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Abstract:

The article is devoted to the examination of the image of a human in the Belarusian writer and front-line soldier V.V. Bykov’s early short story “One Night” (1963). Possessing the characteristics of works attributed to lieutenant’s prose, this short story offers a special vision of a human, atypical for the texts of the named artistic community. The characters of “One Night” — a Russian soldier and a German soldier — are depicted by the author not as antagonists, but as personified components of a single image of a whole person, not subject to ideological attitudes and military orders, free from imposed behavioral stereotypes and abiding in the spiritual world of eternal values. Such a point of view contributes to the rethinking of the opposition “friend or foe” and complements the ideological and moral messages of A.P. Platonov’s war works. Based on the analysis of the spatio-temporal levels of the short story, the speech of the heroes, their names, as well as the interpretation of some details, the conclusion is made that the anthropological concept of V.V. Bykov is constructed considering dialogical philosophy and Christian symbolism. All this allows us to raise the question of Christian anthropology and soteriology in the writer’s subsequent works.

Keywords: V.V. Bykov, lieutenant prose, image of human, spatial ambivalence, philosophy of dialogue, opposition “friend or foe”, A.P. Platonov, Сhristian symbolism.