The Streamlined Banana

In short, this five-to-six-page section exposed a tangled, major-minorities Gordian knot. The text-feeder drops broad hints: “the worst is yet to come, oh-oh!”—as the Primadonna sang earlier in her career. Before she left us for that homeland—where a rapidly growing number of people unearth their roots.

The chapter wraps up with a cliffhanger—a hook designed to mesmerize the consumer. Let them keep chewing their popcorn just like they always do, but don't let 'em slip off.

Here, our text-mechanic has rigged the hook from the screeching brakes of a semi-truck behind the back of the mangy runaway. Oh my! Will the backpack absorb the hit? Or will a plaster cast become the hero’s castle? Anyone made unsteady by the purposeful application of mass entertainment tools clicks for the next episode. They stuff another piece of chewing gum into their pie hole, or flip to the comic book whose hook they are on…

Instead of using regular chapter numbers, a title is slapped onto each five-to-six-page section. The second snippet gets one in Czech: “Pozor, pes.” Avdey is fanning out his tail—the pride of a multilingual peacock.

In reality, these two Czech words read: “Caution, dog in the yard.” But the text-compiler has stacked the deck. He deals a line much closer to the hearts of those who love hard-core jailhouse serials: “Filthy copper dogs!”

That's just how it stuck in his head since childhood. And he's too lazy to check. Either that, or Scumblower is taking a shot at hooking more audience into his camp perimeter.

3

No, the semi-truck from the previous episode didn’t crush him. On the contrary, it delivered our fugitive from the chase by the pregnant Lolita and other juvenile hunters in the Gypsy slums—with all their street-cleaning drama. Why? Because sitting at the wheel was a kind soul. A man cut from the exact same spiritual cloth as that kind American trucker from Balabanov’s cult movie Brother-2.

Overjoyed at how glibly he’s rescued his professor, our laurel-wearing Scumblower spends his third five-to-six-page quota dumping a cheap road travelogue straight out of the old state TV archives. It reads exactly like someone mindlessly filming the highway shoulder on their phone. A cheesy voiceover host dropping well-chewed, “smart” observations from behind the camera.

Long ago, that show was hosted by Senkevich—Yuri, not Henryk. The man literally cut out his own appendix on a whaling ship where he served as doctor. The fear of an infection, aggravated by the total absence of another surgeon, made him set up a mirror in front of his stomach and slice it out with his own hands.

Later on, they stopped slaughtering whales with harpoon cannons, and he picked up a job with Soviet State TV. But all of that is ancient history. These days, marine mammals are exterminated by industrial waste and crude oil spillages. Dumped directly into their habitats. To say nothing of multi-mile fields—swirling, floating patches of polyethylene…

In the endless stream of Hollywood action flicks, this is the most generic cliche: the hero digs a bullet out of his own anatomy assets. Alone. Or assisted by some random hobo or convenient babe passing by. Naturally, the instrument of choice—a pair of rusty pliers.

But antiseptics in a hobo’s shack are nothing like a ship’s medical kit. If they splash an ounce of moonshine on your wound, you’re a lucky guy. Want more? Go join the whalers—

Why do these little deviations land in my literary critique? The answer’s given by that famous line from Gogol—“It's a boring world, gentlemen!”

The purpose of such injections is shaking off the clutch of bored yawns. Taking a hit of optimism, so to speak. Three full five-to-six-page sections are already behind us—and no writer has deigned to hatch yet. From the outside, it looks like a perfectly normal book. You open it up—the text is there, the lines are all in neat little rows, but as for the author… Hello? Anybody home?

History repeats the Bubentsov case. Ever heard the name? Three. I swear! He earned three Stalin Prizes by grinding out novels about collective farms. At Novodevichy cemetery, his full-size black marble statue sits and keeps on writing. Eight days a week. In any weather conditions. But whoever I ask—nobody knows him. Faith! Google itself is clueless.

Unbelievable: rows of medals across the Sunday-best jacket’s chest, a thrice prize winner, a marble meme—go grope whenever you feel like that, and still—Google doesn't know! You almost want to sit down and write a protest to Wikipedia…

But I don't pin much hope on them. They’ll say three letters of our last names match. That I'm likely trying to push a relative. They are such a bunch of pedantic pricks over there!

