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Abstract:

The article is devoted to some narrative features of Valentin Pikul’s last unfinished novel “The Square of Fallen Fighters”. The first book of the unfinished dilogy “Barbarossa” was published in the early 90s of the 20th century, after the writer’s death, and demonstrates a peculiar shift towards the so-called non-fiction literature, which later became especially popular. The central event of the book was to be the Battle of Stalingrad — a topic deeply personal for the author. Pikul dedicated his “Square of Fallen Fighters” to the memory of his father, who died in Stalingrad. Reconstructing the history of the Stalingrad confrontation, the author brings many historical characters to the pages of the book. However, a broad panorama of military and political events of the 30s to early 40s is brought only to the end of August 1942. Among the features of Pikul’s narrative style are various forms of authorial presence in the text, deliberate journalistuc assessments of individual characters and events, original compositional move, and making the German Field Marshal F. Paulus the central linking figure of the novel, which at the end of the last century could look unusual and even defiant. Working on the novel was carried out in the years when the reader learned about the war at first hand from frontline writers. Today, this unfinished reflective novel, based on a multitude of written sources and documentary evidence, reveals its other facets. It has anticipated a new direction in the development of literature devoted to the Great Patriotic War.

Keywords: V. Pikul, “The Square of the Fallen Fighters”, the Battle of Stalingrad, historical prose, documentary source, the author’s presence.