Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  Before going to sleep Tatarsky would sometimes re-read the book on positioning. He regarded it as his little Bible; the comparison was all the more appropriate because it contained echoes of religious views that had an especially powerful impact on his chaste and unsullied soul: The romantic copywriters of the fifties, gone on ahead of us to that great advertising agency in the sky…’

  CHAPTER 3. Tikhamat-2

  Lenin’s statues were gradually carted out of town on military trucks (they said some colonel had thought up the idea of melting them down for the non-ferrous metal content and made a lot of money before he was rumbled), but his presence was merely replaced by a frightening murky greyness in which the Soviet soul simply continued rotting until it collapsed inwards on itself. The newspapers claimed the whole world had been living in this grey murk for absolutely ages, which was why it was so full of things and money, and the only reason people couldn’t understand this was their ‘Soviet mentality’.

  Tatarsky didn’t really understand completely what this Soviet mentality was, although he used the expression frequently enough and enjoyed using it; but as far as his new employer, Dmitry Pugin, was concerned, he wasn’t supposed to understand anything anyway. He was merely required to possess this mentality. That was the whole point of what he did: adapt Western advertising concepts to the mentality of the Russian consumer. The work was ‘freelance’ - Tatarsky used the term as though it still had its original sense, having in mind first of all the level of his pay.

  Pugin, a man with a black moustache and gleaming black eyes very like a pair of buttons, had turned up by chance among the guests at a mutual acquaintance’s house. Hearing that Tatarsky was in advertising, he’d shown a moderate interest. Tatarsky, on the other hand, had immediately been fired with an irrational respect for Pugin - he was simply amazed to see him sitting there drinking tea still in his long black coat.

  That was when the conversation had turned to the Soviet mentality. Pugin confessed that in the old days he had possessed it himself, but he’d lost it completely while working for a few years as a taxi-driver in New York. The salty winds of Brighton Beach had blown all those ramshackle Soviet constructs right out of his head and infected him with a compulsive yearning for success.

  ‘In New York you realise especially clearly.’ Pugin said over a glass of the vodka they moved on to after the tea, ‘that you can spend your entire life in some foul-smelling little kitchen, staring out into some shit-dirty little yard and chewing on a lousy burger. You’ll just stand there by the window, staring at all that shit, and life will pass you by.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Tatarsky responded thoughtfully, ‘but why go to New York for that? Surely-’

  ‘Because in New York you understand it, and in Moscow you don’t,’ Pugin interrupted. ‘You’re right, there are far more of those stinking kitchens and shitty little yards over here. Only here there’s no way you’re going to understand that’s where you’re going to spend the rest of your life until it’s already over. And that, by the way, is one of the main features of the Soviet mentality.’

  Pugin’s opinions were disputable in certain respects, but what he actually had to offer was simple, clear and logical. As far as Tatarsky was able to judge from the murky depths of his own Soviet mentality, the project was an absolutely textbook example of the American entrepreneurial approach.

  ‘Look,’ said Pugin, squinting intensely into the space above Tatarsky’s head, ‘the country hardly produces anything at all; but people have to have something to eat and wear, right? That means soon goods will start pouring in here from the West, and massive amounts of advertising will come flooding in with them. But it won’t be possible simply to translate this advertising from English into Russian, because the… what d’you call them… the cultural references here are different… That means, the advertising will have to be adapted in short order for the Russian consumer. So now what do you and I do? You and I get straight on the job well in advance - get my point? Now, before it all starts, we prepare outline concepts for all the serious brand-names. Then, just as soon as the right moment comes, we turn up at their offices with a folder under our arms and do business. The most important thing is to get a few good brains together in good time!’

  Pugin slapped his palm down hard on the table - he obviously thought he’d got a few together already - but Tatarsky suddenly had the vague feeling he was being taken for a ride again. The terms of employment on offer from Pugin were extremely vague - although the work itself was quite concrete, the prospects of being paid remained abstract.

