Political Phantasmagoria. Three short stories, 2017

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Innokenty Slanevsky. Political Phantasmagoria. Three short stories, 2017

About the AUTHOR and the STORIES

1. THE LAST HOME

2. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL

3. THE IMMORTAL PICTURE

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Innokenty Slanevsky is a Russian author of short stories who has developed his own unrepeatable style: the mixture of political satire with fantastic elements and the revelation of social problems with satirical mysticism. His first seven stories were published in 2016, and in December 2017 the book with 80 stories came out in Russian. He lives in the Novgorod region of Russia, works as a neurologist, married. In this book there are three of his stories: THE LAST HOME, THE IMMORTAL PICTURE and THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL.

THE LAST HOME has an anti-war theme. The allegorical presentation of the situation can be easily recognized by a reader though there are no real names of politicians or countries. The story can be called a political satire with elements of fantasy and satirical hyperbole.

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“And then, the enemy’s planes began to fly to us from the other side of the sea and bomb us,” I added.

“That’s true! “the colonel exclaimed, or rather he passed me his thought silently, for we communicated in the water exclusively mentally, as I have mentioned before. “It was just the thing that made me suspect that something went wrong! Why did we allow the enemy to bomb our territory?! Why were we sent to bomb exclusively peaceful settlements of the enemy, but not its airfields, for example?! It occurred to me that our leadership was absolutely uninterested in the outcome of the war, that they did not want to win the war. They seemed to be interested in something that was absolutely the opposite, in never finishing the war, in its lasting as long forever. Our grandfathers and fathers had fought in a different way, hadn’t they? With those and other considerations, I decided to go to our General Staff. When I came into the General Staff office, I saw a man sitting on two chairs at the table because one chair was not large enough for him. He was a civilian, a noncombatant rat, who had never sniffed powder. He was snapping seeds and spitting them out in all directions, and a cleaner was running around the office and skillfully catching the husks of the seeds right in the air and putting them in a small bag for garbage. How stupid and imprudent I was then to express my thoughts on the war to that noncombatant rat! The rat listened to me reluctantly and indifferently, and then blurted out, “Shove your military considerations, Colonel, somewhere deeper into yourself!” With these words, he spat out the husks right into my face and ordered me to get out. After that, I did not raise that issue any more. It was just that wretched third year of the war. Soon I was sent with another task to the enemy’s seaside, but I didn’t reach it, and I found myself here, under the water …”

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