Free Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin

always thought of myself as Ra: that was the name of the hero of the imaginary adventures I had before I fell asleep, when I closed my eyes and turned to face the wall—until the time when my dreams were affected by the usual developmental changes.
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    I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moonwalker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter? Evenif someone guesses the truth, he’ll never know that this human being was me, Omon Ra, the faithful falcon of the Motherland, as the Flight Leader once called me, putting his arm round my shoulder and pointing through the window at a brightly glowing cloud.

Another subject that appeared in our study timetable—“The General Theory of the Moon”—was classed as optional for everyone except Mitiok and me. The classes were given by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel of Philosophy, Ivan Evseievich Kondratiev. Somehow I didn’t take to him, although I had no real reason for disliking him and his lectures were quite interesting. I remember the unusual way he began his first class with us—he spent half an hour reciting various poems about the moon from pieces of paper; eventually he became so moved that he had to stop and wipe off his glasses. I still used to take notes then, and what I was left with from this class was a senseless accumulation of fragmentary quotations: “Like a golden drop of honey sweetly gleams the moon … Of the moon and hope and quiet glory … The moon, how rich the meaning of this word for every Russian ear … But the world has other regions, oppressed by the tormenting moon, to highest strength and supreme courage forever out of reach … But in the sky, schooled to endure all things, a senselessly distorted disc … He did control the flow of thought, but only by the moon … The cheerless liquid moonness …” And so on for another page and a half. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Kondratiev grew more serious and began speaking in an official singsong voice:
    “Dear friends! Let us recall the historic words of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written in 1918 in a letter to Inessa Armand. ‘Of all the planets and heavenly bodies,’ Lenin wrote, ‘the most important for us is the moon.’ Many years have passed since then, and the world has changed in many ways, but Lenin’s assessment has lost none of its acuteness and fundamental relevance: time has confirmed its correctness, and the fire of these words of Lenin’s still illuminates today’s page in the calendar. Indeed, the moon plays an immense role in the life of humanity. The famous Russian scientist Georgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff developed the Marxist theory of the moon during the early illegal period of his activity. According to this theory, the earth had five moons in all—this is, in fact, why the star which is the symbol of our state has five points. The fall of each of the moons has been accompanied by social upheavals and catastrophes—thus, the fourth moon, which fell to earth in 1904, and is known as the Tungus Meteorite, provoked the first Russian revolution, which was soon followed by the second. Previous moon falls led to changes in sociopolitical formations—of course, the cosmic catastrophes did not affect the level of development of the forces of production, which is determined independently of human will and consciousness, or the emanations of the planets, but they did facilitate the development of the subjective preconditions for revolution. The fall of our present moon—the fifth and final one—will usher in the absolute victory of Communism throughout the solar system. In this course we shallstudy Lenin’s two major works on the moon—‘The Moon and Rebellion’ and ‘Advice from an Outsider’. We’ll begin today with a review of bourgeois falsifications of the