When I was little, we had a war

Stanislav Olefir - from the generation that played not in the “war” - only in the “war”: it could not be frivolous about this word. They did not know how to celebrate the victory - how can one rejoice on the day who has carried away the life of a father, godfather, grandfather, uncle? But for all their seriousness, the "younger children of the war" retained not only frightening memories of the terrible years: the episodes remained in their memory and the episodes are amazingly bright, sometimes even funny.
In the collection of sketches under the general name "When I was little, we had a war ..." As if all the signs of the era had had a lot of signs. Collectivization and German offensive, the liberation of the village and post -war famine, the "enemies of the people" and prisoners - all this is in the book, and all this is not here. Stanislav Olefir tells about the defining historical events in brief essays with the help of stories of ordinary people, avoiding loud words and generalizations. And since life in the village where the action takes place is inconceivable without animals, they become heroes of almost half the stories: friends-dogs, headless chickens and the glorious piglet of wool, deftly bearing mines in search of potatoes, are no less interesting than people.
The life of the Ukrainian village occupied by the Germans is shown by the eyes of a boy of 4-7 years old, for whom any events are equally significant. Suddenly given to the German soldier, the boxes of matches or hoofing holes in the roof of the dugout goat is images that equally touch the children"s soul. The war exposes all the most important and hides the momentary, superficial, - the prose of Stanislav Olefir gives it to the fullest.
Stanislav Mikhailovich was born in Zaporozhye in 1938, he lived for more than 40 years in the Magadan region, in the Chukotka and Kamchatka, died near St. Petersburg in 2015. By profession, he was an agronomist and a chemical teacher, and by vocation - a hunter and a traveler, so most of his books - about the taiga, the far north, wild animals, he was familiar with them firsthand. The collection that you hold in your hands is unique in this sense: the action takes place in completely different places, in other times, and in the spotlight here is primarily people. The publication is supplemented by illustrations by Alexei Kapninsky (Kapych) - light, stylistically verified, deliberately childish: it seems as if the main character himself created them