Literature of the war years


In the pages of prose works we find a kind of chronicle of the war that faithfully transmitted all the stages of the great battle of the Soviet people with Hitler’s fascism.

Russian literature has become a literature of one theme – the themes of war, the themes of the Motherland. The writers breathed a single breath with the struggling people and felt themselves to be “trench poets,” and all literature in general, about Tolstoy’s expression, was “the voice of the heroic soul of the people.”

Soviet wartime literature was multidisciplinary and multi-genre. Poems, essays, stories, plays, poems, novels were created by our writers during the war.

Relying on the heroic traditions of Russian and Soviet literature, the prose of the Great Patriotic War has reached great artistic heights.

For the prose of the war years, the strengthening of romantic and lyrical elements, the widespread use by the artists of recitation and song

intonations, oratorical turns, appeal to such poetic means as allegory, symbol, metaphor.

The traditions of the literature of the Great Patriotic War are the foundation of creative searches for contemporary Soviet prose. Without these traditions, based on a clear understanding of the decisive role of the masses in the war, their heroism and selfless devotion to the Motherland, the successes achieved by Soviet “military” prose today would be impossible.

His further development of prose about the Great Patriotic War was in the first post-war years. Continuing work on the novel “They fought for their country” Sholokhov. There appeared in the first post-war decade and a number of works on which such writers as Simonov, Konovalov, Stadnyuk, Chakovsky, Avizhus, Shamyakin, Bondarev, Astafyev, Bykov, Vasiliev worked fruitfully.

Significant successes military prose has reached at the present stage of its development.

Great contribution to the development of Soviet military prose was made by writers of the so-called “second war”, writers-front-line soldiers who entered

the big literature in the late 50’s – early 60’s. These are such prose writers as Bondarev, Bykov, Ananiev, Baklanov, Goncharov, Bogomolov, Kurochkin, Astafyev.

In the writings of front-line writers, in their works of the 1950s and 1960s, in comparison with the books of the previous decade, the tragic emphasis in depicting the war increased.

The war in the image of prose writers is not only and even not so much spectacular heroic deeds, outstanding deeds, as tiring everyday work, hard work, bloody, but vital. And it was in this everyday work that the writers of the “second war” saw the Soviet man.

The theme of the Great Patriotic War is in general central in the work of Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of the Lenin and State Prizes of Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (he left as a correspondent to the places of fighting). Witness and participant of grand events, he devoted almost all his works to wartime events. Simonov himself noted that almost everything he created was “connected with the Great Patriotic War” and that he “has been and continues to be a military writer”.

Simonov created poems that inscribed his name in the history of the poetry of the Great Patriotic War. He wrote plays about the war, about himself, he says: “I myself feel like a prose writer.” The main thing in my work has been associated with prose for many years. “

Prose of Simon is multifaceted and diverse in genres. Essays and journalism, stories and novels, the novel “Comrades in Arms”, the trilogy “Alive and the Dead” – all speaks about the key moments of the Great Patriotic War, in which the courage of our people, the vitality of the state were manifested.

The general tendency of our military prose for a broader and more objective depiction of the Great Patriotic War affected the writings of the “second wave” writers, many of whom came to the conclusion that today it is not enough to write about the war from the position of a platoon or company commander It is necessary to cover a wider panorama of events.

The distance of time, helping writers-front-line soldiers to see the war picture much more clearly and in greater volume, when their first works appeared, was one of the reasons that led to the evolution of their creative approach to the military theme.

The prose writers, on the one hand, used their military experience, and on the other hand – the artistic experience, which enabled them to successfully realize their creative intentions.

Summing up what has been said, it can be noted that the development of prose about the Great Patriotic War clearly shows that, in the circle of its main problems, the main problem, which has stood for more than forty years in the center of creative search for our writers, is the problem of heroism. This is particularly noticeable in the writings of front-line writers who have shown in their works the heroism of our people, the steadfastness of soldiers.


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Literature of the war years