May 1, 1924
Born in the village of Ovsyanka, Krasnoyarsk Krai Victor AstafievThe author of one of the most honest novels about the war "Cursed and killed."
The main destructive effect of war is that the mass death that is so close and so visibly approaching becomes a common occurrence and gives rise to submissive agreement with it.
When the boy was seven, his father was imprisoned for "sabotage." At the same time, his mother drowned—she was swimming to visit her husband when the boat capsized.
Mom was pulled under a floating boom, her braid caught on the boom sling and she dangled and dangled there until her hair became sweaty.
After my father's release from prison, they moved to Igarka. Relations with his stepmother and his new family didn't work out. He left home, lived in an abandoned building, and then ended up in an orphanage.
Only children are given the saving gift of remembering everything and forgetting everything.
After graduating from a factory school, he worked as a train conductor. In 1942, he went to the front, despite being exempt from military service. He received the Medal for Courage.
They will perish! They will all perish, burn in that indiscriminate, all-consuming fire of war, leaving behind no trace of life, no memory of any kind, because they had no life to begin with.
After the war, he settled in the town of Chusovoy in the Perm region. He worked as a mechanic, a teacher, and a train station attendant. From 1951 onward, he published reports, articles, and short stories in the newspaper "Chusovskoy Rabochy."
Children are our judgement on the world, our mirror in which our conscience, intelligence, honesty, and neatness are all clearly visible.
In 1980, he returned to his hometown, Krasnoyarsk. He wrote rural and military-patriotic fiction. In the early 1990s, he published the novel "Cursed and Killed"—a war through the eyes of a simple soldier, the one who holds everything together and who is blamed for everything. He died in 2001.
Power is always heartless, always treacherously shameful, always immoral
Betrayal begins in the high, important offices of leaders and presidents – they betray millions of people, sending them to their deaths.
Of all the speculations, the most accessible and therefore the most widespread is speculation in patriotism; love for one's homeland sells the fastest—at all times this commodity is in great demand.
