Cursed and Killed

In 1942, as an eighteen-year-old young man, Viktor Astafyev volunteered to go to the front. He served on the front lines, endured several serious wounds, was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the medal "For Courage," and was demobilized in 1945 with the rank of "private." The war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary soldier — one of hundreds of thousands fighting death daily in inhuman conditions — is the central theme in the works of the outstanding Russian writer Viktor Astafyev. The novel "Cursed and Killed" is the culmination of many years of reflection and one of the most dramatic, tragic, and truthful narratives about war as a "crime against reason." The writer's piercing candor, his uncompromising unwillingness to conceal "inconvenient" facts and embellish harsh truths, betraying his own memories and the memory of the fallen, has earned Astafyev's works the love of millions of readers.