The Streamlined Banana

One thing is certain—without the know-how, the risk is sky-high. After all, you’re not just stepping out of your comfort zone here; you’re literally breaking and entering into the territory of total unreason, which everyone interprets in their own screwed way, and there's no telling how wrong it hits them when it crashes into their head.

You end up in such an unimaginable beyond that not a single honorary emergency-rescue stalker could ever haul you out. And if anyone starts waving their certificates around, bragging about what webinars they took on the subject, just spit (metaphorically!) and wipe the floor with the charlatan. Don't let him rob you with his empty chatter—your time is valuable, and you could trade that time for real money, on an occasion.

Even without knowing exactly 'how’, logic says your main job as a creator is to avoid becoming like Christopher Marlowe (whom Shakespeare blatantly ripped off), or Leo Tolstoy (who ran a side-hustle as a graphomaniac on top of his count's income), or Uno Muno, and all the other icons who left muddy footprints and got caught in the lineup of world literature.

In short, leave the greats alone. Copying them won't give you the real high. You might get a career, cash, fame, and women—that's all possible. But as for the real high? Alas and oops.

It’s not for nothing that a vigilant Ministry of Health didn't miss the chance to issue a warning on the matter: 'Once you get hooked on templates, you will sink into commonplace second-ratedness—get ready to bleed cash for antidepressants, followed by total addiction…' and so on and so forth (for details, see Wallace’s The Infinite Jest, the bible of Jim Jarmusch, who directed Dead Man with Johnny Depp in the title role).

Yes, damn it! Walking untrodden paths is easy only for the Chinese. They’ve got thousands of hieroglyphs or more to work with. But with a measly thirty-three letters at your disposal, how much originality can you really squeeze out?

(Has anyone else noticed that after the victory of the October Revolution, when they slashed the Russian alphabet down from thirty-five letters to thirty-three, Russian literature effectively dropped out of the race on a global scale?)

And so, for a real breakthrough into the creation of freedom—you’re expected to break free from the sticky chains of all cliches, which is exactly what’s supposed to make you unique…

Too bad Chapter 5 is still sliding around in the rusted, worn-out tracks of a mind-numbing monologue. Self-repetition is just a cheap form of plagiarism anyway—a literal short circuit onto your own beloved ego. Even so, this latest 5-to-6-page quota almost became the single best chapter I’ve plowed through in this entire 'novel' so far… right up until the moment Professor Anonymous hit a new low and started begging the priest for vodka!

Now, I’m just curious to know—when they train these professors, do they pass a test on some moral code? Or do they have the exact same homeless-style pigsty over there as every low-level trade school on the State Statistics ledger? Then again, that’s beside the point—we're all going to end up in the same place anyway. If it’s not one addiction, it’s another, or the flipside of them, but you can’t outrun it either way.

Stylistically, this page quota beats as yet the rest present in the 'novel’. The sentences stopped looking like a concrete floor in a warehouse of tilted coarse grain sacks. The meaningless vocabulary dropped drastically. Why? Because Avdey started writing about his childhood.

The theme isn't new, but who cares? It's not about the what, it's about the how! The sentences became flexible and plastic. That's a huge plus.

Well, childhood is childhood. Swimming in open water, heading into the woods for mushrooms and berries. The reader starts casting comparative glances back at their own irretrievably sweet years, since those specific strings have been tugged. The older generation begins to recall the writer Krapivin from Pioneer magazine. Avdey completely failed to reach the bar set by Gaidar and Kaverin, but he tried as hard as he could.

Honestly, I just feel bad for Avdik. The kid had a rough childhood, totally fucked over by a lack of animals: no cats, no dogs, he never even touched a horse. Just some dead fish from a lake, and even those got ripped off by village bullies. Total lifelong trauma. Now he's made it to the rank of writer, and he writes while staring at those bastards with an unforgiving inner eye. Take that, you creeps!

The current 5-6 quota presents a year as two cosmic time loops of different sizes. The three-month dacha break is the big one—it's what let him survive the rest of the Soviet year. Basically, even as a kid, he hated the inhuman Soviet lifestyle and attacked it in his mind like a brave, totally vehement blogger.

