| 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. 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 nye-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 that he said nothing for a while, simply gazing at tatarsky with
his black-button eyes. if
not for sprite, then for seven-up. so you can consider you've passed the
test.
pugin thought for a moment, then rummaged in his pockets and held out
an opened pack of parliament cigarettes.
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 caique on the word
'uncola', he very nearly gave up. the
history dissertation he'd written in the literary institute was called: 'a
brief outline of parliamentar-ianism 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. |
| 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 events that been recorded in
history as following each other were in one and the same event, which
had so astounded contemporary and subsequent generations that echo had
been doubled and tripled, and then each echo had assumed a life of own. |
|
it was clear from the apologetically triumphant tone adopted by author
that his discovery appeared to to revolutionary and even
iconoclastic, which set tatarsky pondering yet again on vanity of
human endeavour. he didn't experience even the slightest sense of at
the fact that ii had turned out actually to
nebuchadnezzar iii, and the nameless historian's depth of really
seemed rather laughable. the kings seemed rather laughable too: it wasn't
even known for whether they were people or slips made by
scribe on clay tablets, and the only traces remaining of were on
those same clay tablets.. .. |
| chart pork carcass |