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Abstract:

Lieutenant prose as a literary movement declared itself in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nowadays this concept requires clarification. The article proposes to consider lieutenant prose as a “generational” phenomenon, including the works of front-line writers of the generation of the first half of the 1920s. Particular features of their prose are focus on their own military experience and lyrical narration. It is necessary to take into account the evolution of this movement, the socio-cultural context of the time when each work was created, the reasons for the changes in the author’s narrative strategies, and the reading audiences the work was appealing to. In the works of the late 1950s and early 1960s, addressed to eyewitnesses of the war, a documentary reproduction of military reality is given; the choice of material is determined by the military experience of the authors. The discussion on V. Nekrasov’s short article “The Words ‘Great’ and ‘Simple’” (1959) showed that the aesthetics of lieutenant prose was innovative in the literature of that time. Since the second half of the 1960s, it turns out that the romantic trend dominates on purely documentary level that is connected with the nature of the new readers, for whom the criterion of reliability is the emotional and psychological persuasiveness of the depiction. However, in these works the typological features of lieutenant prose are preserved too.

Keywords: lieutenant military prose, criteria of authenticity, documentary, the lyrical mode, romantic pathos.