The Streamlined Banana

Berdyaev and the masses do not cross paths. Not because his books are missing—but because the school system has foolproof means to leave the minds of graduates with no tools to get him.

Mass microchipping is the surest way to secure society’s sanity. Everyone should just do their job at their assigned assembly line. You a writer? Go crank out text—applying the methods beat into you by college mentors and webinars run by best-selling corporate hacks.

And mind you—it’s best for crickets not to look for trouble off their perches. The small screws of the social machine—processing quantity into new quantity—should spin complying to the demands of business plans…

14

I’m afraid of leaving the impression that I’ve set out on trolling our prize-laureate… O-oh!… Exactly one single sentence has been given out, but what a huge bunch of lies and garbage spilled!

Start with "afraid": Lie Number One, born from the cheap clichés ever rolling out of brainless idiots eager to make a career of a writer. What, is Balzac the only one allowed? It's not like I'm ripping The Wild Ass's Skin off him. It's just a cheap pair of words: "afraid to imagine", "afraid to drop"—as if, what?

Oh, the greedy hunger of fresh-hatched, wide-mouthed baby birds! In fact, I'm not "afraid" or "wary" of—not even "sweat at"—the thought of leaving that impression.

The short time they've spent outside the eggshell keeps them from seeing the upside of growing old. Blinded by looks, they only notice the wheezing, the bald patches, and the fat. It's not given to them—not yet—to understand the deep satisfaction from not giving a fuck. The priceless gift handed to us by our matchless age.

Their ignorance is partly our bad: we don't rush to flash our not giving a fuck with the desperate vanity of upstarts.

I'm not afraid of jack shit. I just grabbed the first lazy phrase within arm's reach for my intro: 'I'm afraid that…' Dropped in in a rush, it serves a textbook lesson to see that the main source of lies lies in the brainless repetition of clunky templates.

Returning (God knows not by my own choice) to the problem of Avdey. He's monotonously dug in like a tick in a puppy's ear—feeding his standard colorless garbage to the same exact listener. You have to hand it to him: he's loyal to his victim. Jiri is living proof—Avdey has annoyed the hell out of him. Especially when he gets wasted on slivovitz and just rambles, drones, and nags, smearing snot all over his face. But let's be honest: how much choice does he have? Is there even an alternative?

I won't say the field is packed, but you can definitely find a few options outside of the goddesses, gods, and little godlings of his Greek pantheon. For instance, you could always address your very own creation: "I recollect that wondrous moment: before me you appeared, just like a fleeting vision, a genius of pure beauty."

Arrogant Pygmalionism, of course—indefensible. From the private journals of her contemporaries, this slut "A. P. K."… Long story short, I wouldn't have looked back at her a second time.

Appealing to future generations isn't banned either. Habitual, lawful occupation of the loyal layers bootlicking communism. The skills passed down to their modern successors. Yep, still licking today. Sure, the target shifted slightly—and now it comes wrapped in St. George ribbons—but it's done with the same enthusiasm, deep and selfless: to reach mutual satisfaction.

Ultimately, you can't rule out addressing yourself—personally. But handling this trick requires extreme caution: you risk pushing your luck straight into a split personality.

(For more details, see the work by S. Ogoltsoff—Russian Prose at the Turn of the 2nd and 3rd Millennia (A Dotted Literary Overview 1983—2023: Sorokin—Dovlatov—Salnikov). Google will tell you where it's located.)

The hitman hired to execute the contract for S*hole chose Jiri as his confidant. Well, so was his choice—the heart wants what it wants (and let Jiri be his judge). But before you think anything bad about me, you should sit down and think it through: why the hell would I even bother to troll this deadbeat? What is there for me to be envious of—his prize money or his writing style?

wouldn't take this guy's writing style if you paid me. As for that prize check, it’s quite a few decades too late anyway—I’d welcome it with my obscene finger up. I mean, what the hell do I need it for? An extra pair of jeans? Mine are still sturdy. Yet for that nothing, you have to bow low, act a platypus with an unnaturally wide smile and cheek pouches full of excess joy—just to secure a stable position of a screw in an eternal scam… Save your troubles—nope.

