Vasilij Subbotin's We Stormed the Reichstag is a typical specimen of the wave of non-fiction prose about World War II which sprang up in the wake of the 20th Congress. The search for the unjustly ...forgotten war hero, one of the major themes of this kind of literature, is represented here by the story of Petr Pjatnickij, a soldier who fell on the steps of the Reichstag entrance with a red flag in his hand and was then forgotten. If, hypothetically, this story was false, it would echo the (probably false) story of the 28 'panfilovcy' who purportedly fell at Dubosekovo during the battle for Moscow. In that case, Subbotin's text would embody a characteristically literary device: giving a name to an anonymous character, the anonymous figure, for example, carrying the flag in Vladimir Bogatkin's well-known painting, as a way to give life and credibility to the image. The Dubosekovo story, as developed by journalist Aleksandr Krivickij, appears to employ the same mechanism for achieving credibility. In this case the operation was twofold: Krivickij gave his heroes first a number, and only later names. The second move was the most hazardous. A story that pretends to be true must be verifiable in real life; this is where Krivickij failed and where Subbotin may have succeeded. Stalinist culture fundamentally refused to separate fact from fiction. The non-fiction literature from the Thaw is exactly the opposite: an attempt at reinstating the separation. Keywords Vasilij Subbotin; Aleksandr Krivickij; War Literature; Non-Fiction.
Writing War Moore, Aaron William
2013, 2013-06-03, 2013-07-01
eBook
Writing War examines over two hundred diaries, and many more letters, postcards, and memoirs, written by Chinese, Japanese, and American servicemen in the Pacific from 1937 to 1945. As he describes ...conflicts that have often been overlooked by historians, Aaron William Moore reflects on diaries as tools in the construction of modern identity.
Young people have been at the forefront of political conflict in many parts of the world, even when it has turned violent. In some of those situations, for a variety of reasons, including coercion, ...poverty, or the seductive nature of violence, children become killers before they are able to grasp the fundamentals of morality. It has been only in the past ten years that this component of warfare has captured the attention of the world. Images of boys carrying guns and ammunition are now commonplace as they flash across television screens and appear on the front pages of newspapers. Less often, but equally disturbingly, stories of girls pressed into the service of militias surface in the media.A major concern today is how to reverse the damage done to the thousands of children who have become not only victims but also agents of wartime atrocities. InChild Soldiers in Africa, Alcinda Honwana draws on her firsthand experience with children of Angola and Mozambique, as well as her study of the phenomenon for the United Nations and the Social Science Research Council, to shed light on how children are recruited, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with what they have done. Honwana looks at the role of local communities in healing and rebuilding the lives of these children. She also examines the efforts undertaken by international organizations to support these wartime casualties and enlightens the reader on the obstacles faced by such organizations.
