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I was amazed at how low the Nobel Prize for literature was in the news agenda last week. In case you didn't know, the award was given to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

News bulletins around the world hardly mentioned it even though the it wasn't a particularly busy day for breaking global news.

Does this reflect the lack of interest in literature and - in particular - in poetry.

Tomas Transtromer is neither a dissident, nor he is fighting for human rights. He is just a great poet.

Clear and succinct, sad and melancholic like a great poet should be.

So it seems that when the Nobel Prize is awarded for purely literary merit, there's no news story.

The Nobel Prize for literature is without doubt is the biggest literary accolade in the world. The anticipation of it can drive authors to distraction.

I've heard that one famous English writer - who has more than enough literary awards already - secludes himself at home and waits for a telephone call from Stockholm every October.

One of the most acclaimed Soviet writers once rang me asking what he could do to get a Nobel Prize: as if I was responsible for awarding it.

Some Russian writers even publish their would-be Nobel Prize lectures as a literary manifesto.

The Nobel prize for literature has been always a matter of controversy.

The award's critics are quick to name those literary giants such as Tolstoy and Joyce, Kafka and Borges, Nabokov and Muzil who have not received the award.

But more tellingly, around a third of the authors awarded the prize have disappeared from the literary annals almost without a trace.

Go to the list of recipients and test yourself: have you read - or even heard of - the writing of some of the winners even from the last 15-20 years?

Politics has apparently played a role in a number of Swedish Academy decisions.

At the peak of the controversial decisions around ten years ago, one famous French literary figure sarcastically exclaimed: "It will be no wonder if next year the prize will be given to some obscure Uzbek writer or poet because of the dictatorship there".

So beyond a national literary pride, I could see the point he was making.

There were indeed moments when candidates appear in the news before the announcement, extolling his or her causes, only weeks later do those causes go off the radar once the prize has been given.

Critics say that prize-giving bookmakers have developed a whole industry of betting on candidates (though even the list of the candidates is never released).

Thus this year a great deal of hype has been created around the name of Bob Dylan whose chances were put as high as 5:1 and according to the bookmakers themselves nearly a third of people placing bets on the outcome of the literature prize chose him.

It was this story that was the news highlight of the whole process, rather than the announcement of the actual winner.

Once upon a time winning the Nobel prize for literature was a life-changing event.

I read the memoirs of the wife of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin. In 1933, she sent him from France, where they lived the life of emigres, to Stockholm to receive the award.

She writes that upon his departure Bunin's trousers were so worn out, that one could see his body as an x-ray.

When he returned he was able not just to pay back all the debts he had acquired over the years of migrant's hardship, but also to buy a villa and live the rest of his life in a decent manner.

In monetary terms the change is not so drastic now - the winner of The X Factor and other talent shows receive more financial gain.

But as I said in the beginning it's the foremost literary accolade.

And in a way I do sympathize to the Swedish Academy in their ambivalent perennial dilemma... On the one hand you want everyone to talk about the new literary 'immortals', so by this token you tend to choose someone who makes a splash in the 'puddle' of world news.

But on the other hand there's an ocean of literature with profound layers and layers where human eye, mind or soul - let alone news - rarely reaches and silence is twinned with it...

As the winner of this year Tomas Transtromer wrote:

A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.

I'm aware that my words will be out of sync and out of tune with that loud chorus of voices that is damning Carlos Tevez for his alleged refusal to play for his team, Manchester City, in their moment of need.

The internal inquiry is still going on, but the fans have already made up their mind: Tevez is the sole culprit.

Indeed all arguments seemingly support their view: Tevez is if not the highest paid, then at least one of the highest paid football players in the whole world.

The coach - Roberto Mancini had every right to ask him to play as a substitute at any time of the game and Tevez should have obeyed Mancini's decision.

It's a case of rebellion, unheard of in top league football and the rage of Man City supporters is quite understandable. Some of them spent thousands of pounds to see that match in Italy and had every right to expect commitment from all Man City players, including Tevez...

However, however, however...

I played football throughout my teenage years and even had hopes to play better than Pele.

Alas, it's the same old story of hopes turning - or rather burning up - into regret.

But I dare to think that I know something about the psychology of footballers - especially those with big egos.

I must say that I'm not one of Tevez's fans, quite the opposite. When I've seen him playing next to Messi for Argentina he seemed to me quite rough and, in some ways, one-dimensional.

So there's no personal bias on my part. But I can easily recognise his desire to play, his enormous determination, and his qualities as a fighter.

Though as a forward he is not 'my cup of tea', he must be well worth what he earns.

But let's get back to the incident itself, let's even assume that everything had happened as Mancini told us: Man City is losing 0-2, there are another 20 minutes of the game to go and he asks Tevez to warm up; and Tevez refuses to warm up and to play.

There's an old Uzbek joke.

Once, the character Mullah Nasreddin from Uzbek folklore was being teased by both of his two wives.

One of the wives asked Nasreddin in front of the other: "Tell us, whom do you love more, me or her?"

Nasreddin tried hard to look even-handed: "I love both of you equally!"

But the naughty wives went on and the older one said: "Imagine that all three of us are swimming in the river and if both of us start to drown. Who would you save?"

"I'd save both of you."

"But that would be impossible, the stream will be fast and we are heavy... You can only save one of us..."

Nasreddin looked simple-heartedly at the older one and said: "You can swim a bit, can't you?"

