Judging from the photographs in the report, the third letter of this word appears to resemble the Cyrillic letter ‘И’ rather than the Latin ‘U’. We may therefore assume that what we are presented with here is not an anagram of the English word ‘fuck’, as M. Leibman asserts in his monograph, but a representation of the Russian word ‘сKиф’, i.e. Scythian. This surmise is confirmed by the phrase ‘yes, we are asiatics’ on the back of the T-shirt - a clear allusion to Alexander Blok’s poem ‘Scythians’, which, to all appearances M. Leibman seems not to have read.
Also found with the articles of clothing was a rucksack containing a laptop computer, as already mentioned in the report. None of these items had been damaged, and no signs of exposure to fire were discovered on any of them, which indicates that they were planted on the site of the incident after the five-pointed star was burned into the grass. No criminal investigation was initiated as a result of this event.
The subsequent fate of the text that was (supposedly) discovered on the hard disk of the laptop is well known. It initially circulated among occult fringe groups, and was later published as a book. The original title of the text, sounding exactly like the Russian phrase for ‘so fucking what?’, was considered obscene even by our modern-day literary hucksters, and so it was published under the changed title of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf.
This text is not, of course, deserving of any serious literary or critical analysis. Nonetheless, we would like to note that it presents such a dense interweaving of borrowings, imitations, rehashings and allusions (not to mention the poor style and the author’s quite exceptional puerility), that its authenticity or genuineness do not pose any question for serious literary specialists: it is interesting purely as a symptom of the profound spiritual decline through which our society is currently passing. And for serious people who have made their way in the world the pseudo-oriental pop-metaphysics that the author is unable to resist flaunting before other dismal failures like himself cannot possibly evoke anything more than an intense feeling of compassion.
We should like to assure Muscovites and visitors to the capital that cleanliness and public order in Bitsevsky Park are always maintained well up to the mark and the militia of Moscow stand guard over the peace and security of citizens walking there by day and night.
Finally, and above all, my dear friends, may there always be room in your lives for a song of joy!
Tengiz Kokoev,
Major, head of the ‘Bitsa Centre’ Department of the FSB
Maya Marmeladoff, Igor Shitman,
PhD in philological science
Peldis Sharm,
Presenter of the TV programme ‘Karaoke Homeland’
1
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze,
Still one of those blue-caped starmen?
Humbert Humbert
The client I had been directed to by the barman Serge had been waiting in the Alexander Bar of the hotel National since seven-thirty in the evening. It was already seven-forty and the taxi was still crawling along, shifting from one traffic jam to another. I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one.
‘I want to be forever young,’ Alphaville sang yet again on the radio.
I wish I had your problems, I thought. And immediately remembered my own.
I don’t really think about them that often. All I know is that they reside somewhere out there in the black void and I can come back to them again at any moment. Just to convince myself one more time that they have no solution. And thinking about that for a moment leads to interesting conclusions.
Let’s just suppose I solve them. What then? They’ll simply disappear - that is, they’ll drift away for ever into the same non-existence where they reside for most of the time anyway. And the only practical consequence will be that my mind will stop dragging them back out of that black void. Doesn’t that mean my insoluble problems only exist because I think about them, and I recreate them anew at the very moment when I remember them? The funniest of my problems is my name. It’s a problem I only have in Russia. But since I live here at the moment, I have to admit that it’s a very real problem.
My name is A Hu-Li. When this is spelt in Russian letters - ‘А Xули’ - it becomes a Russian obscenity.