That’s why the tiniest suspicion of trolling stays groundless, baseless, and brainless. And if it happens that I have to keep little Avdeyka in check here and there, or give his nose a fillip or two, it's purely an educational reflex. Since you happened to be there at the moment of exasperation—here, get it, you little puggle—for the splendor and total misery of courtesans who style themselves to look like the Russian literary elite of the current moment.

As for me personally—what the hell do I need this S*hole for anyway?

On this point, it’s all incredibly simple—by a sheer whim of Chance, this tempting snack of gingerbread happened under my idle claws. And as a regular old graphomaniac, I don't need much to fill my share of eternity… Let us continue, however.

Nikolai Berdyaev never actually stepped away from the term "existentialism." He docilely used it in forms that had already turned habitual: "existential philosophy," "existential center," "existential time," and the like.

But the great merit of this philosopher—still unsurpassed in Russian—lies in the fact that he raised the question of the necessity of purging science of terms inaccessible to those who think "existentially." A chance to completely bypass traditional rote. The Glad Tidings for the likes of me!

Terminology distillation is a fairly labor-intensive process. It is met at daggers by the wunderkinds who can rattle off any piece of absolute garbage from memory, even when in a coma—all while unable to dig the matter. They drum it out so fast it literally swerves your head. A trick far beyond my capabilities. So, to give myself a clue as to what I'm talking about, I had to distill "existentialism"—and the equally quirky "existentiality"—down to a much more clear form, easily pronounced: "essentiality.".

Essentiality is simple: learning what’s what through a person's live experience while they exist.

Now I get it with zero mental strain: why "essential center" means the soul-spirit-persona, and why "essential time" makes way more sense than "existential time." Sure, it's not 100% crystal clear—yet decreased obscurity perks you up, inspires a solid motivation…

Coming back to the current 5-to-6-page quota number fourteen, we see so-called "Slavik" at the age of twenty-one. University is in the rearview mirror. He’s professing his love to his alma mater, harbors dreams of running away to the Kuril Islands—and hitting the open road, in general.

However, his thoughts don’t flutter around the treetops for long—he lands flat on his routine, prosaic ass. Taking a job as a junior editor, alias proofreader, within the city-limits grid. The fire he opens at the four-year-old "dry law" leaves you clueless—the Soviet people long since have broken in the rigorous regulations. No-alcohol tea-party weddings with moonshine poured out of a kettle any different from those of lawless times? Are you kidding?

Then a girl walks up to him with that classic line of theirs: "Remember me?" The game of "What, Where, When, and Wearing What" followed—which he loses by a mile. Out of pity, she finally drops a code word in Spanish, spelled out in Russian letters. Slavik's brain explodes. First, she's hot—he's twenty-one, remember—and to top it off, she's from Crimea!'

The magic impact loaded into the word "Crimea" was demonstrated already twenty years later—by that near-crash landing on the Yamal Peninsula.

How's that for a killer cliffhanger? It definitely hooked some folks, mostly because—back in the day—it was a Crimea girl who forced my virginity.

Though I don’t find fault with Crimea. Moreover, that wild girl’s present address is in northern Italy. One of my granddaughters dug it up after doing some excavations online. But here's a real essential catch: we hooked up with the internet long before those kids—but they're still slicker with it. Some weird paradox.

15

A sudden spleen wave went over me. A certain weariness sat down in my very bones. The moment I wrapped my head around the fact that this is merely 5-to-6-page quota number fifteen—and what a hell of a lot of this damn product is dumped ahead of me…

And as a final blow, Vladimir Dahl sneers out from his four volumes of the Great Russian Language: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, eh? Right, you old fart? Don’t contract pulling the cart if you haven't stuffed enough oats under your belt!" And other barely looked-through entries in his Dictionary.

Holy hell—four fat volumes! I'm an old man, not a tractor. My overall mood, honestly, is in sync with a mountain climber's. The one who stopped at the foot of a peak, staring up with his jaw on the floor, thinking to himself: "Man! Aren't we completely fucked!"

Though maybe he doesn't think at all—given he got free, regime-provided education. In that scenario, his feet do the thinking: "But who needs it? Are we contracted for climbing this SOB's Kilimanjaro? Grunt-hauling Avdey's trash in our backpack—as the grand symbol of modern Russian literature!"

But the guy bossing the show from under a faded baseball cap at a meter seventy-four above just waves his hand and orders: "Let's roll!"—what a motherfucking prick!

