Gramophone of centuries - a story by Yefim Davydovich Zozuli . It was written in 1919.
Content
Scene Description
To the inventor Kuks came his old friend Tilib. Kuks completed the “Gramophone of Ages” - an apparatus that reads the sounds of the human voice and generally all sorts of sounds imprinted in the form of special invisible tubercles on all inanimate objects near which they are heard. Lumps can persist for centuries. Friends decide to check the device (although it has been tested previously - the cabinet has been listened to, from the beginning of its construction - 10 years before socialism). They listen to the dining room, hear the voice of Kuks's dead wife, thousands of ordinary words. Suddenly, the voice of the young Tilibom is heard, he confesses his love to Kuks's wife. Following Kuks scolding Tilibom for his eyes, calling him "the old channel." They heard a lot of unflattering about themselves, said at different times by the lips of both. Tilib repeatedly tried to seduce a friend's wife, but it turned out that other friends seduced her. Kuks offers to make peace: “We stand each other. But forget about it. All this is past. And the next generation will be fine. The new man will be smarter than us. ” Tilibom agrees.
They walk along the street of the socialist utopia of the second half of the 20th century, everywhere is sunny, pleasant music sounds. They listen to the old street - they scourge someone, the beggars ask for alms, a pogrom is heard. At the apparatus, onlookers gather. People listened to the lively eerie sounds of a bygone life and perceived them exactly in a nightmare. Cooks does not know what application the Gramophone of Ages will find. People do not understand him. In socialist schools they teach more about building the future than they are familiar with the affairs of the past. He decides to turn in the device to the Academy.
The Gramophone of Centuries was tested at the Academy of Sciences for a whole week, which caused two disasters - once a man was shot under an oak tree (which passed one of the tests), and the prayer of the doomed was truly terrible: “Shoot, but not in the face!” This request was unknown to someone when the person being killed made such a depressing impression that the sensitive creator of the New Ethics started banging his head on the ground and, as his further behavior found out, went crazy. When the apparatus in another garden began to reproduce the scene of the torture of the peasant by the landowner and the garden was voiced by terrible cries of the tortured, an old revolutionary present among scientists suddenly rushed to the apparatus, knocked him down and began to stomp his feet.
At the meeting, the inventor was told: “Your invention is great, but completely useless. May the old world be damned forever! We do not need his moans, we do not need his horrors. " Tilibom says he lost peace from the apparatus. Besides personal abomination, ”Tilib continued,“ in my ears there are constantly groans, screams, curses and curses that filled the old world. Kuks suddenly jumped up and began to finish off the car and trample it underfoot, like that revolutionary in the Academy.
Reviews and Analysis
Alexander Iosifovich Deutsch in the article “Yefim Zozulya” describes the basis of the story: “Hatred of the old world owns the writer with such strength that he sees nothing in the past except suffering and horrors. Later, he will understand that in his creative works the new world will take advantage of the best of what was left to him from the past, but now he is obsessed with the passionate pathos of denial and destruction ... ” [1] .
In the article “Ezim Davidovich Zozulya”, I. A. Tortnova calls this symbolic and philosophical-satirical tale an important stage in the author’s work; in it and some other social topics are embodied in allegorical images and situations. As criticism noted, at that time “Zozulya loses her usual object of observation and goes on to fantasy novels, utopian novels” [2] .