Vadim Zakharov

The golden page presented here, which has been pressed into a thick binding and passed through a laser printer sixty-seven times, is also the result of looking into a point or turning this point inside out. It contains the entire story of “The Little Prince”, including its illustrations. However, it does not look supersaturated or tired from bearing such a heavy burden. On the contrary, its core has been filled with inner substance, while its golden field is pregnant with the burnish of ancient armaments. This is how old men look sometimes when they have reached the hale heyday of age: wise, weather-worn, and loving. And you don’t have to know the story of their lives to understand this. It is enough to find yourself in their presence, and you immediately understand everything without the need for further words. Here, thoughts, words, and letters have also bled together, forming the relief of another world, of its ridgelets and hollows. You will look like a blind person reading braille. But you won’t need words: your fingers will immediately grasp all the images and plots from the page’s darkness.

…Even more. By placing your palm on the core of the page, you can feel a certain physical warmth; it is already enough not to pull your hand away immediately. This is the warmth of a famous text, which has been transformed into an “other.” This is actually what the edition is supposed to do. You know everything, at least about the content of the page before your eyes, but at the same time, you understand that this known quantity has been endowed with different qualities and now has a different relationship to the world, so that you will soon feel your hand squeezing something on the other side of the page. Don’t be afraid. There is nothing mystical or supernatural going on, nothing like what happened to the little boy in Rilke’s only novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” (1910), when he climbed under the table to pick up a pencil that had fallen down and saw that some other’s hand was reaching out to him from the wall. No. Here, it’s all just about a simple state that lasts no more than a second, when there is no one else around except for you and only you, seen through the depth of the “other,” through your voluntary transformation into one single point.