All in all, little Avdey has a whole hell of a lot of words in his text. Five hundred and thirty-seven goddamn pages! To quote Prince Hamlet from the same-titled play—'Words… words… words… words…'

And what the fuck is the point? No—the question doesn’t belong to the quote.

Sure, the words are there. But they spin out in a sterile thread. A style lifted directly from the bulletin boards of any random state institution.

Any facility will do! Wherever you go, three sections of this “book” have already been pinned up. They are words completely drained of vitality. Words pressurized to lose any meaningful texture—turned into two-dimensional origami.

But I don't blame citizen A. N. Scumblower in the slightest. It is his predetermined fate to drag the heavy chains of a martyr and a sufferer. While the true buzz of life is to live it to the fullest. Experiencing pure ecstasy…

Wait, wait! I owe you an apology—a couple of rather fishy words slipped out there. It would be far more accurate to put it so—

Happiness is the intoxication by obsession.

And it is not his fault that the simple, supreme joys of life don't stand a chance in a land of triumphant bureaucracy. A country where actual joy was phased out. Replaced by banking cards for the ever-loyal.

Happiness only comes in freedom and creative immersion. They are inseparable. Outside the strife and torments of creativity, you can't win freedom. Creating something is your weapon to break through to it. Only in the creation of unprecedented things and ideas—free from ready-made forms licked clean to the point of trash—can one find happiness.

But what do we actually find here, in the first three sections of the S*hole? It’s derivative trash piled on top of derivative trash. Every single sentence is a dumping ground of two-dimensional, stillborn clones. Why is that? Once again—it couldn't be simpler:

The goals and the means are ass-backward. Instead of creating to win freedom—that’s the real goal!—the prize-winner chained up his creativity to stop it from distracting him. He buckled into a slave yoke for the carrot of the 'Big Book Prize.’ Then he assiduously began to stamp out some sheer garbage—a clear-cut marriage of convenience to a manufacturing defect.

Instead of creativity, we get a circus of sucking up to the “right people” on the prize committees. The networking starts. Curtsies. Bows. Bending over backwards this way and that. Diplomacy, they call it.

I’m not saying he goes completely on all fours. But any seasoned insider gets the message—respect has been demonstrated properly, his willingness to serve clearly signaled. He barks right on cue at the underground “zindans” in use by the Ukrainian Security Service. But it leaves you wondering. Hey, man—did I open a book? Or was it an accidental tuning into some state-sponsored talking head?

Simultaneously, a drive-by quotation from Tsvetaeva is inserted into the sequence—a calculated nod to the ”internal emigration” community to prove he is part of the club. The corporate inventory of a bohemian intellectual must be verified, even if it requires only a dual-line entry. See my aesthetic baggage?

Creativity is a great cross. A heroic feat. A back-breaking labor taken on voluntarily. The clothesline in Yelabuga helped Marina end her torment. Especially when she had no strength left for her supreme obsession.

And what is this?—it’s the very thing you can’t keep under control.

“I walk and smile all by myself,

But once I stop to think:

What do I look like to the sidewalk fellows?—

I laugh until my pulse stops pumping!…”

These are lines by a Czech poet—also on the theme of uncontrollable happiness, by the way.

And looking back a couple of paragraphs, I see I was talking absolute hooey. No tether is strong enough to keep a creative knack in check: it's mightier than you. And if by some miracle it was overcome… well… “Don't sweat it, might happen to anyone”—the classic line by sympathetic hookers to comfort a confused client…

And now tell me, Avdey Scumblower—how many times while grinding out those first three sections did you burst out laughing? How many times did you reach a state of uncontrollable ecstasy?

Fine, whatever. You don't have to answer. Andrei Voznesensky already answered for you, in just a couple of lines:

In our most crisis-free of all societies,

I have a production crisis—damn writing block…

Thank God he didn’t happen to drift into Yelabuga at that particular moment.

Am I profaning the greats? My dear fellow! You’re looking for profanation in all the wrong places. True profanation is right there. Where the name of the man who commanded us to “Live Not by Lies!” is used to cover up lie upon lie. Whoops, Isaich! Your name is stamped in golden letters now—right onto the assembly line of role models for future laurel-wearers.

