Pip: O'Writer PUB — where the literary conference is always in the wrong century.

Mara: Today we're following a writer who boards a plane for Dublin and ends up somewhere considerably less convenient — a piece by Brian M'Conchogrye that bends time, genre, and the definition of a good drink. Let's start with the story itself.

А не это вот всё

Pip: The setup here is a familiar comic premise — reluctant celebrity author, dragged to a conference he didn't want to attend — but the story pulls the floor out from under it almost immediately.

Mara: Right. The narrator establishes his philosophy early: "Мой любимый формат — это место за стойкой, где говорят откровенные глупости, и хорошо напиваться — признак хорошего тона." His ideal evening is a barstool and honest nonsense. Dublin is an imposition.

Pip: And then the plane shakes, he hits the floor, and wakes up on straw in nineteenth-century Kazan. No explanation, no portal, no chosen-one speech — just a rifle butt to the jaw and a demand for cold kvass that nobody can fill.

Mara: The story is aware of its own genre. He explicitly says he hates time-travel fiction — "тупые истории" — because the hero either fails to cope with the past or overcorrects and tramples butterflies. He's irritated by the premise he's living inside.

Pip: Which is the most honest thing a time-travel story has ever admitted about itself.

Mara: What follows is less adventure than social comedy. He sits on a regimental sofa, drinks tea with a serf girl named Polina, gets force-fed champagne by officers who find his talk of airplanes and the internet delightful, and wakes in a cart headed for Kamchatka — apparently under exile conditions he still doesn't fully understand.

Pip: The crime, presumably, is something he published. He never finds out what. He asks once, and they hand him vodka.

Mara: Polina reappears at a roadside posting station, now apparently his wife — and that relationship, conducted across a single night and a year of letters, becomes the emotional center of the piece. He writes her name, just "Поля," and that's the whole letter. A genius writer, reduced to one word.

Pip: A year in the saddle, fifty horses, the Baikal steppe, a candle burning down — and then the story snaps back. He's on the floor of the business-class cabin, a flight attendant is handing him whisky and cola, and the turbulence outside Dublin looks exactly like the landlady's lightning.

Mara: The closing line is the title restated as a verdict: "За дождь, за раскаты и вспышки, на Камчатку. К Полине, куда-нибудь, лишь бы пожить ещё, а не это вот всё." The nineteenth century, for all its inconvenience, felt more like living. The conference, the hotel, the reception desk — that's the "всё" he wants none of.

Pip: The warm beer was always the wrong problem.

Mara: The story keeps returning to the same image — a candle, a drink that's gone wrong, a woman on the other side of something impassable.

Pip: Time zones, centuries, whatever. The distance is the point. More from O'Writer PUB next time.