  For a test-piece Pugin set him the development of an outline concept for Sprite - at first he was going to give him Marlboro as well, but he suddenly changed his mind, saying it was too soon for Tatarsky to try that. This was the point - as Tatarsky realised later - at which the Soviet mentality for which he had been selected raised its head. All his scepticism about Pugin instantly dissolved in a feeling of resentment that Pugin wouldn’t trust him with Marlboro, but this resentment was mingled with a feeling of delight at the fact that he still had Sprite. Swept away by the maelstrom created by these conflicting feelings, he never even paused to think why some taxi-driver from Brighton Beach, who still hadn’t given him so much as a kopeck, was already deciding whether he was capable of applying his mind to a concept for Marlboro.

  Tatarsky poured into his conception for Sprite every last drop of his insight into his homeland’s bruised and battered history. Before sitting down to work, he re-read several selected chapters from the book Positioning: A Battle for your Mind, and a whole heap of newspapers of various tendencies. He hadn’t read any newspapers for ages and what he read plunged him into a state of confusion; and that, naturally, had its effect on the fruit of his labours.

  ‘The first point that must be taken into consideration,’ he wrote in his concept, is that the situation that exists at the present moment in Russia cannot continue for very long. In the very near future we must expect most of the essential branches of industry to come to a total standstill, the collapse of the financial system and serious social upheavals, which will all inevitably end in the establishment of a military dictatorship. Regardless of its political and economic programme, the future dictatorship will attempt to exploit nationalistic slogans: the dominant state aesthetic will be the pseudo-Slavonic style. (This term is not used here in any negative judgemental sense: as distinct from the Slavonic style, which does not exist anywhere in the real world, the pseudo-Slavonic style represents a carefully structured paradigm.) Within the space structured by the symbolic signifiers of this style, traditional Western advertising is inconceivable. Therefore it will either be banned completely or subjected to rigorous censorship. This all has to be taken into consideration in determining any kind of long-term strategy.

  Let us take a classic positioning slogan: ‘Sprite - the Uncola’. Its use in Russia would seem to us to be most appropriate, but for somewhat different reasons than in America. The term ‘Uncola’ (i.e. Non-Cola) positions Sprite very successfully against Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, creating a special niche for this product in the consciousness of the Western consumer. But it is a well-known fact that in the countries of Eastern Europe Coca-Cola is more of an ideological fetish than a refreshing soft drink. If, for instance, Hershi drinks are positioned as possessing the ‘taste of victory’, then Coca-Cola possesses the ‘taste of freedom’, as declared in the seventies and eighties by a vast number of Eastern European defectors. For the Russian consumer, therefore, the term ‘Uncola’ has extensive anti-democratic and anti-liberal connotations, which makes it highly attractive and promising in conditions of military dictatorship.

  Translated into Russian ‘Uncola’would become ‘Nye-Cola’. The sound of the word (similar to the old Russian name ‘Nikola’) and the associations aroused by it offer a perfect fit with the aesthetic required by the likely future scenario. A possible version of the slogan:

  SPRITE. THE N
YE-COLA FOR NIKOLA

  (It might make sense to consider infiltrating into the consciousness of the consumer the character ‘Nikola Spritov’, an individual of the same type as RonaldMcDonald, but profoundly national in spirit.)

  In addition, some thought has to be given to changing the packaging format of the product as sold on the Russian market. Elements of the pseudo-Slavonic style need to be introduced here as well. The ideal symbol would seem to be the birch tree. It would be appropriate to change the colour of the can from green to white with black stripes like the trunk of a birch. A possible text for an advertising clip:

  Deep in the spring-time forest I drank my birch-bright Sprite.

  After reading the print-out Tatarsky brought him, Pugin said: ‘"The Uncola" is Seven-Up’s slogan, not Sprite’s.’

  After that he said nothing for a while, simply gazing at Tatarsky with his black-button eyes. Tatarsky didn’t speak either.

  ‘But that’s OK,’ Pugin said, eventually softening. ‘We can use it. If not for Sprite, then for Seven-Up. So you can consider you’ve passed the test. Now try some other brand.’