I swear to God! Not a single one of my books will ever be submitted for any prize competition. Not even the smallest one—hell no! Just as Russia cannot be stuffed into a top hat, the creative act does not belong inside even the finest, gold-plated toilets of 99-karat proof…

And yet, sometimes it really gets tough. Your hands just drop. Yesterday, when I finished reading S*hole Section 3, I just sat there blankly in front of the window. Not seeing or caring what was outside. There I was. Eyelids hanging below wide-open eyes—like someone with shell shock.

Oh, God! What did I get myself into? Do I need it?

Only in the dead of night did the answer finally arrive. It shook me awake—pretty roughly, too—and said, “Hey, don't sweat it, everything's fine. Since you signed up for this gig, you’ve got to haul your Sisyphus load all the way to the final period.”

“At best,” it said, “you’ll make someone else stop and think about all this. At worst, you’ll be happy in those rare moments of pure, unadulterated freedom—when you do manage to break through to it.”

And that’s exactly how it is—just kicking a sick man and rubbing his nose in his own piles of shit is something I can’t stomach: it’s a total nightmare. But if I deliver a final verdict, wash my hands of him, retreat into myself, and just walk away—that feels completely soulless…

According to Berdyaev’s methodology, you have to do the exact opposite. You must break yourself open to encounter the other. For freedom is discovered only through the communion of “I” and “Thou.” So that it finally sinks in, once and for all—there’s no “I” nor “Thou,” but “We.” Otherwise, no feasible breakthrough to freedom.

Such as—?

Like by Father McKenzie, writing a sermon that no one will hear. I was still a boy, with absolutely no English, when The Beatles’ genuine breakthrough in “Eleanor Rigby” completely blew my mind…

Enough philosophy—we have pages left to tear down. The savior trucker had Spanish plates. But our Nameless friend’s attempts to gossip hit the wall of silence.

This lets Avdey click the channel to a popular political analyst. Selling his bla-bla-vomit on separatism. About Basques, Catalans…

Fortunately, a little motel popped up along the mountain road. After a night's sleep, the semi-truck was gone without a trace, driver and all—a literal deus ex machina. That's a bone tossed to my own personal erudition here. But Anatoly Wasserman would totally get and forgive me.

Next, Scumblower’s creative “I” launches into a description of springtime awakening in the mountains of Slovakia. Where he is completely stranded, all because some guy named Yurik—who happens to be deaf in one ear—and a rich little brat named Petik, alias Pavlik, are ghosting his phone calls and frantic SMS texts.

In short, he spilled a bunch of hooks there to get a random catch. This Section 3 is titled: “Where could I have gone wrong?”

Avdey, we answered that for you a page ago. But let's repeat it anyway:

The mistake is that your talent—which absolutely anyone gets for life, unless they choke it out with the help of school education—was traded away. Traded for an expensive suit and a lentil-colored tie.

And just to complete my dutiful report: in Section 3, Avdey actually managed to cram in all three types of time. Cosmic, historical, and existential. It left me personally hanging on a hook. Well now—let’s see, let’s see…

4

“A thought once spoken is a lie…”

said a certain, not unknown, Russian poet. But I didn't repeat his line to show off, like, ‘Look how educated I am!’—far from it. Of course he was in the school books, but it took me a lifetime to catch up to him. Now, by the right won through that long journey, I can afford to disagree with this famous quote:

But if I happen to be a principally un-muzzleable truthteller, what am I supposed to do now? Go completely mute for the rest of my life, or what? Just so I don't have to confess at the very end: ‘God, I spouted so much bullshit!’

Terminolgically speaking, this question holds a paradox.

Neat word, isn't it? The way it sounds, just bounces off your teeth with some crunchy snap—paradox!

Mind you, the guy sitting next to me on the commuter train might not have a clue what I just crunched at him. And he’d be right, too, because we’ve got a perfectly good word of our own that you just understand right in your gut without any explanation—the catch.

Then again, without crunchily dropping a 'paradox'—jeez, look how much practice it took to make it roll off my tongue so casually: 'para-dox'—no artistic elite group will let me into their fancy club. Especially not the literary critics. Though when you look at their mugs—same plain village bumpkins. Paradoxical, but a fact.

Anyway, that’s not the point. I have a question for the great poet: why the biased view of my brainpower and morals? If I dare to say, 'I want a drink!', am I a liar again?

