Hot Snow. Battalions Request Fire

Yuri Vasilyevich Bondarev (1924–2020) became famous for his books about war, written based on his own military experience. For him, the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, described in the novel «Hot Snow», or the heavy fighting during the crossing of the Dnieper in 1943, mentioned in the story «Battalions Request Fire», are not just pages of history, but stages of his own front-line biography. The collection also includes stories written in the 1950s dedicated to the events of 1944–1945: «The Last Salvos» and «The Youth of Commanders». «Prose of Lieutenants» allows readers to feel what lies behind the dry reports of losses, narrating unvarnished how and for what reasons people on the front live and die. The famous writer-frontliner Vasily Bykov once said, paraphrasing a well-known saying: «We all came from Bondarev's „Battalions“…»