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177 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
Once I was in lower Manhattan. I stopped by a bar named Johnny's. I went inside, ordered a coffee, and found a seat by the window.Later, when someone asks him what he finds most striking about America, he answers, "The fact that it exists. That it is a reality." I think a lot of Americans who have traveled to Russia would say something similar.
I sensed that there was someone under the table. I bent down- it was a bum, drunk. A black guy, completely drunk, wearing a red shirt.
And suddenly I nearly cried with happiness. Could this really be me, drinking Irish coffee in a bar called Johnny's, with a black bum under the table?
the suspicious similarity of characteristics between guards and prisoners or, speaking in the broadest terms, between 'prison' and 'freedom'...One single, soulless world extended on either side of the restricted areas.This reinforces certain thoughts that I've been having lately. I had never lived in an authoritarian country until this past year, and I have to say that it doesn't feel very different from living in 'freedom', at least on the surface. But it's so easy to live on the surface, isn't it? Just as in America, people here stare at their phones, yell at their kids, eat at McDonald's, go to superhero movies, and generally go on with the hideous banality of their lives. I was here on election day, and angels didn't weep (or if they did I didn't hear them), blood didn't rain from the sky.
Soviet rudeness often takes a legitimized form of injunction. I have read many announcements in my life that startled me, but I especially remember three. The first one I saw on the wall of a Leningrad food store. It read: "THE GUILTY WILL BE PUNISHED!" After that, not a word. A threat ominously addressed into space.
Apropos: In this same food store, a friend of mine saw a note lying on the cover of a zinc tub: "Zina, don't water the sour cream, I already watered it."
The second announcement was on a wall in the office of the head of the militia in the city of Zelenogorsk. It read: "DON'T ASK ANY QUESTIONS!" This order reeked of hopelessness.
But the most surprising announcement of all was one I saw in the admissions office of a country hospital. It consisted of two words -- "NOT ALLOWED" -- followed by three exclamation points.
“Gud ivning,” Bortashevich said, “good thing you showed up. I’m wrestling with a philosophical question -- why do we drink? Let’s suppose, as they said earlier, it’s a vestige of capitalism in the mind of the people, a shadow of the past...And, mainly -- the influence fo the West. Even though we really let ourselves go in the East. But that’s all well and good. Just explain this to me. Once I lived in the country. My neighbour had a goat, a lush the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Be it red wine, be it white -- just pour it. And the West here had absolutely no influence. And a goat has no past, you would think. It’s not like he was an old Bolshevik ... So I thought, maybe some mysterious power is locked up in alcohol, something like the one that appears when the nucleus of an atom breaks up. So couldn’t we harness it for peaceful aim? For example, to get me demobilized before my term is up.”
As is well known, the world is imperfect...How does the activist, the revolutionary, choose to act in this situation?...What does the moralist try to do in this situation?...
The artist takes a different path. He creates an artificial life and uses it to supplement the vulgar reality. He creates an artificial world in which nobility, honesty, and compassion appear to be the norm.
The results of this knd of activity are known a priori to be tragic. The more fruitful the efforts of the artist, the more deeply tangible the rift between dream and reality will be. Everyone knows that women who overuse cosmetics begin looking old earlier.
I understand that all my arguments are trivial. It was no accident that Vail and Genis dubbed me ‘the troubadour of honed banality”...My conscious life was a road to the summits of banality...I needed twenty years to master the banality instilled in me, in order to make the step from paradox to truism.