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gangster movies. ‘Not the future,’ they told me.”
    It turned out Vitaly wanted me to shoot a short interview with him. He was planning a documentary about himself.
    “None of you TV people could capture me right in your films. Did you bring a big camera? Good.”
    We shot the interview in the car. Vitaly put on his most statuesque look, part reptilian, part Romantic, speaking ever so slowly.
    “Ever since I was a child I knew I could be more than other people. Run faster. Jump higher—” Suddenly, mid-sentence, he broke off and burst out of the car. He started screaming, spitting at a crumpled bum with wildly swollen eyes drinking from a bottle in a plastic bag behind the car. The bum crawled away. Vitaly got back in, still breathing hard, but the anger switched off like a light.
    “You wouldn’t want him in the same shot as me. He’d make it ugly.”
    Then Vitaly shot an interview with me. He had all my words written out already; I just had to memorize the script.
    “The first time I met Vitaly he struck me as the most talented dangerous man, and the most dangerous talented man, I had ever encountered. . . . ”
    It was a long speech, and I kept fluffing my lines. But Vitaly was a patient director, and by the fifth take we got it right.
    After the shoot Vitaly leaned into the back and brought out a pile of hardcover books.
    “These are for you.”
    They were novels, written by Vitaly.
    “I’ve taken to writing books. They’re selling pretty well. I’ll be honest, the first one was ghostwritten. But since then I’ve learned how to write myself.”
    Most of the early books were based on Vitaly’s life of crime. But in the last book he had changed genres. It was a satire of Russian politics, about a bully, gangster state that uses its giant reserves of fart gases to manipulate the countries around it into submission (at the time Russia was threatening Ukraine with shutting off its gas supply).
    “I often think now I should have gone into politics,” said Vitaly. “I just thought it boring, I didn’t realize they used the same methods as us. It’s too late now, though. I’ve dedicated myself to art. If I can’t film, I’ll write. And you know what the future is, Peter? Comedy. Set up a meeting for me at TNT; they might want to televise my fart-book.”
    I told Vitaly I’d do my best. He insisted I take a stack of thick, black glossy books to show people. I couldn’t say no and carried them in two plastic bags back to town, the sharp edges of the books tearing through the plastic and spiking against my legs with every step.
    At TNT I went through the motions of helping Vitaly and gave the scripted comedy department a copy of the book.
    “No idea whether it’s any good, but I promised,” I explained, almost apologizing. And thought that would be the end of it.
    But a few weeks later I walked into TNT and there was Vitaly, sitting in one of the little glass meeting rooms with a couple of producers, wearing his shell suit and cap. He noticed me when I came in, stood up, took off his cap, and waved. “Hi, brother,” I could hear him calling, the words low and distorted through the glass. Suddenly I wanted to turn away, ignore him, pretend I’d never met him and didn’t know him. ‘Brother!’ he called again, waving his cap in ever larger motions. And the only way I could override the sudden desire to run away was to play up and call out even louder: ‘Brother! Brother!’ until everyone in the office could hear and was looking at me.
    “Is he for real?” the women in the drama department asked me afterward. “It all seems a bit of an act.”
    “Oh, he’s quite real. You actually interested in his book?”
    “It’s well written. We need to think about it.”
    One of the areas TNT specializes in is satire. If the USSR drove humor underground and thus made it an enemy of the state, the new Kremlin actively encourages people to have a laugh at its expense: one TNT sketch show is about