  ‘Which one?’ Tatarsky asked in relief.

  Pugin thought for a moment, then rummaged in his pockets and held out an opened pack of Parliament cigarettes. ‘And think up a poster for them as well,’ he said.

  Dealing with Parliament turned out to be more complicated. For a start Tatarsky wrote the usual intro: ‘It is quite clear that the first thing that has to be taken into consideration in the development of any half-serious advertising concept is…’ But after that he just sat there for a long time without moving.

  Exactly what was the first thing that had to be taken into consideration was entirely unclear. The only association the word ‘Parliament’ was able, with a struggle, to extract from his brain, was Cromwell’s wars in England. The same thing would obviously apply to the average Russian consumer who had read Dumas as a child. After half an hour of the most intensive intellectual exertion had led to nothing, Tatarsky suddenly fancied a smoke. He searched the entire flat looking for something smokeable and eventually found an old pack of Soviet-time Yava. After just two drags he chucked the cigarette down the toilet and dashed over to the table. He’d come up with a text that at first glance looked to him as if it was the answer:

  PARLIAMENT- THE NYE-YAVA

  When he realised this was only a poor low-grade calque on the word ‘uncola’, he very nearly gave up. Then he had a sudden inspiration. The history dissertation he’d written in the Literary Institute was called: ‘A brief outline of parliamentarianism in Russia’. He couldn’t remember a thing about it any more, but he was absolutely certain it would contain enough material for three concepts, let alone one. Skipping up and down in his excitement, he set off along the corridor towards the built-in closet where he kept his old papers.

  After searching for half an hour he realised he wasn’t going to find the dissertation, but somehow that didn’t worry him any more. While sorting through the accumulated strata deposited in the closet, up on the attic shelf he’d come across several objects that had been there since his schooldays: a bust of Lenin mutilated with a small camping axe (Tatarsky recalled how, in his fear of retribution following the execution, he’d hidden the bust in a place that was hard to reach), a notebook on social studies, filled with drawings of tanks and nuclear explosions, and several old books.

  This all filled him with such aching nostalgia that his employer Pugin suddenly seemed repulsive and hateful, and was banished from consciousness, together with his Parliament.

  Tatarsky remembered with a tender warmth how the books he had discovered had been selected from amongst the waste paper they used to be sent to collect after class. They included a volume of a left-wing French existentialist published in the sixties, a finely bound collection of articles on theoretical physics. Infinity and the Universe, and a loose-leaf binder with the word ‘Tikhamat’ written in large letters on the spine.

  Tatarsky remembered the book Infinity and the Universe, but not the binder. He opened it and read the first page:

  TIKHAMAT-2 The Earthly Sea Chronological Tables and Notes

  The papers bound into the folder obviously dated from a pre-computer age. Tatarsky could recall heaps of samizdat books that had circulated in this format - two typed pages reduced to half-size and copied on a single sheet of paper. What he was holding in his hands seemed to be an appendix to a dissertation on the history of the ancient world. Tatarsky began remembering: in his childhood, he thought, he hadn’t even opened the file, taking the word ‘Tikhamat’ to mean something like a mixture of diamat (dialectical materialism) with histmat (historical materialism). He’d only taken the work at all because of the beautiful folder, and then he’d forgotten all about it.

  As it turned out, however, Tikhamat was the name either of an ancient deity or of an ocean, or perhaps both at the same time. Tatarsky learned from a footnote that the word could be translated approximately as ‘Chaos’.

