Untrodden paths

Departing, to Andrei: Get your dosage after breakfast and you may enjoy yourself in the garden till dinnertime.

Scene in the yard – Dialectics

Sound of chirping birds.

Out in the yard, Andrei notices a young man stripped to the waist working out with a dumb-bell not far from the porch. He approaches him and asks: Twenty?

Tsvetochkin: What?

Andrei: Twenty kilos?

Tsvetochkin: Yep.

Andrei: Do they allow it?

Tsvetochkin put the dumb-bell on the ground: Of course, not, well, not officially, anyway. The boys brought it so we could exercise on the sly. We hide it in the lilac bushes afterwards. Want to try?

Andrei: Sure.

Tsvetochkin commenting on Andrei’s vigorous jerks: Well, boy, you are in good shape. Unfortunately, I can’t use full force, my ribs are still aching.

Andrei: Why?

Tsvetochkin: Cops broke three of my ribs.

Andrei: Did you get here in the festival sweep too?

Tsvetochkin: No, I had problems with our local police inspector.

Andrei: Where are you from?

Tsvetochkin: Do you know the 37th kilometer commune?

Andrei: Yes.

Tsvetochkin proudly: Have you ever heard the name of Tsvetochkin?

Andrei: Harry Tsvetochkin?

Tsvetochkin: Yes.

Andrei: Never heard it, but I did see it. This name is sprayed in large letters on a wall of a shed near the railroad. Whenever I go by in a commuter train I see: Harry Tsvetochkin. Did you spray it?

Tsvetochkin: No. Boys did it. You see we used to work out there with the dumb-bells. As I proved to be the local strongman, the boys sprayed my name in red letters on the wall.

Andrei: And what was the problem with your local inspector?

Tsvetochkin: Well, his daughter began frequenting our shed.

Andrei with a laugh: Got interested in the sport too?

Tsvetochkin: Yes, if you call sex a sport. Her daddy tried to disband us a couple of times, and threatened to tear off my head and everything beneath. I told him to bugger off because no one was dragging his precious babe there by force. Well, a week later they picked me up at my work place, put in a car and drove to the police department for what they call «questioning».

Somebody had stolen the wheels off somebody’s car, so they said it was me, and punched me in the teeth to facilitate, as they put it, a «Gorbachev’s consensus» – to make me confess, I mean. I countered the bastard who hit me with my right, in the teeth too. He went down like a log, hitting the keys with the back of his head, they had the keys stuck in their safe. Well, in short, he got his head fractured and the whole mob went mad and started punching and kicking me, breaking three of my ribs, then they threw me in solitary where I developed lung edema, and the pleura became detached from the beating.

Well, they got scared I would die on their hands, so they offered me money: Take it, they said, and keep your mouth shut, or else; we’ll take you to a hospital as a mugging victim we picked up in the street.

Andrei: So what did you do?

Tsvetochkin: Refused, of course. I won’t look at this scum, much less make deals with them. Too bad I didn’t kill that bastard.

Andrei: Well, I’m afraid you’re too harsh on them. They didn’t cheat you with the hospital, anyway. They mistook emergency for psychiatry, though; but you can’t expect police to know who treats heads and who treats, say, asses.

Tsvetochkin smiles: How can they, indeed, if you can’t tell their heads from their asses?

Andrei: How did you survive, incidentally? Lung edema is a serious thing. Did they treat you here?

Tsvetochkin: They did, with aminazine, just like everyone here. I survived because I heal easily like a dog.

Andrei: I see; I’m pretty much a survivor too. Where shall I put this dumb-bell?

Tsvetochkin: Over there, in the bushes behind the bench. Would you like to play chess or dominos?

Andrei: Naah, any brain use is strictly proscribed for me by the authorities. I’d much rather sun-bathe in the bushes.

Tsvetochkin: OK, then.

Andrei, approaching a bench among lilac bushes on which Victor Vasilyevich, stripped to the waist, is sunbathing: May I?

Victor: Sure, enjoy yourself, if labor therapy is not for you.

Andrei: I’m not inclined to work for the communists, besides they won’t risk letting me out. Frankly, I’m surprised they let me out in the garden.

Victor: They let everyone out in the garden here. Unless you are strapped to your bunk, of course.

Andrei: Well, that’s a comfort. By the way, I’ve thought of your new and the Hegelian old dialectics. How do they exactly differ? You’ve said you just added maxims there…

Victor: Caught a philosophic fever in the nuthouse?

Andrei: No, I was just wondering: If you really created a universal methodology, it would actually mean a revolution of our minds, because methodology is a kind of a universal key used for deciphering, the key which could change our whole outlook. Isn’t that so?

Victor: Yes, though I’d compare it to a grammar, a syntax: If you do not know its rules, you won’t understand the language, even if you know the meaning of every word. That’s one thing; the other is that, more importantly, having changed our world outlook, this methodology will change out attitude toward the world.

As for differences, it differs from the old one not so much by a greater number of new notions and maxims as by a newer and more detailed interpretation of the old ones, ranging from conditionality and relativity of all notions and maxims, like: the unity and struggle of the opposites; a shift of quantity into quality and negation of negation – all this may be true under certain conditions with certain points of reference, and not true in others.

The old dialectics has none of this, nor has it a universal measure for various processes and phenomena.

Andrei: Wait a minute, how can there be a universal measure in this extremely diverse material world?