Consecutio temporum

Спрошенный студентом-"физиком" из Бауманки, "что именно символизирует собой собака," Андрей Тарковский юлит, веселится, по-отечески укоряет вопрошающего за "сложное восприятие действительности" и произносит сакраментальную фразу "собака ... обозначает собаку". В контексте "вечера вопросов и ответов" в техническом ВУЗе это совершенно годный ответ, коан для толпы фарисеев, разделённой на секции физиков и лириков, постигающих искусство в стремлении взять автора на понты и поддержать разговор вопросом про весло.

Мерилин Робинсон в своей первой повести "Housekeeping", написанной в тот же год, когда "Сталкер" показывали в Канне, предупреждает вопрос о собаке (выделение здесь и далее моё):

For example, once we spent the night in the woods. It was a Saturday, so we had worn our dungarees, and had carried our fishing poles and a creel that contained cookies and sandwiches as well as jackknives and worms. But we had not planned to stay the night, so we had no blankets. We walked miles up the shore to a small inlet where the water was shallow and still. These waters were full of plump little perch disturbingly avid for capture. Only childen would trifle with such creatures, and only we among children would walk so far for fish that bit with equal avidity within a hundred feet of the public library. But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again. She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods.

( reveal )