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possible text for an advertising clip:
        Deep in the spring-time forest I drank my birch-bright Sprite.
       After reading the print-out Tatarsky brought him, Pugin said: ‘"The Uncola" is Seven-Up’s slogan, not Sprite’s.’
       After that he said nothing for a while, simply gazing at Tatarsky with his black-button eyes. Tatarsky didn’t speak either.
       ‘But that’s OK,’ Pugin said, eventually softening. ‘We can use it. If not for Sprite, then for Seven-Up. So you can consider you’ve passed the test. Now try some other brand.’
       ‘Which one?’ Tatarsky asked in relief.
       Pugin thought for a moment, then rummaged in his pockets and held out an opened pack of Parliament cigarettes. ‘And think up a poster for them as well,’ he said.
       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 calque on the word ‘uncola’, he very nearly gave up. Then he had a sudden inspiration. The history dissertation he’d written in the Literary Institute was called: ‘A brief outline of parliamentarianism 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