Alpine ballad. Bykov V.

“The author of the most piercing books about the war”, “The most readable Belarusian author around the world”, “The last writer of the realistic sense of Europe” - all this is said about Vasil Bykov.

Three days before the start of World War II, Vasil Bykov turned 17 years old. In 1942, yesterday’s student of the Vitebsk Art School and externs of the Vitebsk school of factory training was called up to the front, where he participated in battles for Krivoy Rog, Alexandria, Znamenka, walked through the territory of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, and was wounded twice. In 1947, the first story of a young writer was published.

Bykov’s works marked in the literature a new stage in understanding of military events, combining the tragic specifics of the war, “torn truth”, with the “eternal” problems of being. How to maintain humanity in inhuman circumstances? What to save among the horrors of war - a body or soul? For what a person suffers, does he only live for himself? The heroes Vasil Bykov, an outstanding master of military prose of the twentieth century, are looking for answers to these and other questions.

The collection includes the famous novels "Alpine Ballad" and "Its Battalion".