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

love or narcotics determines your preferences for the rest of your life. His
next great success (not only in his own opinion, but in the opinion of
Pugin, who surprised him once again by paying him) was a text written for
Davidoff cigarettes, which was symbolic, because his career had started with
them. The text was based on an advertisement for Davidoff Classic that was
on all the hoardings in the city centre: dark tones, a close-up of a wasting
face with the burden of unbearable knowledge glinting in the eyes, and the
inscription:
THE MORE YOU KNOW: DAVIDOFF CLASSIC
At the first sight of the wise, wrinkled face, Tatarsky immediately
began wondering just what it was that this foreign smoker knew. The first
explanation to come to mind was rather sombre: a visit to the cancer clinic,
an X-ray and a dreadful diagnosis.
Tatarsky's project was in total contrast: a light background, a
youthful face expressive of ignorant happiness, a white pack with slim gold
letters and the text:
'FOR IN MUCH WISDOM IS MUCH SORROW AND HE WHO INCREASES KNOWLEDGE
INCREASES GRIEF.' DA VIDOFF LIGHTS
Pugin said Davidoff's agent would be unlikely to be interested, but
some other cigarette market leader might very well take it. 'I'll have a
word with Azadovsky/ he said casually. 'He's got an exclusive on sixteen
brands.' It seemed to Tatarsky he'd heard that name before. He jotted the
phrase down in his notebook and casually dropped it into several
conversations with clients, but his natural shyness found expression in the
fact that he usually halved the number of brands.
At the beginning of winter Tatarsky had his one-room flat redecorated
after a fashion (against the background of cornflower-blue Soviet-era tiles
that were coming away from the wall, the expensive Italian mixer-tap looked
like a gold tooth in the mouth of a leper, but he had no money for major
renovations). He also bought a new computer, although he had no particular
need for it - he'd simply begun to have difficulties getting texts printed
out that he'd typed in his favourite word-processing program: one more
muffled groan under the iron boot of Microsoft. Tatarsky didn't feel
seriously aggrieved, although he did note the profoundly symbolic nature of
the event: his interface program - a medium by its very nature - was
becoming the most important message, taking over an incredible amount of
computer memory space and resources, and that reminded him very much of a
brazen new Russian running the funds for teachers' salaries through the
accounts in his bank.
The further he penetrated into the jungles of the advertising business,
the more questions he had to which he couldn't find the answer, neither in
Al Rice's Positioning: a Battle for your Mind, nor even in the latest book
on the same topic. The final Positioning. One colleague swore to Tatarsky
that all the themes that Al Rice hadn't touched on were analysed in
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In his heart of hearts
Tatarsky suspected Ogilvy was really the same character who appeared for a
second in George Orwell's 1984 in the consciousness of the hero in order to
perform an imaginary feat of heroism and then disappear into the ocean of
oblivion. The fact that comrade Ogilvy, despite his double unreality, had
nonetheless made it to the shore, lit his pipe, donned his tweed jacket and