Compilation of electro-psychotix from Romania, Serbia, Russia and Belgium.

“Of all these publishers circulating underground papers beneath the government, and the pamphlet bootleggers, book counterfeiters, and street peddlers, I am gathering an organization, which the mainstream would call the mafia, but our stream will call . . . I don’t know what.

“Our mission: to bring all the illegal business in our publishers—intelligentsia and these friends of mine—together under our control, and then all the publishers conducting illegal business across the country, and then all the legal business, too.”

“Well, in all of them . . .”

“Okay, most of them. We’ll make enough money, ideally hard cash, to buy them all within a few years when privatization begins, and it will definitely begin. We will create a gigantic publishing conglomerate—legally, and we will have so much influence on politics, and so much authority and power . . .”

“We’ll be magnates. We’ll be like the sun,” mused Yegor, feeling the liquor glow.

“Right now we have three streams of income. The first—almost legal. To move all equipment and staff to cooperatives, to initially and privately make books, and sell them. Right now, this literate country will go for it. They’ll go for Nietzsche, Platonov, Nabokov, Hemingway, Chase, King. Our native bestsellers will emerge, too. Business will boom.

“The second stream—completely illegal, a black market of literature. Left-wing circulation, unlicensed texts, publications without authorization or rights. Basically, intellectual piracy. And just like that, a monopoly, a stronghold on typography, special interest stores, et cetera.”

“This is so amazing, Igor, I could just kiss you!” cried Yegor, but he didn’t know how to kiss another man, so he didn’t.

“The third stream is . . . neither here nor there. It’s legal, but frowned upon. Not sure that it will work, but it’s worth a shot. Literary counterfeits and pranks. The ‘lost appendices of King Lear’ that were ‘found.’ Sensationalism. We just need someone to compose them in Old English and Old Rusian. Like a made-up Nostradamus. Rediscovered journals of Hesse. Intellectual provocations aimed at pretentious idiots. Pseudoscientific theories. Friedrich Engels—a woman, the lover of Marx’s wife. Shit like that. Premium pricing, in small circulation. All in all, a boutique of falsified gems.

“And I think a lot of rich and political guys will show up. Some of them might want to sponsor intellectual and creative people of raw talent—who isn’t a failed writer? They’ll have a bunch of young girls with them, starlets who want to sing and act. And we’ll be there with movie scripts and songbooks. And then the boss, who will want to go down in history as a great poet. A dramaturge. A new-wave Griboyedov. We’ll have a whole crew of talented but awfully impoverished and alcoholically weak-willed poets. We’ll buy whatever they have that’s been lying around, whatever poems and plays they don’t need. We’ll buy them for cheap. But we’ll sell them to the big bosses and executives for price tags that Tolstoy wouldn’t even have dreamed of. Two hundred dollars an hour to bang on a typewriter at corporate parties. And we’ll produce them under the executive name for the executive budget. They’ll be expensive productions. And the poet—that’s for life. Then we’ll always have to pretend to be poets for these bankers and execs and pass other people’s poetry off as our own. We’ll have constant clients. It will be like a drug for them. So, Yegor, a collaboration in this third stream of organized income is what I wanted to—”

“I’m in!”

“—offer you. If you’re in, then, firstly—”

“What, what do I have to do?”

“—you must kill Fedor Ivanovich.”

“Without question.”

“Right now. For bonding, I’d say, and dedication . . .”

“No matter. Just . . . with a firearm. I couldn’t stab or strangle him.”

“Here is a gun. Fedor Ivanovich, Fedor Ivanovich, could you come here for a minute . . .”


Almost Zero, Natan Dubovitski