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Abstract:

The theme of the Great Patriotic War is often presented in literature directly, as a depiction of battles and events, as representation of personal experience of a writer. There are some writers who personally participated in military actions and have personal military experience, but there is also a number of writers who did not reach the draft age and experienced the war as children or teenages. The article explores the prose of Yuri Kazakov and Yuri Trifonov. These authors do not present The War directly, but this theme can be found in their prose at the level of overtones and motifs. The article examines Yuri Kazakov’s unfinished story “Two Nights”, in which the adult hero tries to make sense of his childhood impressions of the war and looks for the meaning of life. The main motifs and feelings of this story coincide with the motifs and atmosphere of other works by Yuri Kazakov. The short story “The White Gates” by Yuri Trifonov is elegiac and full of melancholy. The teenage characters encounter the first days of the war when the war is still far from them. Trifonov does not describe the war directly, but as a kind of watershed, a point after which something changes in the characters’ lives. The war becomes an impetus for an existential worldview. Even if the war is not described directly, the events of childhood, the shocks that the writer encounters at an early age, leave an imprint on his personality, and determine his worldview.

Keywords: Yuri Kazakov, Yuri Trifonov, war prose, war literature, the Great Patriotic War, existential worldview.