In 1998 Emile Zola's celebrated J'Accuse turned 100. To commemorate the occasion, the French daily Le Nouvel Observateur asked several European writers to muse about the impact of Zola's pile-driving polemic. Among them was Victor Pelevin, the 36-year-old author of such satirical delights as Omon Ra and The Life of Insects. True to form, the idiosyncratic Russian immediately threw the putative topic overboard and seized on the punning relationship of j'accuse and jacuzzi. His essay, which makes its English-language debut in Elaine Blair's translation, doesn't tell us much about Zola. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the effervescent mental processes of its author.

From time to time, I have the sense that I resemble a jacuzzi. Unpredictable and inexplicable bubbles of thought continually float to the surface of my mind. I don't know where these thoughts were before, or where they'll disappear later. I only know them in the moment that they percolate in this jacuzzi on my shoulders. All that I know, think, and remember is a chain of these bubbles, rising to the churning surface of my consciousness and disappearing into the space where I no longer am.

I see the same jacuzzis on the shoulders of others. They differ little from my own, except perhaps in their water temperature and shape of the tub. The principle action is the same. So is their future: after a certain amount of time, the plug will pop out of the drain and the water will wash away into an unknown reservoir, about which so many different convictions have been expressed in the last 10,000 years that, were these convictions not merely bubbles, one could go insane.

As far as I know, the jacuzzis of the past were similar to those of today--simpler in their design, but with the same principal function. This is why ancient societies came to the inexorable conclusion that everything in the world is simply a combination of two elements: air and water. It's possible that this is in fact the case. Yet it would mean that the theory itself is no more than air and water, and consequently fails to explain anything.

The form into which the vaporous bubbles gather is of particular interest. Here technology, which has reached previously unimaginable heights on the eve of the third millennium, is especially helpful. As they rise to the surface, the tiny air bubbles in a modern jacuzzi form what is known as "the foam of days," astonishing the senses with its seemingly endless novelty. Yet it is written in the Bible that even in ancient times these bubbles were already forming under the sun.

The problem, ultimately, is that for a long time now there has been nobody in the jacuzzi. Not in my own, and not in the neighboring ones that percolate next to mine. Behind the word I is nothing more than a garland of bubbles, which remains unchanged from morning until evening, yet disappears at night when the electricity is turned off and the compressor no longer blasts air into the water. For this reason the apostrophe in the word "j'acuzzi," used to describe the whirlpool that emerges as the water is heated, actually represents little more than a rudimentary law of grammar.

To accuse another jacuzzi is a difficult task--because not only the object, but more important, the subject of the accusation is nowhere to be found in that water and air. There is nobody to accuse. Still, I regret that we do not live in an age that produces legends like the one about Archimedes. This story is obscure and little understood, yet quite poetic. They say that Archimedes could appear in the bath only when there was not a single bubble in the water. His sudden immersion was so turbulent that much of the water splashed onto the floor. Impressed with Archimedes's work, the ruler of Syracuse, where Archimedes lived, brought him a crown of gold and silver. Archimedes only laughed, and plunged the crown into the water.

The above must, evidently, be understood as a metaphor.