  A lot of the space in the folder was taken up by tables of kings. They were pretty monotonous, with their listings of unpronounceable names and Roman numerals, and information about when they’d launched their campaigns or laid the foundations of a wall or taken some city, and so forth. In several places different sources were compared, and the conclusion drawn from the comparison was that several events that had been recorded in history as following each other were in fact one and the same event, which had so astounded contemporary and subsequent generations that its echo had been doubled and tripled, and then each echo had assumed a life of its own. It was clear from the apologetically triumphant tone adopted by the author that his discovery appeared to him to be quite revolutionary and even iconoclastic, which set Tatarsky pondering yet again on the vanity of all human endeavour. He didn’t experience even the slightest sense of shock at the fact that Ashuretilshamersituballistu II had turned out actually to be Nebuchadnezzar III, and the nameless historian’s depth of feeling really seemed rather laughable. The kings seemed rather laughable too: it wasn’t even known for certain whether they were people or simply slips made by a scribe on his clay tablets, and the only traces remaining of them were on those same clay tablets.

  The chronological tables were followed by extensive notes on some unknown text, and there were a lot of photographs of various antiquities pasted into the folder. The second or third article that Tatarsky came across was entitled: ‘ Babylon: The Three Chaldean Riddles’. Beneath the letter ‘O’ in the word ‘Babylon’ he could make out a letter ‘E’ that had been whited out and corrected - it was nothing more than a typing error, but the sight of it threw Tatarsky into a state of agitation. The name he’d been given at birth and had rejected on reaching the age of maturity had returned to haunt him just at the moment when he’d completely forgotten the story he’d told his childhood friends about the part the secret lore of Babylon was to play in his life.

  Below the heading there was a photograph of the impression of a seal - a gate of iron bars on the top of either a mountain or a stepped pyramid, and standing beside it a man with a beard dressed in a skirt, with something that looked like a shawl thrown over his shoulders. It seemed to Tatarsky that the man was holding two severed heads by their thin plaits of hair; but one of the heads had no facial features, while the second was smiling happily. Tatarsky read the inscription under the drawing: ‘A Chaldean with a mask and a mirror on a ziggurat’. He squatted on a pile of books removed from the closet and began reading the text beneath the photograph.

  P. 123. The mirror and the mask are the ritual requisites of Ishtar. The canonical representation, which expresses the sacramental symbolism of her cult more fully, is of Ishtar in a gold mask, gazing into a mirror. Gold is the body of the goddess and its negative projection is the light of the stars. This has led several researchers to assume that the third ritual requisite of the goddess is the fly-agaric mushroom, the cap of which is a natural map of th
e starry sky. If this is so, then we must regard the fly-agaric as the ‘heavenly mushroom’ referred to in various texts. This assumption is indirectly confirmed by the details of the myth of the three great ages, the ages of the red, blue and yellow skies. The red fly-agaric connects the Chaldean with the past; it provides access to the wisdom and strength of the age of the red sky. The brown fly-agaric (‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ were designated by the same word in Accadian), on the other hand, provides a link with the future and a means of taking possession all of its inexhaustible energy.

  Turning over a few pages at random, Tatarsky came across the word ‘fly-agaric’ again.

  P. 145. The three Chaldean riddles (the Three Riddles of Ishtar). According to the tradition of the Chaldean riddles, any inhabitant of Babylon could become the goddess’s husband. In order to do this he had to drink a special beverage and ascend her ziggurat. It is not clear whether by this was intended the ceremonial ascent of a real structure in Babylon or a hallucinatory experience. The second assumption is supported by the fact that the potion was prepared according to a rather exotic recipe: it included ‘the urine of a red ass’ (possibly the cinnabar traditional in ancient alchemy) and ‘heavenly mushrooms’ (evidently fly-agaric, cf. ‘The Mirror and the Mask’).

  According to tradition the path to the goddess and to supreme wisdom (the Babylonians did not differentiate these two concepts, which were seen as flowing naturally into one another and regarded as different aspects of the same reality) was via sexual union with a golden idol of the goddess, which was located in the upper chamber of the ziggurat. It was believed that at certain times the spirit of Ishtar descended into this idol.

  In order to be granted access to the idol it was necessary to guess the Three Riddles of Ishtar. These riddles have not come down to us. Let us note the controversial opinion of Claude Greco (see 11,12), who assumes that what is meant is a set of rhymed incantations in ancient Accadian discovered during the excavation of Nineveh, which are rendered highly polysemantic by means of their homonymic structure.