Cossack altar. Butenko V.P.

The action of the novel covers the most dramatic period of the Great Patriotic War, when in the summer of 1942 the Nazi troops broke into the steppe expanses of the Kuban. The war split the old Cossack clan of the Shaganovs. The Red Army soldier Yakov Shaganov, being surrounded, goes underground. His father, chosen by the farm ataman, meets his brother Paul, who became a Wehrmacht officer in exile. But the love of father’s land and betrayal cannot get along in Cossack souls!

A moral choice inevitably faces each: to sacrifice themselves in the fight against the invaders or, remembering the oppression of the Soviet regime, to support the invaders promising free life? The fate of the heroes develops differently, and their feeling of devotion to their native land, unshakable loyalty to Cossack traditions leads.

The dynamism of the narrative, many unknown and little -known facts from the history of the region, figurative folk speech, a scattering of intriguing details - all this makes the book of the Stavropol writer Vladimir Butenko with a noticeable phenomenon in Russian prose.