I suspect Citizen Tyutchev never bothered to open an email account. Guess I’ll have to use my own homespun brain to figure it out. (Damn! Again?)

Telling people ‘I’m thirsty’ isn't a thought—it’s just household info on the needs of the body I'm sitting in and using. So, talking about the flesh, I spout the pure truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unless I'm boldly lying for profit, or just out of pure boredom.

But who is this 'I'?

Simple as a cooked turnip: I am three-in-one.

Part (a)—the personality, soul, and spirit, the 'real center' according to Berdyaev. (Yes, I got to know the philosopher personally. Didn't get most of it, but now I can brag that Nikolenka and I are buddies).

Part (b)—the specimen, the individual, or 'God’s creature' in church cant.

And on the third side, (c)—the persona, the one who gets a passport, and the one they open a case file or a dossier on (depending on which state agency gets interested in you).

And so, in this manner…

H-hold on, what the hell was all that for?

Well, please, would you look at that! I went and split myself into three separate people, and now I’ve forgotten why? It's a good thing I didn’t slide all the way into psychoanalysis—those Freudian bastards literally quarter people on their couches. Well, 'split' them into four identities, I mean.

Oh! I remember. Why is a spoken thought on a dry topic a lie?

Because it came out of a defective tool! The language of any specimen always limps.

While a thought sits inside you, it's pretty true. But drag it out with words, and it turns into a pervert. Like it or not, when you say it, you lie like a gray stallion. Your tongue just won't bend to describe how it looked when it was still inside.

Yes, the truth of the existential center—that very soul that got saddled with a life sentence inside your body—comes pretty close to the mark. However, the absolute truth has to be whole, and it has to happen all at once! But that’s the catch: language is nothing but a tool for hacking the whole into pieces. You can be right a hundred times over to the power of x³, but while your truth is being mooed out piece by piece, it turns into the exact crime Citizen Prosecutor accused you of at the very beginning of the trial…

It's a small comfort that I'm not the only one; everyone around me—including Citizen Prosecutor, though let's keep that between us, you know the drill—is a liar, a fraud, and a bullshitter.

Fine, but if you are so hopelessly condemned to lie, at least do it beautifully. Especially when you’re pulling a gig as a writer.

To smooth over the bitter sorrow that words can't capture the whole truth, I'll just go ahead and rip Chapter 4 to pieces. Let my inner soul relieve some stress that way. I don't smash glass or break furniture, no matter what action films say about fighting shock with crazy gestures…

The whole chapter is just a monologue by the Nameless Professor. He rants from bell to bell. His audience is exactly one person: Father Jiri, a priest who switched from Catholicism to Orthodoxy just to get a wife. This highlights the priest's clear erotic obsession, even if he doesn't have a beard. Who knows why.

Still, I won't rule out some future plot trick, since I haven't read past Chapter 4 yet. Maybe this academic lush from Moscow State University is in for some brutal trials later on in the storyline.

Maybe some Elon the Mars-Conqueror type will turn him into a sex slave, despite his mangy, molting appearance. In these eschatological times of ours, it’s far too late to count out anything at all.'

The gist of his throne speech from someone else's armchair basically boils down to tales as dreary as a Russian coachman's song: about how absolutely gorgeous everything used to be back then, while now it's just a total, absolute disaster.'

Which is completely understandable—the guy is 49+ and molting. 'Back then' means the USSR, even though the only real difference is that they obliterated the 3 first letters and slapped an F after the remaining R, and turned the country into a cheap resource colony for bargain-basement liquidations. All the other crap remained exactly as it was.

George Orwell described the case in his Animal Farm ahead of time back in 1944—where pigs in neckties pretend to be civilized. The only thing he didn’t mention was the Rolexes on their hooves: everything else is one-to-one match.

As for the artistic value of Chapter 4, it’s a total, absolute 'uh… yeah…': Avdey let himself get dragged around by the nose by his own tool—language. And that tool, true to its nature, went ahead and hacked the whole thing to absolute sh… I mean, smashed it into tiny, microscopic smithereens. Forget about a whole paragraph; you’ll wear yourself out trying to find a single sentence that hasn't been minced into empty verbal trash: 'words… words… words… words….

I get it, I really do—it's a new era, a different millennium, and you can’t jump any higher than the trashy style of slimy blogging… But still—damn! In short, the jockey couldn't handle his half-broken nag; she bolted wherever she pleased, the rider got a sudden case of explosive diarrhea from sheer fright, and the end result: page quota number four.