And it hit me, bone-tired from this insane work: no way will my sarcasm or angry lines last for this entire Big-Ass Book. We need a mid-march pivot. I should shift my priorities. I don't have the juice for this whole mountain of shit—and sooner or later I'd slide into self-repetition. I hate that idea. It doesn't put a smile on my face. It makes me sick. In short—I pass.

So it's time to feed the manufacturer some gingerbread—if he actually deserves it anywhere. Though I know beforehand the whip won't stay idling for long: Avdey's bound to spin out of control again. Spare the rod, spoil the child. So what exactly am I supposed to praise the kid for?

Well, here's one: he gave a pretty informative look at the ultimate dream of Soviet youth—getting dropped into the young-animal pen for budding high-ranking executive bureaucrats. Cadres decide everything at any point in a bureaucratic state's history. You have to forge them young. Under the guise of camp counselors and translators for foreign kids in sunny Artek—right on the Crimean coast at the foot of Mount Ayu-Dag.

The future helmsmen of the great superpower were treated to three meals a day—served whenever they felt like eating. After lights out, collective naked sea baths followed, concluded with subsequent copulation. No, not a group thing: just a modest whoever-managed-to-grab-whom, on the separately located benches of the sleeping pioneer camp.

Now it is absolutely clear to me who shares pics of the heartfelt propaganda on Facebook: how sweet was happiness to live in the USSR. (Oh, yes! And not to forget slapping the mandatory note here: RF legislation has declared Meta—Facebook’s parent company—an extremist organization.)

The squad under Slavik consisted of exactly three pieces—all of them Peruvian guerrillas from the Shining Path. Two kids and a dude fully ripe: genitally. He wanted Dasha, a translator for the Yugoslavian pioneers.

Slavik lusted after that very girl—in secret. But Dasha jumped the Peruvian instead, even though the guy had killer bad breath. Her only motive for these late-night hookups with the Latino was pure sadism toward Slavik. He had to do simultaneous translation from Spanish—all while his dream girl and the smelly guerrilla chose a camp bench to mate on.

That way, the readiness for self-sacrifice was implanted and steeled in the Soviet cadres. Early training—just to stake out their pass to a shining future.

Whether Slavik watched the progress of the bench-staged action from the bushes, Avdey does not specify. But S*hole will clearly become a bedside bible for teenage jerks—right before they go to sleep.

We must also praise comrade Scumblower for a simple fact. The declaration delivered through his protagonist—"We didn't steal Crimea from Ukraine"—was not concluded, despite the author's Moscow registration, with the traditional: "That’s been and shall be our baseline!"

The final curtain-drop cliffhanger for this 5-to-6-page quota was catered by the sobs of a fat twelve-year-old girl on a bench—underneath the shimmering of maritime stars in the night sky.

16

"A thought once spoken is a lie!" So said the great one. In a flash of poetic vision, he stood at his wooden desk—steel nib dipped into the inkwell—and repeated it out loud to the hooked-out ink drop.

He wanted it to understand exactly what it was to map out on a plain, logoless sheet. Or rather, he didn't repeat it—he dictated it with a slow drawl, like a schoolteacher. Even though he called himself a poet.

A poet's job is to crush mountains of hot air down into something so compact that even ink can get it. Say a poet sits through a ninety-minute lecture by some hyped philosophy professor. Then he goes home, and dumps the whole summary onto blank paper in a single line: "A thought once spoken is a lie!" Now go ahead and try condensing an hour and a half any shorter. Especially while standing up as you scribble.

These days, comfortably rubbing my nose against the monitor, my finger stained with no ink, I’m just tap-tapping the springy plastic of a keyboard. I'm spelling out the dots over the "i's" left out of his compact line.

Because times change drastically fast. What people used to get on the fly now takes a while to sink in—if it hits at all. Thanks to the insane progress all around. Don't touch the brakes—on we progress!

Okay, out of sheer love for humanity, I will add some fluidity to the thoughts spilled across the treetops of my comment. A thought is a lie? Ha! As if it actually has a choice! After all, you ultimately construct it out of words. And every single word is merely a sign—a symbol abstracted from real truth by a distance of three times nine lands.