You can clearly see his unconscious attempts to apply 'existential Δt'. And it makes sense—a childhood squeezed into a five-page quota inevitably shatters into isolated, pinpoint episodes that, unfortunately, have absolutely zero connection to one another. And this is what doomed his spontaneous punctualism to a total failure.

Yeah, Avdey never actually managed to break himself open; nobody ever trained him in those kinds of tricks, and he didn’t have enough time to figure it out on his own—the deadlines for submitting the book to the award committee were breathing down his neck. Then again, there were his job duties.

It was exactly this buzzkilling approach ruined the high you expect when you crack open a book. But I don’t hold a grudge, and I still managed to dig up the positive points in this 5-to-6-page quota. After all, we non-resisting non-believers are the absolute gold standard of impartiality.

He drops a few quick hints that 'nothing is right'. That rebel stance doesn't fit a kid's age at all—it's just a cheap blog trick to suck up to anarchists in the audience. Nice try, Avdey! Our people are traditionally fiercely loyal to the rulers, and right before an election, they are fiercely loaded.

Hashed up for the next plot cliffhanger, we get Petro-Pavlik again and his chief bodyguard Yurik, the half-deaf childhood buddy.

6

Hallelujah! Hip-hip, hooray! Well, finally! The hardest stage of tunneling through the upper layers of exposition on top of exposition on top of exposition is officially behind us—or as the pros call it, 'overburden stripping’ done. Now comes a smooth, soft-and-cuddly immersion into the literary core, just the way we love and want it. Portraits of actual characters have finally begun to show up, physical features wrapping about the psychological make up.

For the patient man shall not be passed by the chalice he craved for so long, and now it is too late to take offense. (Will what’s been poured make him happy? Well, that’s anybody's guess. However, giving thought to all possible caveats can ruin the aphoristic punch of a line in toto—while it should seem carved by a stiletto. So sit right here in the parentheses and don't even twitch, inquisitive one.)

And finally, out floods a mix of everyone's fave Daniil Granin with a pinch of Kyr Bulychev. (Note jotted on my left cuff: ‘Cheap lounge players everywhere worship that second guy's first name. For some reason they always use a lowercase letter—in labookh lingo, "kyr" means booze of any kind.’)

He’s launched right into short, high-density briefings on the past and future destinies of the characters in S*hole. It’s like a dotted line, but done with real taste. Get the hell out of here, you loathsome blogging style! Give 'em hell, you fast-flying beauties! Clear the way! Clear the way!

These vividly painted portraits offered a ray of hope, if only because the female ones turned out much more attractive to our Scumblower than the men. Consequently, judging by his preferences (glory be to All-Merciful Providence!), our Scumblower is straight.

It’s hard to relay what a relief this is. A mere thought of The Danish Girl makes my scrotum spontaneously twitch—wrapping it in a weird, hazy gloom and miserable prostration. And that's despite all my stubbornly cultivated tolerance.

Yes, this sixth page quota was a long-awaited oasis in the middle of a desert. Special thanks to Avdey for not overplaying his hand. While showing off the ancient words he managed to memorize, he controlled himself and didn't drop 'that is to say'—though he knows that card too, a hundred percent.

7

Inside any and every human being sits a personality—that’s not even up for discussion. Let's say you absolutely despise your chief accountant for some reason: there’s still a personality sitting inside him, regardless, just like in any and every one of us.

What's more, all these personalities are completely different, since they don't match up in the exact degree of how badly they've been brain-fucked by anxieties and internal fear. Nor do they match in the depth of their naive faith that the lot of pop stars and oligarchs is enviable—intensely so.

And what exactly is a personality? Why, it’s that very same damn thing that’s been explained to you, Mr. Professor, throughout this entire critique. But since you’ve been sitting way too long in your comfy armchair, let me remind you: a personality is what used to be called the soul or spirit in the old, naive days, that in the existentialism cant got transfigured into man's ‘existential center’.

This is the only spare part in your whole setup capable of creativity. The rest of your biological components just handle bodily functions—and they'd better stay focused on that. Thanks to this wise design, any individual can make real breakthroughs to freedom, assuming they aren't an idiot.

Even people you wouldn't suspect in a million years. Including that chief accountant, even though he's a total brown-noser to the bosses, while acting like an absolute bastard and an unmitigated prick toward you.

