Shepherd and shepherd. Modern pastoral

The novel "Shepherd and Shepherd" of the writer -Frontovik Viktor Astafyev is one of the most difficult and more painful things to him ", a tribute to those who did not return. The war appears here without any halo of romance, through dirt, cruelty, warped fates and attempts to survive in the most unthinkable circumstances. But in such conditions, mercy and love exist. The author in his work connects, it would seem, incompatible things: the exalted sentimentality of pastorals and the landing of military everyday life. But the love of heroes is doomed, and the young lieutenant dies not so much from wounds as from hopelessness, from the impossibility of changing the course of events. And how many of them, unknown, gone on the roads of war