‘Militia romance’ by Zakhar Prilepin: a new word about war

In the context of very controversial assessments of the works of Zakhar Prilepin, the proposed article sets the task, through an analysis of one of the writer’s last books, to clarify the features of his artistic statement about the state of the world and man in it. Militia Romance seems to be the first attempt at an artistic conceptualization of the conflict in Ukraine, marking the beginning of the ‘Donbass text’ in the history of Russian military prose. Prilepin strives to designate a new type, a new character in Russian life. In terms of form, this book is closely related to the improvisational forms of music genres, as indicated by the author’s genre definition - ‘14 tracks in different rhythms’. In different tracks, as is customary in musical improvisation, different instruments perform solos, i.e., motifs. The book is based on a complex contamination of the motifs of music and death, which is inextricably related to the theme of the Motherland and the oppositions ‘friend - foe’, ‘commander - subordinate’, ‘innocent - criminal’, ‘man - woman’, ‘adult - child’. The combination of motifs creates the unique poetics of Zakhar Prilepin’s ‘Donbass text’. The article examines cinematic techniques, novelistic endings of the tracks, one-word chapter titles, literary allusions to the works of Nikolai Gogol and Leo Tolstoy. The importance of the author’s polemics with the ideas of pacifism and non-resistance is emphasized. The modern writer personally involved in what is happening in Ukraine is convinced that ‘evil can only be defeated by force’. For him, war is a path to personal transformation while choosing the side of truth.