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

when he no longer needed anything from this woman or this sand or this sea
or even from himself. The dark melancholy into which he was plunged by this
thought was so profound that at its very deepest point he unexpectedly
discovered light: the slogan and the poster for Parliament that he had been
searching for suddenly came to him. He hastily pulled out his notebook - the
pen turned out to be inside it - and jotted the ideas down:
The poster consists of a photograph of the embankment of the river
Moscow taken from the bridge on which the historic tanks stood in October
'93. On the site of the Parliament building we see a huge pack of Parliament
(digital editing). Palms are growing profusely all around it. The slogan is
a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Griboedov:
Sweet and dear Is the smoke of our Motherland
Parliament slogan:
THE MOTHERLAND'S#1 SMOKE!
"Thou lookest out always for number one" he thought gloomily.
Putting the notebook back into his pocket, he gathered up his prizes
from the table and took a final glance around the room. The thought flashed
through his mind that he could take the beautiful woman running across the
sand as a souvenir, but he decided against it. He turned out the light, went
out on to the roof and stopped to allow his eyes to grow accustomed to the
darkness.
'What now?' he thought. To the station.'




CHAPTER 5. Poor Folk


The adventure in the forest outside Moscow proved positively
stimulating to Tatarsky's professional abilities. Scenarios and concepts now
came to him far more easily, and Pugin even paid him a small advance for his
slogan for Parliament:
he said Tatarsky had hit the bull's-eye, because until '93 a pack of
Parliament had cost the same as a pack of Mariboro, but after those famous
events Parliament had rapidly become the most popular cigarette in Moscow,
and now they cost twice as much. Subsequently, however, 'the smoke of the
Motherland' was dispersed without a trace into the thick gloom of a winter
that arrived unexpectedly early. The only dubious echo of the slogan left in
the snowbound advertising space of Moscow was the phrase: 'From ship to
ball', another borrowing - by an unknown colleague of Tatarsky's - from the
poet Griboedov. It was to be glimpsed at one time on large hoarding
advertisements for menthol cigarettes - a yacht, blue sea and sky, a peaked
cap with a sunburst and a pair of long legs. Tatarsky felt a pang of
jealousy at this, but not a very powerful one - the girl in the menthol
advert had been chosen to suit the taste of such a wide target group that
the text seemed spontaneously to read as: 'From ship to balls'.
For some reason the wave of fly-agaric energy that had swept through
his nervous system found its finest outlet in texts for cigarettes -
probably for the same reason that the first truly successful experience of