Sand Acacia

In the 1987 published novella "The Sand Acacia," Ruslan Kireev, in the form of a parable, writes about the irony and mockery as one of the sides of the world's evil. The story varies an apocalyptic plot: every committed evil, mockery, even an unspoken malicious thought, draws the deadly quicksand closer to the flourishing city. Every good deed makes it retreat a little. Each of the townspeople undergoes a "sand trial," that is, each becomes responsible for multiplying evil—and at the same time each is able to tip the other scale with their portion of good. This novella shows how the author overcomes narrative self-irony, which defines the style of most of his previous works.