However, to execute a creative act, the personality needs to focus its mind and bring itself into a state of total integrity. After that, the creative act will start rolling along like a charm.

The main thing is that the personality realizes this and stops wasting themself on trivialities, which buzz into all three of their ears, including the middle one—crap like 'order a pair of ripped-knee jeans from the internet and you'll find true happiness’.

Thanks to personalities being different we have the unique originality and authenticity of creative acts sitting in absolutely any and every one of us—at some of which the genius Kafka himself stares in amazement nervously puffing a cigarette butt he’s chiseled off Rilke in a dark corner.

Alright, whoa there! I'm nobody's Father McKenzie from the Anglican breed of Christian Faith—so I'm gonna go right ahead and keep enjoying this seventh 5-to-6-page quota.

~ ~ ~

Like I just said: it's the same chair and the same priest. Being an ex-Catholic, he's trained to sit in a confession box until the client stops rambling. But honestly, this smooth text doesn't smell like rambling at all. It's built on the rock-solid guidelines of Pioneer magazine. And that's fine—leave well enough alone.

The characters already released onto the playing field are getting further development and extra personality traits. The riddle of Petik-Pavlik—which Avdey has been desperately overplaying for the last few 5-to-6-page quotas, tossing it this way and that—has finally been untangled.

As it turns out: Petik is his first name, and his last name is Pavlik! This gave our Scumblower the perfect chance to show off his sleight of hand during the shuffle: “Oh no you don't—this here is Petik, and Pavlik is hiding right in the back-left pocket of your underwear!” Any magic trick only benefits from a little humorous seasoning.

Childhood Pavlik is drawn as a complete wimp who reads yellow Children's Encyclopedia books and believes in aliens. But Yurik looked like a beaver from day one—showing the early traits of a future cop and a slimy prick.

The wimp’s mom is a busty specimen: a woman whose sex appeal still makes old Avdey swallow hard today. She almost ripped off beaver-Yurik’s ear for tormenting her little kid—a kid already driven not quite right in his head by that yellow encyclopedia.

Flinging her 'sensual mouth' wide open, she showered the little beaver with a barrage of swear-word colloquialisms: a linguistic assault whose full meaning our future professor failed to grasp. And this, despite the fact that he was already at a quite mature, Pioneer-badge age.

From a literary angle, this 5-to-6-page quota is remarkable for belonging to two distinct movements at once: classicism, by right of seniority, and romanticism—which is classicism's prodigal son.

A prime sample of the older movement is the visit made by the mom with her sensual mouth to another Yura: a teenager with a telescope. It was to his dacha that she dragged Petya for a makeshift psychotherapy session—where the telescope owner delivered a lecture to the kid on the ideal design and unmatched beauty of the starry cosmos.

And the romantic plot-twist was delivered by a thunderstorm: an event ripped straight from the finest examples of Japanese anime—and complemented by cross-hatching in the spirit of Gabriel García Márquez (translated from the Spanish).

Avdey wasn’t even afraid to label his eclectic mating of the movements an apocalypse: using a bolt of lightning to burn down the dacha owned by the beavers—the parents of our long-suffering Yurik Jr. It’s framed as a kind of revenge by aliens for his bullying Pavlik, who had found faith in them.

In passing, I’ll briefly note that any accusations of plagiarizing foreign authors are simply laughable. We aren’t reading Shakespeare here—we're reading Samuil Marshak. We got luckier with T.S. Eliot’s poetry: there’s a choice of seven deeply agonizing versions in Russian. While instead of Joyce, we have… what’s his name again? Well, anyway…

Therefore, a creative hack is left with nothing but to soak up their spirit in the original and lay it out using the scraps they managed to get in the foreign work: it’s not for nothing that Nabokov called translations a transfiguration…

Regarding the hearing loss in one of Yurik Jr.'s ears due to the apocalyptic alien attack, our Scumblower keeps a stone-cold silence. However, I’m not complaining, and I'm not filing any justified grievances: little Avdeyka was shuffling and trying until he sweated bullets—so let him at least take a break from his plot rig.

8

Mount up, squadron! The kiddish games are over: out comes the score for the violin of time. The priest took the professor in—food and a bed in exchange for sweeping the church. Anonymous is happy.

