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

history dissertation he'd written in the Literary Institute was called: 'A
brief outline of parliamentar-ianism in Russia'. He couldn't remember a
thing about it any more, but he was absolutely certain it would contain
enough material for three concepts, let alone one. Skipping up and down in
his excitement, he set off along the corridor towards the built-in closet
where he kept his old papers.
After searching for half an hour he realised he wasn't going to find
the dissertation, but somehow that didn't worry him any more. While sorting
through the accumulated strata deposited in the closet, up on the attic
shelf he'd come across several objects that had been there since his
schooldays: a bust of Lenin mutilated with a small camping axe (Tatarsky
recalled how, in his fear of retribution following the execution, he'd
hidden the bust in a place that was hard to reach), a notebook on social
studies, filled with drawings of tanks and nuclear explosions, and several
old books.
This all filled him with such aching nostalgia that his employer Pugin
suddenly seemed repulsive and hateful, and was banished from consciousness,
together with his Parliament.
Tatarsky remembered with a tender warmth how the books he had
discovered had been selected from amongst the waste paper they used to be
sent to collect after class. They included a volume of a left-wing French
existentialist published in the sixties, a finely bound collection of
articles on theoretical physics. Infinity and the Universe, and a loose-leaf
binder with the word Tikhamat' written in large letters on the spine.
Tatarsky remembered the book Infinity and the Universe, but not the
binder. He opened it and read the first page:
TIKHAMAT-2 The Earthly Sea Chronological Tables and Notes
The papers bound into the folder obviously dated from a pre-computer
age. Tatarsky could recall heaps of samizdat books that had circulated in
this format - two typed pages reduced to half-size and copied on a single
sheet of paper. What he was holding in his hands seemed to be an appendix to
a dissertation on the history of the ancient world. Tatarsky began
rememberin: in his childhood, he thought, he hadn't even opened the file,
taking the word 'Tikhamat' to mean something like a mixture of diamat
(dialectical materialism) with histmat (historical materialism). He'd only
taken the work at all because of the beautiful folder, and then he'd
forgotten all about it.
As it turned out, however, Tikhamat was the name either of an ancient
deity or of an ocean, or perhaps both at the same time. Tatarsky learned
from a footnote that the word could be translated approximately as 'Chaos'.
A lot of the space in the folder was taken up by tables of kings. They
were pretty monotonous, with their listings of unpronounceable names and
Roman numerals, and information about when they'd launched their campaigns
or laid the foundations of a wall or taken some city, and so forth. In
several places different sources were compared, and the conclusion drawn
from the comparison was that several events that had been recorded in
history as following each other were in fact one and the same event, which
had so astounded contemporary and subsequent generations that its echo had
been doubled and tripled, and then each echo had assumed a life of its own.
It was clear from the apologetically triumphant tone adopted by the author