Vasil Bykov. Live Until Dawn. Alpine Ballad

"The author of the most poignant books about the war," "the most widely read Belarusian author worldwide," "the last realist writer in Europe"—all of these have been said about Vasil Bykov. Three days before the start of the Great Patriotic War, Vasil Bykov turned 17. In 1942, a recent student at the Vitebsk Art School and an external student at the Vitebsk Factory Training School, he was called to the front, where he fought in battles for Krivoy Rog, Alexandria, and Znamenka, traversed Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Austria, and was wounded twice. In 1947, the young writer's first short story was published. Bykov's works marked a new era in literary understanding of wartime events, combining the tragic concreteness of war, the "trench truth," with the "eternal" problems of existence. How can one preserve humanity in inhumane circumstances? What is to be saved amid the horrors of war—the body or the soul? Why do people suffer? Do they live only for themselves? The characters of Vasil Bykov, a distinguished master of 20th-century war fiction, seek answers to these and other questions. This collection includes the celebrated stories "Alpine Ballad," "Sotnikov," "Obelisk," "Live Until Dawn," "His Battalion," and "Go and Never Return."