I had to pay my own toll, too, to get busted out of the Detgiz prison zone: for this long-awaited transfer to the chemical-plant penal colony. Here I can finally say: 'Bye-bye, Mr. Bulychev and Lady Agnia Barto!' Now I’m a volunteer recruit!

What was the toll? The agony of returning to that exact same style of blogging: disparaging no one in sight, yet fearlessly merciless. Here, Avdey used broad strokes to sketch the big picture of the rot we’ve all blundered into, generously sharing a blood-curdling filth that never became the 'true history'—the kind Ms. Gogoleva naively believes in—stuffed into high school textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education.

This eighth 5-to-6-page quota sits inside practically every single smartphone. It’s exactly what slips through the feed in that specific corner of the neural network where you logged your account—scrolling through it at a flat speed of one smart-ass per half-second.

The only thing that somehow made my eye pause for a sec was a question from a Greek commentator—who also happens to own the local village tavern: 'Wait, but isn't it the USSR’s now all back for you there?'

A piece of Greek wisdom: striking smash bang to the point without a miss. They simply went ahead and abolished the Central Committee of the Communist Party, swapping it right back out for the Good Old Tsar. Done out of sheer economic efficiency—a twenty-five-in-one bundle deal.

Hashed up for the plot cliffhanger, we get the now-entirely-habitual lamentations: the childhood friend who called him out, but never showed up to meet and accommodate.

9

The plotline moves further forward: along a sine wave. Replacing the Greek tavern-owner and his political lecture on the current moment of chaos in our best of all fallen worlds, we get a sudden leap backward—straight into memoirs about the beautiful years of college life.

The wimp pops up again—now playing the part of a philosophy student. Naturally, he knows more than any professor or the whole university department combined: a beautiful comic-book picture.

Throughout this ninth 5-to-6-page quota, Mitrofanov popped into my head: the tour guide from Dovlatov’s The Pushkin Hills. And his visit literally pierced me with nostalgic tenderness—like the spear of St. George the Victorious skewering the accursed serpent.

And further on—in such a spear-pierced state—it suddenly occurred to me: why on earth is that? After all, both of these guys are writing about the exact same damn thing, right? Both Dovlatov, with his Mitrofanov, and our current laureate, with his Pavlik, have presented the same phenomenon: the stellar capacity of the human intellect to completely overturn any and all IQ metrics.

But you can feel a real, living human inside Mitrofanov. Pavlik is just a tracing-paper blueprint: a modified cyborg model built for AI black-ops. How did it turn out like that?

To me—still pierced by that damn spear (you prick, Georgie!)—it's clear: this wild difference in feelings is completely the writers' fault.

Dovlatov sees a personality in his character. This prize-chaser looks at his like a tool to line his own pockets—nothing more. A personality evokes real feelings; an objectified concept cannot. I don't care if you crown yourself with a whole forest of laurels: it's still a flat-out no..

The apocalypse, just so you know, Avdeyka, has already arrived—but they taught you completely wrong about what's what in it. It is not the end: the apocalypse is the beginning of a new life.

Our mission is to bring this beginning closer by any means. That's what we're doing, whether we realize it or not: everyone at their post. Who are we? Eschatologists, of course.

'The worse, the better.' You've heard it, Avdey. But did you get the wisdom, kid? It's simple: every lie and piece of garbage—no matter what fancy gloss they wrap it in like 'postmodernism' or 'conceptualism'—just speeds up the end for the packers. But for us, it's the start: for us eschatologists.

Don't look for this in Kant or Hegel. Start with Berdyaev—they never warped him by translation into Russian. Most of all, an author has to love their own character. You can't hide love any more than a cough. But a fake stands out worse than a needle in a sack—assuming the reader isn't just eating popcorn to kill time.

No, sir. Who's going to love an algebraic formula called 'the individual'—unless they're a total pervert?—(Look, just pull your damn spear out of me, you fucker!)—under whatever philosophical sauce they try to serve it.

Yes, they met at the university—but their paths flatly refused to cross. The future oligarch didn’t notice the budding professor, and the professor hadn't yet guessed that the wimp was an upcoming oligarch.