There is a distance of infinite proportions between that tattoo of yours reading "I♥iphone!" and the actual depth of your feelings for that $600 bitten apple.

Most philosophers just stack verbal-symbolic lie upon lie upon lie inside the houses of cards of their academic systems. The sole reason they build them? To watch the spectacular collapse of their own dear, faulty logic.

To make it clear: take the tiny word "I." Because it's so completely abstract, it can cover any random object you want—from a 300-pound sumo wrestler to a toddler in daycare.

Out of pure love for humanity, I won't even go so far as to suggest trying to imagine the true meaning of just one single concluding word in that widely known line: "I think, therefore—I exist."

Yes, but where the hell is the truth then?

And the truth, my dear man, is in the exact same litter of objectivizing jargon as "God," "money," "homeland," and suchlike.

You can memorize them by heart, any single one. But you can never truly get it—if not through your own live, personal experience, forged in the throes and trials of the "I."

Welcome to the lifelong quest, if you please, to get it through essentiality. Through the violent breakthroughs of the creator’s essential center toward absolute freedom. As simple as that.

However, inside Scumblower’s sixteenth 5-to-6-page quota, Slavik didn't bother to bust his balls in search of the truth. The explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is accounted for by our fat little girl.

Firstly: Snowball the cat tried to commit suicide three days before the disaster, repeatedly launching himself headfirst at the apartment walls.

Also: a cop in Fastov stood by while rocks were thrown at the bus of evacuees from Pripyat. And how they chopped off her hair so it wouldn't radiate. Now she's stuck on a bench in Artek—treated like a leper by the pioneers.

But where are the rest of the kids from her bus? Take your pick:

1. Not everyone's dad is a high-ranking cadre;

2. Little Avdey prosaically slapped together this piece of crap into S*hole from scraps of hearsay.

The truth of this admittedly tear-jerking story remains beyond verification. (Stones, or just a single stone in a fully asphalted city like Fastov? Did they fly out from a raging crowd, or from some random little punk who’s shitted his pants from terrifying, bizarre rumors? Did that cat actually sense the atomic explosion in advance, or was the animal simply suffering from severe constipation?)

From my own live experience, I only know the wind blew east and dragged Chernobyl's radiation all the way to clotheslines in Scotland. But the Geiger counters clicked on time—and the local housewives dumped the wash.

Also, that crane operator V. Gavkalov was sent from construction unit SMP-615 in Konotop with his rig to the “accident” site—the mandatory code word for the explosion used by the state news show Vremya.

Also, how the traffic cops forcibly pumped alcohol into KamAZ drivers hauling concrete to bury the crater under the lid of the “Sarcophagus”—good old “Commissar's rations,” if anyone remembers.

They slapped a warning sign right on the dump truck windshields: “Caution! Driver is drunk!” Blasted out of their minds or shaking from fear—not a few drivers just drove the concrete to a handy patch of woods and dumped it in the dirt.

Also, how booze keeps leukemia at bay: proven by the live history of Chernobyl fire chief L. Telyatnikov. He showed up to the disaster totally wasted, right from a massive wedding—hey, it was Saturday. Eleven years later, he hit the British Isles and found a warm welcome and total mutual understanding: especially among the Scots. He finished his career—and his life—as a Major General at fifty-five.

But Slavik babbles this tragic fat-girl story to Father Jiri and his “church-mom” Anna. Not that she gave birth to him—their setup is like by Kupriyanov and Natasha. The girl preferred to turn a tree instead of a pikeperch.

On the Futurist scene, Vvedensky is way deeper than Kharms—but Kharms is trendier. He picked a catchy handle, and his face alone would have blown even battle-hardened TikTok selfie avatars straight to hell.

However, dumping this information into a Czech environment through the pipeline of “little girl-to-Scumblower-to-Slavik” instantly triggers a chain of completely different associations—entirely unrelated to the OBERIU avant-garde.

Those rocks hurled at the bus from the crowd will instantly remind them of Kristallnacht: the glass-shattering night of Jewish pogroms across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland in November 1938—back when the police did absolutely nothing to intervene for two whole days.

Cropping off her hair will make them recall the literal tons of long hair harvested from those arriving at the “death factories” of the Third Reich.

