About the Real Stories Project: Life Is the Best Screenwriter

Real Stories stands apart from Iskandar Kadyrov’s other literary projects. It isn’t a cycle of philosophical novellas like the three branches of INCUBATOR^™ — The Threshold, The Fool’s Journey, and The Gift — built on invented worlds and archetypes. Here, the opposite principle applies, stated by the author as plainly as possible:

"Sometimes things happen that are hard to believe. And yet — they did."

The material isn’t imagination but life itself — strange coincidences, love, friendship, loss, and circumstances that, in the author’s own words, "life writes better than any screenwriter." The project has one rule, and it doubles as its formal constraint: none of it is invented. Some novellas reconstruct documented cases (like "The Day They Met Again," drawn from a real psychiatric investigation); others draw on the author’s own personal, autobiographical experience ("Staccato"); still others retell stories heard from someone else ("The Kiss," "The Friends"). What unites them isn’t genre or tone — the range runs from documentary drama to pure family anecdote — but origin: every plot really happened once, before it ever became a text.

Four novellas written so far:

1. "The Day They Met Again." A reconstruction of a documented case: two children, in two different families, independently recall the life and death of two strangers to them — and one day meet, recognizing each other like old acquaintances.
2. "The Kiss." One May evening, a crash, a shattered phone — and a letter that finally reaches its reader after twenty years of silence.
3. "Staccato." An autobiographical novella: an adult narrator describes a traumatic episode from his own childhood in language of polished, disarming wit.
4. "The Friends." A neighbor saves a friendship with a spa day for someone else’s rabbit — and the truth turns out funnier than any lie told to protect it.

Taken together, this small body of work shows the range built into the very idea of a "real story": the same real-life origin can turn into a documentary drama about a memory that outlasts a lifetime, a love story the length of a single letter, an autobiographical testimony to pain, or an anecdote people go on laughing about for years. None of these registers is more "literary" than another: the truth here is valued not for fitting neatly into a genre, but for the plain fact that it happened.

The project continues: the cycle is still being written, and new stories will be added as life keeps offering material that, in the author’s words, "doesn’t need to be invented — it only needs to be found in life itself."

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