Nikolay Grinko credited as playing...
Professor
- Writer: All your technology, all those blast furnaces, wheels, and suchlike hustle and bustle, so that people can work less and consume more, they're all crutches, artificial limbs. Mankind exists in order to - to create works of art. At least that's unselfish compared with all other human activities. Great illusions. Images of absolute truth. Are you listening to me, Professor?
- Professor: What unselfishness are you talking about? People keep dying of hunger. Have you been living on the moon?
- Writer: No one in the world has a conception about the Zone, so it'll be a sensation. Television, you lady fans getting hot flashes, people carrying brooms as if they were laurel wreaths. Then our professor appears all in whit and declaims, "Mene, mene. Tekel upharsin." Naturally, everyone gapes and shouts, "Give him the Nobel Prize!"
- Professor: You bedraggled hack writer. You homegrown psychologist. Fit only to scribble graffiti in lavatories, you talentless clod.
- Writer: That's feeble stuff. Call that an insult? You don't know how it's done.
- Professor: All right. Suppose I'm after a Nobel Prize. What are you after? Want to bestow on mankind the pearls of your bought inspiration?
- Writer: I spit on mankind. In all of mankind, only one man interests me. And that's me. Am I worth anything or am I shit like certain other people?
- Professor: What if you find out that's indeed what you are?
- Writer: Know something, Einstein? I don't want to argue with you.
- Professor: Truth is born in arguments, damn it.
- Writer: Tell me, Professor, why did you get involved in this business? What's the Zone to you?
- Professor: Well, in a sense, I'm a scientist. What's in it for you? A fashionable author, women dropped all over you.
- Writer: I've lost my inspiration. I'm going to beg for some.
- Professor: So you've exhausted your talent?
- Writer: What? Yes, in a way.
- Stalker: What are you up to, Professor?
- Professor: Imagine what will happen when everyone believes in this Room and when they all come hurrying here. It's only a question of time. Not today, but tomorrow. And in the thousands. All these would-be emperors, grand inquisitors, fuhrers of all shades. The so-called saviors of mankind! And not for money or inspiration, but to remake the world.
- Stalker: I'll never bring that sort here.
- Professor: What do you understand? You're not the only stalker in the world. No stalker knows what ideas the people you bring here take away with them.