Daniil Kharms, Venedikt Erofeev, and Sergei Dovlatov Rewrite Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing

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Daniil Kharms, Venedikt Erofeev, and Sergei Dovlatov Rewrite Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In Amerikkka in One Continuous Flow of Consciousness

The river begins in a sentence that never learned punctuation and therefore keeps going, like us, like America, like the bottle that is passed and comes back emptier but heavier. We stand by the water because standing is cheaper than believing, and the trout know this, they hover with the calm of officials who have seen documents before and are not impressed.

Fishing rods appear but are immediately ashamed of themselves. Someone remembers trout fishing as a book, not an activity, and this feels more accurate. The river agrees by doing nothing special. Water has always been good at ideology: it flows forward while pretending it isn’t responsible.

One man explains that America is a system for losing small things—keys, hopes, afternoons—and trout are merely witnesses enrolled without consent. Another man interrupts himself to say he has already forgotten what he was about to forget. This is written down mentally and published later as silence.

We drink. The bottle is democratic, then aristocratic, then gone. The trout jump once, as if to check whether we are serious, then fall back into the grammar of water. Nobody moves. Movement would be too close to intention.

A memory arrives uninvited: a train, a kitchen, a fish that was never caught but cooked anyway. Someone laughs briefly and apologizes to no one. The river pretends not to hear, which is its best quality.

America passes by sideways, wearing a hat that doesn’t fit. The trees lean in to listen but learn nothing new. Fishing becomes thinking, thinking becomes waiting, waiting becomes a form of protest no one notices.

At some point evening happens by accident. We pose without agreement, forming a photograph that claims permanence while already fading. The trout keep their distance. We keep the day. The river keeps going, which feels personal but isn’t.

Nobody catches anything.

This is considered a success.