The Last Summer

The novel “The Last Summer” completes the trilogy “The Living and the Dead.” In it, the writer leads his heroes along the triumphant roads of the “last summer” of the Great Patriotic War.

The forty-fourth year, just like the past forty-third, began under the thunder of artillery in the middle of our winter offensive. But then, a year earlier, the war was still deep within Russia, in the river bend between the Volga and the Don; now it has stepped far to the west, beyond the Dnieper, into Right-Bank Ukraine. At the end of January, the blockade ring around Leningrad was finally broken; in February, ten German divisions perished in the cauldron near Korsun–Shevchenkivskyi. In March and April, the Germans had to leave almost all of Ukraine—Uman, Kherson, Vinnytsia, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Chernivtsi, Mykolaiv, Odesa. Our troops entered northern Romania, liberated the Crimea, and in early May stormed Sevastopol. But even all of this, taken together, was only the beginning of those immense events that were yet to unfold by the end of that turbulent year...