they could start all over again with nothing to worry about. Tatarsky
couldn't even begin to imagine how they managed that.
Gradually a very unpleasant tendency began to emerge: a client would be
presented with a project conceived and developed by Tatarsky, politely
explain that it was not exactly what was required, and then a month or two
later Tatarsky would come across a clip that was quite clearly based on his
idea. Trying to discover the truth in such cases was a waste of time.
After listening to his new acquaintances' advice, Tatarsky attempted to
jump up a rung in the advertising hierarchy and began developing advertising
concepts. The work was much the same as he had been doing before. There was
a certain magic book, and once you'd read it there was no more need to feel
shy of anyone at all or to have any kind of doubts. It was called
Positioning: A Battle for your Mind, and it was written by two highly
advanced American shamans. Its essential message was entirely inapplicable
to Russia - as far as Tatarsky could judge, there was no battle being waged
by trademarks for niches in befuddled Russian brains; the situation was more
reminiscent of a smoking landscape after a nuclear explosion - but even so
the book was useful. If was full of stylish expressions like 'line
extension' that could be stuck into concepts and dropped into spiels for
clients. Tatarsky realised what the difference was between the era of
decaying imperialism and the era of primitive capital accumulation. In the
West both the client who ordered advertising and the copywriter tried to
brainwash the consumer, but in Russia the copywriter's job was to screw with
the client's brains. Tatarsky realised in addition that Morkovin was right
and this situation was never going to change. One day, after smoking some
especially good grass, he uncovered by pure chance the basic economic law of
post-socialist society: initial accumulation of capital is also final.
Before going to sleep Tatarsky would sometimes re-read the book on
positioning. He regarded it as his little Bible; the comparison was all the
more appropriate because it contained echoes of religious views that had an
especially powerful impact on his chaste and unsullied soul: The romantic
copywriters of the fifties, gone on ahead of us to that great advertising
agency in the sky ...'


CHAPTER 3. Tikhamat-2


Lenin's statues were gradually carted out of town on military trucks
(they said some colonel had thought up the idea of melting them down for the
non-ferrous metal content and made a lot of money before he was rumbled),
but his presence was merely replaced by a frightening murky greyness in
which the Soviet soul simply continued rotting until it collapsed inwards on
itself. The newspapers claimed the whole world had been living in this grey
murk for absolutely ages, which was why it was so full of things and money,
and the only reason people couldn't understand this was their 'Soviet