The Dawns Here Are Quiet

They were young and flirtatious, cheerful and full of energy. They loved to sing, dreamed of love, and waited for it like a miracle. But then war suddenly came to their land—war that destroys lives, smashes dreams, kills love. They have to stand up against an entire world of evil, hatred, pain, despair, and suffering.

According to the author, the novella is based on a real episode of wartime: seven soldiers who, after being wounded, served at one of the key stations of the Kirov Railway, did not let a German sabotage group blow up the railway in that section. Only a sergeant survived—the commander of a group of Soviet fighters, who after the war received the medal “For Combat Merits.” “And I thought: there it is! A situation where a person himself, without any order, decides: I won’t let them in. There’s nothing for them here. I started working with this plot, already wrote about seven pages. And then I realized that nothing would come of it. It would just be a private case in wartime. There was nothing fundamentally new in this plot. The work stalled. And then—suddenly it came to me: let my hero’s subordinates be not men, but young girls. And that’s it—the novella immediately took shape. Women are the hardest in war. There were 300 thousand of them on the front! And then nobody wrote about them.”

Boris Vasiliev’s best works: And the Dawns Here Are Quiet, Not Listed in the Lists, Don’t Shoot White Swans, A Long Day, An очередной рейс (A Next Trip), The Winners, My Horses Are Flying… A novella about its time and many others.