The novella “Kosnitsa” is Amire Sabirov’s first attempt in prose—an experience by the poet and front-line veteran. The text is delicately crafted stylistically, woven from portraits and moods and working on multiple levels at once: from the careful psychological development of the hero—a young man who comes to understand the structure and the metaphysical meaning of war—to the precise depiction of the boundary between life and death. A boundary into which not only a person is drawn, but the entire world as well, in today’s pre-catastrophe era.