Collectors of Silence

The novel "Collectors of Silence" by Dmitry Filippov has all the chances to become a benchmark text of the emerging corpus of new Russian military literature, born from the Special Military Operation, which can be analogously called "the prose of volunteers". Filippov went to war as an established writer and will return as a classic. "Collectors of Silence" testify to the significant potential of the artist: there is a well-thought-out architecture of the text, a logically constructed composition, and a powerful mix of epic and report. The bright and convincing actions of the main character, credible characters, nerve and drive – sometimes, especially in the second part, whose chronotope is the storming of Avdiivka, the book resembles rapidly edited frames from a film crew that knows it could die at any moment, and it is critically important for them to leave this material behind. The events of the Great Patriotic War and the war in Ukraine stand side by side – and go straight into eternity. The exposition of two realities is also essential: war and the nourished, former, sleepy life of Russian megacities.