amrealurban
One morning, a phone call at five a.m. turns a man into a resource. An engineer, a philology student, an old Afghan veteran, a history teacher - all of them are overtaken by the same knock at the door. The State Machine sets its conveyor belt in motion: a draft notice, a medical commission, a training camp, a freight wagon, a trench, a stray shell fragment, a death notice. At every stage people become figures, and figures become accounts.
Suddenly Mortal is a novella about the mechanics of dehumanization. About logistics in which bandages run out faster than soldiers. About heroism that turns out to be nothing more than a bookkeeping entry. And about a book that remains when the people have burned.
Written in a grotesque, tragicomic manner, with epigraphs from Nietzsche to Brodsky and an intonation that echoes Bulgakov's satire, the novella asks a single question: what do you do when the Machine switches into sleep mode until the next cycle - while the dead ring out louder than any hymns?