It doesn’t hurt the dead

Vasil Vladimirovich Bykov (1924-2003) knew how to hold a blow - the war taught. But when in the fall of 1965 the story "The Dead is not hurt" was printed in Belarusian, and after a year "New World" in Russian, he had very tightly - devastating articles in Pravda and “Light”, the close interest of the state security organs, and finally,, finally , the proposal of party functionaries "get out abroad". His war continued, but now it was not the Germans, but their own. So, the story fell to the very point, it was exactly about who was his own, and who was a stranger in a terrible military meat grinder, and after it. Vasil Bykov tried to figure out his whole writing life to figure it out. Is Sakhno Sickle, who forces the wounded Yurka Strelkov, and he surrenders to the lieutenant Vasilevich, and he surrenders? Her or someone else"s partisan Zoska her detachment comrade Anton Golubin (the story "go and not return"), who rushes between a sense of military partnership, direct betrayal, an attempt to sit out and escape? Zoska does not have a predetermined answer, Vasil Bykov does not have it either. And each reader must find this answer himself.
Natalya Gameova - a literary critic, translator, radio host. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. First Deputy Chief Editor of the magazine "Friendship of Peoples". The main sphere of professional interests is modern Russian literature in the general cultural and social context, literature of the countries of the near abroad. The author of the book "Air of Time. After the USSR: we and our myths" (2015)