Björn recenserade Berättelse om det viktigaste av Nils Håkanson
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4 stjärnor
A Story Of What's Most Important (1923) is the sort of short story that sets your head spinning. Over 45 pages, Zamyatin tells the supposedly simple tale of a skirmish between Soviet soldiers and rebelling farmers, where both sides soon discover that their leaders are old friends. Except - presumably inspired by the new idea of cinema, an art that can catch time in a bottle - the narrator comes equipped with a remote control that can pause, rewind, slow time down or speed it up, capture a moment and make it last forever or cut it off once and for all.
As if that wasn't enough, he intercuts it with a sci-fi story of a dead planet hurtling down to collide with Earth, the last four inhabitants fighting over the last bottle of oxygen amidst crumbling columns and temples.
And underneath that, somewhere, traces of an even older …
A Story Of What's Most Important (1923) is the sort of short story that sets your head spinning. Over 45 pages, Zamyatin tells the supposedly simple tale of a skirmish between Soviet soldiers and rebelling farmers, where both sides soon discover that their leaders are old friends. Except - presumably inspired by the new idea of cinema, an art that can catch time in a bottle - the narrator comes equipped with a remote control that can pause, rewind, slow time down or speed it up, capture a moment and make it last forever or cut it off once and for all.
As if that wasn't enough, he intercuts it with a sci-fi story of a dead planet hurtling down to collide with Earth, the last four inhabitants fighting over the last bottle of oxygen amidst crumbling columns and temples.
And underneath that, somewhere, traces of an even older story about gods, men, sacrifice and rebirth.
All of it in a prose that never says outright what's most important, and skips from closeups to panoramas to things that can never be captured in images in the turn of a phrase.
Seriously, no wonder Stalin didn't want him to write anymore.