Konstantin Simonov is a well-known Russian writer who served as a war correspondent throughout the war; a poet who immortalized himself with the searing poem «Wait for me, and I will return…», and with the novel «Living and the Dead», later continued with two more novels—«Soldiers Are Not Born» and «The Last Summer», expanding into a trilogy and becoming an epic artistic narration of the Soviet people’s path to victory in the Great Patriotic War. The author sought to combine two planes: a reliable «chronicle» of the war’s major events, seen through the eyes of the main characters Serpilin and Sintsov, and an analysis of these events from the standpoint of the understanding and assessment of the author’s present. The second part of the trilogy describes the period of preparation and the events of the Battle of Stalingrad—a turning point in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. The third part is devoted to the Belarusian offensive operation. The images of the main characters in the films «Living and the Dead», «Reckoning», created based on the first and second books of the trilogy, were brilliantly embodied by Kirill Lavrov and Anatoly Papanov.