To prevent any accusations of making baseless claims, I’ll note that his attempt to terrify the reader with cheap, woodblock-print graphics of unprecedented meteorological storms tanked with a resounding crash. I won't hide it: the peaceful descriptions of nature in Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches used to scare me way more—I would skip them entirely, jumping straight to the next paragraph. But during this trashy blog-writing about supranatural cataclysms, I had to yawn with a closed mouth just to keep up appearances.

In a nutshell, this sleeping-pill monologue is nothing but an oversized list of synonyms, aggressively peppered with punctuation. You can clearly see his desperate attempt to swap out the monotone lecturer for a young boy, but the kid never actually hatches out from under this forty-nine-plus Anonymous lush and his incoherent nonsense about ozone gas and vintage vacuum-tube radios

(An old tube radio! Did you think about the next generation? What is some Gen Z kid on TikTok supposed to picture from that word? Or is it all just about winning a prize, and after that, who cares? Is it just water off a duck's back to us? What a total waste!)

To answer the slippery question of why the USSR went belly up, he just turned on that same TV analyst to talk about our 'collective guilt' for giving up the fight for mankind's bright future. This talking head can't even see the three-story pyramid of bureaucrats sitting on every worker's neck. He's flesh of the pyramid blocks' flesh—no DNA test needed.

But enough about the grim stuff! It's time to move on to the sweetness of the dessert—those lovely little numbers and a full basket of different kinds of times! And it doesn't matter a damn bit that our prize-winner understands them about as well as a sheep understands sausage casings. Let him rattle off whatever garbage pops in the gibbosity of his head; we will step right over his ignorance, drop the correct accents, and fill our leisure time with some philosophical-temporal mind games.

First up, we are presented with a prime sample of historical time (of which our text-assembler himself hasn't got a clue, of course, in his naively virginal ignorance). The text, clunkily strumming along in the exact style of late-1930s Stalin Prize nominees writing about conquering the virgin lands, babbles on about transforming a swamp into a blossoming dacha cooperative garden. Attaboy, Avdeyka! What a stellar example of 'historical Δt' you rolled out for us!

Right on its heels comes a sample of 'cosmic Δt'. Unlike the straight line of 'historical Δt', this one moves in circles. And what’s his grand illustration? A homeroom teacher forcing the class to walk in a circle, shut up, and count out exactly one minute in their heads without opening their eyes.

The teacher was completely right; a closed circle is the perfect symbol for 'cosmic Δt.' Meanwhile, 'historical Δt'—as any beginner philosopher has already guessed—is represented by a straight line. The experiment posed absolutely no threat to the students’ health: they are, after all, the product of genetic selection, bred from generations who have spent their lives walking in circles, totally silent, with their eyes voluntarily squeezed shut.

And finally, the concluding dimension—existential time—is represented by a single, simple point. Why? Because 'existential Δt' is not only discontinuous (unlike the first two timelines), but it is the absolute center of a raw breakthrough to freedom. Its location is dynamic—forget all that baby-talk about Harry Potter-style time portals—and you can never guess where the hell it’s going to burst through next.

And now, right as the curtain drops on this latest 5-to-6-page quota, this detour into temporal dimensions brings back a specific memory. The most famous paragraph in world literature to open with a digital timestamp belongs to W. Somerset Maugham’s Lord Mountdrago. In it, a psychoanalyst checks his watch while waiting for a late client: 17:40.

But look at our Scumblower! Attaboy! In the very first sentence of S*hole, he managed to outrun the decaying West by exactly one hour and ten minutes! 16:30!

Giddy up, you fast-flying little rusher of ours!

5

How this is done is completely unknown to me, and therefore I am on equal footing with absolutely anyone else in this matter. Totally. Yes, you’re supposed to break yourself open and execute a sheer breakthrough to freedom, but how? A step-by-step instruction manual is completely missing from the picture—you can't even find one on the pirated websites. Not even a version for dummies.

The only thing you can do—if you get lucky—is stumble upon a finished result that proves such a breakthrough is actually possible, specifically for incorrigible Doubting Thomases like me. Take, for instance, Bach’s Toccata in D minor, blasting through a pipe organ.