And another thing—just thought of it right now—about that philosophy rule where quantity becomes quality, or vice versa. What a paradoxical trap: English literature only has twenty-six letters, yet Joyce, Pynchon—though only Gravity's Rainbow is worth a damn on Tom's ledger—and Wallace never let the living spring of real literature dry up.

Yet over here, with thirty-three letters, we're stuck in the hopeless swamp of the Sorokin-Pelevin stagnation: a frozen mediocrity turned out by a pair of old-fart masters.

And who the hell gave me the right! How dare I?! Judge for yourself, dear Professor. Here are two snippets from different sources. Same exact theme: a side view of two guys walking slow, talking philosophy. Compare them and guess which hemisphere Avdey was working in—A, Western, or B, Eastern?

1.

…hands in pockets, their figures dwindling—fawn and gray and a lick of scarlet, very sharp-edged—their footprints behind them a long freezing progress of exhausted stars, the overcast reflecting from the glazed beach nearly white.

2.

'Lost in their talk, the two thinkers ignored me: and I walked past them feeling sad and jealous…'

10

Everyone has a favorite number. Peter the Great, for example, had a soft spot for seventeen. For me—it's ten.

To be honest, I didn't know ten was my favorite at first: I had to calculate it numerologically. Once the math proved it was the absolute one for me, I called it quits. I'm a committed partner. Plus, I'm too lazy to go diving back into all those logs and cosines a second time.

And this tenth 5-to-6-page quota in S*hole didn't let down the expectations loaded onto it. Here is where you find a total, complete match between form and content. In terms of form—it’s the same already familiar, gasping, frantic dotted line: '… I felt sadness and jealousy …' Period. Paper can endure anything.

Prince Myshkin would have smeared each of those loaded nouns across eight pages. Minimum. But what can you expect from Myshkin? First off: he's an idiot. Second: he lived under the autocratic thumb of imperial Russia. We don't walk the same trails with his likes—such ones are completely out of step with our march.

And as for content, number ten is nothing but a student’s brave thumping on his own ribcage out of sheer pride that the days of his rebellious youth happened to coincide with the start of the wild nineties. They filled him with ecstasy brimming over even three decades later: he is still choking on his own spit as he retells it—and thank God’s mercy there isn't a glass tube shoved right through his cheek like a Pavlov’s dog. Instead, a stream of teenage ego just bounces up and down a Czech priest's wife's chair.

While you're still a half-baked punk, it's practically unthinkable not to brag about getting it on with a whore who happens to be in grad school. At that moment, she was staging a campaign to raise her own retail price: which is why she put on a cheap, bohemian, Zinaida Gippius-style act from the days of the Russian Literary Renaissance. It was a marketing stunt—a promise to give herself away as a 'free bonus one' to whoever was able to score tickets to a 'cool' theater production.

A crafty little bimbo, huh? Raising her rating in the eyes of the consumer with an edgy bait-and-switch: a strategy based on conditions that were completely impossible to fulfill from the start. Like trying to spell out the word 'Baltika' from the tiny letters stamped inside every one-thousandth beer cap… A special offer for driving her to the moon…

Hey, it's not her fault she never slept with Marc Levy! How else could she learn she's not the first or the last? Back in Novel with Cocaine (1934), she was already beaten to it by some other bohemian trash: a woman trading her body for a government receipt attesting her client’s donation of two kilos of gold to fight the Volga famine. Now that is what selfless bonking is!

It's a perfect one-to-one replica: a piece of paper here, a piece of paper there. Both for the exact same thing—a performance. Raising money to fight a starvation that you set up yourself! Total theater through and through.

But they didn't teach Ageyev in the lit department back then—not even as a sideline. Instead, his groin brain was standing at full mast, completely short-circuiting his actual head. So the kid went to Petik Pavlik to cry and beg for tickets you couldn't land in a lifetime: even if you stood in line for a solid month like a toy tin soldier.

But at that revolutionary moment, Petik had shaved his head bone-bald and laced up a pair of American army boots. He was already the overseer of wholesale black-market smuggling operations—with his headquarters stationed inside the 'Taiwan' beer pub. That’s exactly where the desperate users of the Excel program running inside his skull kept rushing: for his internal macros to calculate whose goods to barter theirs for, and at what exact interest rate. Meanwhile, our grand thinker was being simultaneously protected by shadow thieves-in-law and the KGB—running in total sync.