Prokliaty i ubity [The Damned and the Dead]

In 1942, an eighteen-year-old boy, Victor Astafyev, volunteered for the front. He served on the front line, suffered several serious wounds, was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the medal 'For Courage', was discharged in 1945 with the rank of 'ordinary'. The war, seen through the eyes of a simple soldier - one of hundreds of thousands who, in inhuman conditions, daily fight with death - is the central theme in the work of the outstanding Russian writer Viktor Astafyev. The novel 'Cursed and Killed' is the result of many years of reflection and one of the most dramatic, tragic and truthful stories about the war as a 'crime against reason'. The piercing frankness of the writer, his uncompromising unwillingness to hide the 'inconvenient' facts and to embellish the harsh truth, betraying his own memories and memory of the fallen, won the love of millions of readers for Astafyev's works.