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

years someone had told him that when he grew up he would be a copywriter,
he'd probably have dropped his bottle of Pepsi-Cola on the hot gravel of the
pioneer-camp beach in his astonishment. In those distant years children were
expected to direct their aspirations to-


wards a gleaming fireman's helmet or a doctor's white coat. Even that
peaceful word 'designer' seemed a dubious neologism only likely to be
tolerated until the next serious worsening in the international situation.
In those days, however, language and life both abounded in the strange
and the dubious. Take the very name 'Babylen', which was conferred on
Tatarsky by his father, who managed to combine in his heart a faith in
communism with the ideals of the sixties generation. He composed it from the
title of Yev-tushenko's famous poem 'Baby Yar' and Lenin. Tatarsky's father
clearly found it easy to imagine a faithful disciple of Lenin moved by
Yevtushenko's liberated verse to the grateful realisation that Marxism
originally stood for free love, or a jazz-crazy aesthete suddenly convinced
by an elaborately protracted saxophone riff that communism would inevitably
triumph. It was not only Tatarsky's father who was like that -the entire
Soviet generation of the fifties and sixties was the same. This was the
generation that gave the world the amateur song and ejaculated the first
sputnik - that four-tailed spermatozoon of the future that never began -
into the dark void of cosmic space.
Tatarsky was sensitive about his name, and whenever possible he
introduced himself as Vladimir or Vova. Then he began lying to his friends,
saying that his father had given him a strange name because he was keen on
Eastern mysticism, and he was thinking of the ancient city of Babylon, the
secret lore of which was destined to be inherited by him, Babylen. His
father had invented his alloy of Yevtushenko and Lenin because he was a
follower of Manicheism and pantheism and regarded it as his duty to balance
out the principle of light with the principle of darkness. Despite this
brilliantly elaborated fable, at the age of eighteen Tatarsky was delighted
to be able to lose his first passport and receive a new one in the name of
Vladimir.
After that his life followed an entirely ordinary pattern. He went to a
technical institute - not, of course, because he had any love for technology
(he specialised in some kind of electric furnace), but because he didn't
want to go into the army. However, at the age of twenty-one something
happened to him that changed the course of his life for ever.
Out in the countryside during the summer he read a small volume of
Boris Pasternak. The poems, which had previously left him entirely cold, had
such a profound impact that for several weeks he could think of nothing else
- and then he began writing verse himself. He would never forget the rusty
carcass of a bus, sunk at a crooked angle into the ground on the edge of the
forest outside Moscow at the precise spot where the very first line of his
life came to him: "The sardine-clouds swim onwards to the south.' (He later
came to realise this poem had a distinctly fishy odour.) In short, his was
an absolutely typical case, which ended in typical fashion when Tatarsky
entered the Literary Institute. He couldn't get into the poetry department,
though, and had to content himself with translations from the languages of