In a side note: the poetic streak in the Germans’ national character is open-source data in the public domain—take “Crystal Night” or “The Night of the Long Knives.” Though instead of knives, Hitler actually liquidated the “old guard” of German fascism with guns: specifically in the hands of his “new guard.”

The news of that poetic night of June 30, 1934, immensely delighted comrade Stalin—he never tired of repeating to his inner circle: “Wow! What a great job Hitler did!”

This delightful example was instantly seized upon, and after the assassination of S. Kirov on December 1, 1934, the Soviet people composed a popular ditty: “Stalin whacked old Kirov dead in a narrow corner”—right before heading out in multi-million-strong prison stages to drop dead in the crackling Siberian frost of the GULAG camps. Those who got lucky were lined up before firing squads—with relatives notified they were held “without the right to correspondence.”

Their German counterparts were honester: the families of the executed paid bills for the ammunition used for the cleansing of society.

It would seem like everyone is one of our own—all are brother Slavs: Czechs, Russians, Ukrainians—yet the goddamn associations are out of sync.

No, Mr. Scumblower didn't care a bean for the details of the civilian evacuation from the nuclear explosion zone. He showed even less interest toward comparing the “incident” to the atomic bomb blast that Marshal Zhukov detonated during military maneuvers in the Orenburg region in the 1950s—just to test out on our brave, handsome little soldier-boys what kind of crazy shit this really was. In any case, the main street of Orenburg still bears the Marshal’s name to this very day.

And since Chernobyl—the literal child of the USSR's atomic program—happens to be located on the territory of Ukraine, she must be punished: just in case, so that fascism never dare raise its head from out there. These very considerations smartly justified the SMO started in 2022.

Our prize-laureate can only hint at it indirectly, since his “worthy” product is locked into the good old year of 2018. The only inconvenience then was that green toad of envy choking us ever since that badass American operation: “Desert Storm” back in 1991.

I mean, look at how easily that Chuck Horner cracked old Saddam Hussein open like a nut—are we supposed to be any worse than them?

We have a brilliant minister of defense, after all—the sheer glare of the medals pinned to his full dress will completely eclipse his colleagues from North Korea and China combined. Mount up! Full ahead!

Then the old story from the times of the Crimean (sic!) War of 1854 repeated itself:

“On paper, plans looked just fine—

which made the troops march to a ravine!”

The Russian autocratic empire got a kick in the teeth in Crimea then—a humiliation no less degrading than the one handed to Russian communist imperialism in Afghanistan (1979—1989).

No, the careful Mr. Scumblower didn't zoom in on the facts—the smart award-winner saw that position was a losing bet. To wind up the page quota, Avdey served a delicious list of Slavik's girl's looks: a solid inventory list. What do you expect from a bureaucratic lapdog cadre?

Georgi Markov was made Chairman of the Soviet Writers Union—but today, not a single recycling plant will take his worthy works even as cheap waste paper.

17

After tucking the twins and her oldest grandson in for bed, our shared Baba Marfa would kill the nursery light and go stand by her bunk in the corner. She'd freeze there like a black shadow against the streetlights from the common courtyard—her face tilted up, whispering secrets to the ceiling in the thick dark of that corner. That's where her God lived.

So my later shots at understanding the abstract garbage of “God” didn't start from scratch. I knew His exact night coordinates: God hangs out near a vague whisper in the dark.

But the old lady dropped the ball on sex ed—big time. It's a bill I had to pay over and over again later in life: in my sex life, obviously.

Those fucking Russian fairy tales she used to read to us at bedtime—man, I wish I had been plugging my ears! Yes, those exact “wonder-tales” became the number-one reason for all my subsequent sexual agonies. They planted inside me an absolutely lame set of views on how you're actually supposed to approach… well… THAT.

Thanks to those tales, for a partner to unlock my full carnal warehouse, she had to conquer me first. Only then would I bust my ass—plowing like a horse that just ripped off its leather coat. Or rather, I used to plow: past tense. With the current state of my lower back's skeletal frame… well, let's not go there. Main thing: I'm not totally bald as yet.

All those stoves sitting in open fields, those rivers with marshmallow banks—like a pack of horny tour guides, they completely ruined my settings: “First you taste my little pie, then I'll tell you where the geese-swans flew!” Demanding that crap from me at five years old, when I didn't even have a clue about the whole cunnilingus thing!