Traditions of Russian literary classics in fiction by participants in the Battle of Stalingrad

Abstract

The article states that the heroic-patriotic traditions of Russian classics (M. Lermontov, L. Tolstoy, A. Blok) live on in the works by participants in the Battle of Stalingrad: the founder of the ‘lieutenant prose’ Viktor Nekrasov and poets Mikhail Kulchitsky and Aleksandr Korenev. M. Lermontov’s ‘Borodino’ sounds with a new vigour in the lyric poetry by the fighters at Stalingrad. Works dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad follow and modernize the traditions of Russian realism exemplified by the first-hand accounts of L. Tolstoy, an officer during the Siege of Sevastopol. Military and engineering learnings of the Russian army garnered during the Crimean War were adopted by the characters of Front-Line Stalingrad [V okopakh Stalingrada] by V. Nekrasov, who received an architect’s degree in pre-war Kyiv and was in command of a sapper battalion on the Stalingrad front. This officer writer also follows the narrative approach of the 19th-c. classic, so that the ferocity of the battle does not obscure the ‘dialectics of the soul’ of his fellow soldiers, whom he portrays as part and parcel of the centuries-long national culture.