Thinking those two wives with the same husband, and then turning my thoughts to Tevez...

Manchester City bought not one but half a dozen world-class strikers: Dzeko, Aguero, Balotelli, Adebayor and Santa-Cruz.

For the 'top player' to be not a 'one and only' but a 'one of' is already an unbearable burden.

When on top of that, that person is treated as the 'second- third- or the fourth-best' choice and they also have unresolved family issues with your kids growing up in the opposite corner of the world - you have an explosive mixture, which waits for a release.

If one looks carefully, there's a moment of craftiness in Mancini's behaviour too.

If you can't win the lost game without Tevez and appeal to him as to the last resort, it means that he's better than others. Keeping him sidelined on the bench repeatedly is not fair.

But if he is not as good as he was (as Mancini says), what's the point of bringing him on instead of other, better (according to Mancini) strikers?

So as formal logic states: either-or.

Tevez must have felt something along these lines, when he proverbially exploded.

There's a bigger theme that emerges in this incident: a long lasting and strengthening tendency to treat the human body as a commodity.

Having been long established in the form of prostitution, it's becoming an integral part of modern day sport too.

For the top performing machines like Manchester City Tevez or Adebayor, Santa-Cruz or Balotelli are just spare parts, rather than human beings.

Like parts of high-performance cars they are well-looked after, polished and lubricated, but any unnecessary click - and they are immediately replaced to be thrown away.

Anelka could be bought instead of Shevchenko, Chamakh instead of Adebayor, Aguero instead of Tevez.

The human soul beneath the sporty body could always rebel at some point.

Tevez's case is partly about it too.

Maybe he is not the finest football player, but he is definitely an explosive fighter.

Journalists who are exposed to the news every minute of the day, I guess, must be subject to the same professional deformation as any other profession.

I've heard some of my colleagues saying that when they come home in the evening they can't remember what the leading news story of the day was, and are reminded of it when they watch the 10 o'clock news.

But some news somehow sticks to mind and to the great irritation of your family you find yourself telling them about the same piece again and again.

This happened to me this week with a news story from Russia: The Russian army have stopped buying Kalashnikovs because they have so many of them and also because they want to try something new instead.

I never thought that I would write about Kalashnikovs, let alone sing its praises. But that story has made me think.

Does it stick in my mind so much because the facts of the story have been kept from the machine gun's inventor - the 92 year old Kalashnikov himself?

Those who have dealt with the history of modern Russia might know that at the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime, when its founder Lenin fell terminally ill with irreversible brain damage, his closest comrade Stalin ordered special daily copy of Pravda to be published for Lenin's exclusive consumption and to keep him happy in his madness.

So did I see some ominous parallels in it?

Or was there something else which made me come back again and again to the same news?

Then I understood what exactly the cause of my reminiscence was.

The AK 47 machine-gun itself.

There are books devoted to it, which compare Kalashnikov to an atomic bomb, to the ubiquitous 'fast food' chain of the battlefield, to any most popular invention of the 20 century.

It even became one of the icons of the last century.

My story is a different one.

In my young days I served in the Soviet Army and the AK 47 the serial number LA 8276 belonged to me for three years.

That weapon is etched into my memory.

In the nights of the field camps during the exercises I used to put it under my head, cushioning it with a rucksack. While I was on guard on my own in freezing Prussian nights it used to protect me, at the firing range while I was aiming a cardboard figure at 300m it was my extended sight, extended arms, extended breathing.

I knew every smallest part of it, being able to deconstruct it to bits and pieces and reconstruct again in 11 seconds.

I spent hours and hours cleaning it to perfection, because according to our old colonel commander there were two parts of soldiers ammunition which must always be absolutely clean and ever ready for action and one of those was the AK machine-gun.

I know that AK 47 is a killing machine.

One of the most efficient ones.

Therefore I can't be proud of my sudden nostalgic reminiscence.

However exactly this point made me write this piece.

Recently a friend of mine, a well-known Uzbek writer wrote a novella which nostalgic about the Soviet era.

I know for a fact that he hated and hates the Soviet system.

But at the same time such a big chunk of his life - dare I say the best (young) part of his life - has been left forever in that period of time.

So his nostalgia, I guess, for his youth, for his life, rather than missing the Soviet past, made him write that novella.

In the novels of the great Russian writer of the 20 century Andrey Platonov, one can find many vagabond characters, who while wandering aimlessly along the earth ploughed by revolution, collect all sorts of unnecessary things: a bolt, a cork, a nail.

In the time of losing the big sense of life those characters tend to stick to small random things which are witnessing their existence in this world.

This bolt, this cork, this nail could stay much longer keeping the trace of your touch when your short presence in this world ceases to be.

So with age one understands clearer that not any 'isms', be it communism, capitalism, patriarchalism, primitivism or anything else, but the human life has the value which gives birth to our nostalgia, which may be attached to anything: to a silly song, an out-of-fashion dress, or indeed the AK 47 machine-gun.

Here's a fragment of a poem, which more succinctly makes this point.

On your road there are nails, staples,
rusted corks, the dried apricot of time,
a concrete path, the railway, grass here and there,
a living snowdrop or simple, ordinary wire...

In actual fact, in fact all this
leads one to think then, but at the same time your premonition
realises: your life in its complete uselessness
can be tied in with these things.

Do not grieve about this,
death in fact is neither high nor low.
It is not death that is greater
but the thought of the road to death
that overcomes death itself.