The return of military prose: the Great Patriotic War in modern literature

The article provides an overview of the works about the Great Patriotic War, created by both frontline writers and representatives of the generation who did not fight. All texts analyzed in this article were published for the first time at the end of the XX and in the XXI century. A new direction of militaryhistorical prose in Russian literature of the early 21st century is noted as an important author's strategy, which arouses the keen interest of many researchers. This article examines texts about the Great Patriotic War, which combine fantastic, postmodern, realistic and documentaryhistorical approaches. This is shown in the example of Alexander Khlebnikov’s fantastic story “A Glimpse of the Future” and other works. Analysis of the “siege novel” by Andrei Turgenev (Vyacheslav Kuritsyn) “Sleep and Believe” made it possible to discover the use of many author’s strategies that are relevant in today’s literature. For example, the nonlinearity of the narrative, the creation of a modern version of the "Petersburg" text, the use of "codes" of Russian classics. A similarity was found with “Kolyma Tales” by Varlam Shalamov. The works of front–line soldiers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Daniil Granin, published for the first time in the current century, are also analyzed. Their timeshifted view of the events of the last war is especially valuable, because the authors reveal unexpected details of everyday life at the front. Attention is paid to a unique edition – the novella by Vsevolod Petrov "Turdeyskaya Manon Lesko. The story of one love which waited about sixty years for publication. It marks the return of the "lieutenant" prose of the first postwar years, whose traditions were laid down by Emmanuel Kazakevich and later developed in the work of Boris Vasiliev.