Victor Astafyev, "Cursed and Killed" Moscow: AST, 2024 

Viktor Astafyev's anniversary is, of course, not the only reason to remember his novel "Cursed and Killed" in May. This unfinished book (the author published two parts of it in the early 1990s and stopped working on it a year before his death) remains one of the most brutal statements about the Great Patriotic War. The text is naturalistic and merciless: Astafyev describes the soldiers' daily life and the needless suffering in reserve units, captures the brutality of combat, and views the tragic events not from an epic distance, but through the eyes of individuals, representatives of various social strata, soldiers, and commanders. The novel's main feature, however, is not this, but rather that the author, stripping the war of both meaning and heroism, leaves his readers with only two feelings: horror and disgust. 

“Grasping each other, people, both wounded and untouched by bullets, went under the water in bundles; the river bulged, bubbled, shook with human convulsions, foamed with red breakers.”