The Dream of Death

Vagif Sultanly is one of the foremost representatives of modern Azerbaijani prose and his latest book expresses moral and ethical features specific to modern society such as estrangement, alienation, oblivion, negligence and feelings of uselessness. The main part of the book is a novel entitled "The Dream of Death" which expresses the excitement and anxiety reflected inside the internal human world by the destruction of a town's cemetery to make way for a new highway and the consequent need to relocate the corpses from the old cemetery to the new one. A chaotic unfolding of the events and circumstances around this profoundly unsettling action in the novel allows the author to create a powerful view of a modern tragedy. The short stories entitled "The Morning Mist", "Motherland", "Mirage", "Polar Night", "The Cave" and "A Blind Tie" describe the moral and ethical changes imparted by the social environment to the human characters who are turned into objects of art description.