Writer Dino Butzati (1906–1972), who is called one of the leading Italian science fiction writers of the twentieth century, is represented very modestly to the Ukrainian reader. Some of his works at different times were published in the famous magazine Vsesvit and a number of science fiction almanacs. Now you can familiarize themselves with the free digital platforms “Library of Ukrainian Literature” and “Chertivo”, but in both, as in the printed primordics, the author’s surname is served as Budzati.

The reason for this transcription is incomprehensible, because the Italian translation experts assure: Buzzati reads and is written as Butzati. It was with this spelling of the surname in 2009 that the author’s most famous novel “Tatar desert” (“Folio”, translation of Yuri Pedan) came to the Ukrainian book market..

Roman, written during the Second World War (1940) not a very famous writer, but already famous journalist in his homeland, brought Butzati world recognition. And this is despite the fact that the author managed to work in the same newspaper-the Milan Corriere Della Sera-and under Mussolini, and with the Antifashistian rebels, and in the post-war period. At the same time without changing the beliefs and not adjusting to the change of power.

The Tatar Desert-an allegory novel with a fairly common plot (“A life-poor life in a remote border fortress”-here you can remember a dozen authors, from Franz Kafka, with whom Butzati is customary to compare, to John Kutzey, whose “barbarians” in the end, after 44 years since writing, from afar in Ukrainian) in Ukrainian). Describing the life of a fortress on the border with a conditional mountain desert, Dino Butzati used the experience of his childhood in dolomite alps. And a year before the release of Roman, he went on an editorial trip to Africa, where the Italian fascists waged a aggressive war in Abyssinia. From there, Dino wrote optimistic reports until he picked up the typhoid fever and returned to Italy.

Having recovered, he again became a military correspondent, now on the cruiser " This experience will then form the basis of several of his already frankly anti -war fantastic short stories.

The “Tatar desert” is based on a simple plot: the young officer Giovanni Drogo, just after the Academy, goes to serve in the remote border fort, which is called, despite the strategic insignificance, moral and physical obsolescence, the fortress. From which Drogo has an irresistible desire and even the opportunity to transfer to a more interesting place of service as soon as possible, but something holds other officers here. This is something-a distant sense of threat and the opportunity to prove himself in a future war, which the book kingdom did not know for a long time, unlike the real Italy then. A simple, it would seem, plot clings to its details, primarily the absurdity of life according to the charter. In one of the episodes, a soldier who forgot an updated password perishes daily - he was shot by the sentry, because the instruction requires that.

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In another episode, the authorities sees telet pipe among the officers-because someone noticed a suspicious movement in the dead desert, but this movement should not be noticed, according to the valuable instructions of the highest leadership. During the meaningless competition in the high-speed demarcation of the mountainous section of the border (the northern neighbors also participate in it), one of the officers freezes in the snow, and his death becomes the subject of envy of others-after all, and died, fulfilling the duty....

The mysterious northern neighbors who have not been showing themselves for decades, finally (! ) begin to clearly prepare for war, which causes the enthusiasm of the guards of the fortress unusual for reality. After all, some spent in her all a conscious life, without showing himself with anything. Waited for war and already a middle -aged sick lonely drogo. But is it too late?

In 1976, the novel " The film of the same name directed by Valerio Dzurlini received several film aids and is considered one of the most starry - almost all roles in it are played by leading Italian and French actors of those times.

And it is not without reason Butzati is considered a leading representative of Italian fiction. His works - both small novels and novels - almost always contain an element of this genre. For example, “time deceior”: a mechanism is working in the city for the elect, which delays the course of time for the residents, so the lucky ones who can afford should live at least one and a half hundred years. But only within the city-leaving it will no longer be possible due to changes in the body.

In the story “An increased portrait”, the reader comes into contact with such a popular topic of artificial intelligence, which in the 1960 work has a completely different character than the usual eccentric interlocutor or a generator of silly pictures with people with extra limbs for our contemporaries. Almost all the plots of the novels of Butzati have signs of social prose. As, for example, a terrible story “Seven floors” - about a leading medical clinic with a clear hierarchy, where lucky ones with completely petty diseases are on the seventh floor, and on the first - incurable suicide bombers. The hero of the story is on a carefree seventh, but soon he is supposedly not at all because of the deterioration of his condition, they begin to translate (and every time only temporarily) lower....

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Or grotesque novel " In a mountainous area, in an incredible way - contrary to all biological laws - a dragon wound up, which eats peasant goats. Moreover, the peasants themselves wear him on a goat daily so that he does not make troubles. A selected aristocratic society goes to the battle with the dragon, having even a small gun in the arsenal. But it turns out that the dragon is very miserable, one might say, dwarf. And not even a dragon, but a dragon with two reptiles-children. And instead of reproducing the centuries -old plot of the battle of a warrior with a monster, we see the meaningless and brutal murder of an animal, which, in principle, does not threaten any people....

The story “Panic in the La Scala” is knocked out of the fantastic series, which the contemporary of Butzcati, the French writer and biographer Andre Morois called the best European post-war report. The plot is based on an atmosphere of anxious expectation of coming to power in a single Milan (a city where the author spent most of his life and was buried) of such “Morcists”, rebels with an eclectic ideology that proclaims some incomprehensible “new justice”. The rebellion was supposed to begin during the opera “Beating the Babies” of the authorship of the invented composer Pierre Grossghemyut....

The presence of only one Butzati translation on the book market of Ukraine (or rather, its absence - the “Tatar desert” has long become a bukinistic rarity) - an annoying misunderstanding. Undoubtedly, there are other works of his other works, which would be enough for good almanac.

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