One Hundred Days of War

Simонов, who traveled the front-line roads from the Black Sea to the Barents Sea, in these diaries shows what could not appear on newspaper pages: bewilderment and courage, the mud of trenches, and the inhuman strain of the war’s first months.

The voice of a man who every morning was not sure he would live to see the evening has, years later, turned into an invaluable testimony of his time.

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (1915–1979) was a famous Soviet writer, author of the trilogy "Living and the Dead" and many poems of the war years that became classics ("Wait for Me," "Do you remember, Alyosha, the roads of Smolensk region," etc.).

During the Great Patriotic War, working as a military correspondent, K. M. Simonov visited different fronts— from the Black Sea to the Barents Sea. "One Hundred Days of War" was created from the materials of front-line notebooks he kept in the earliest months. Even during the war, Simonov brought the notes into literary form and dictated them to a stenographer; and, a quarter of a century later, after raising the archives, he carefully verified the facts and provided the text with comments.

These diaries let you find yourself right in the thick of the war’s early events and see the harsh, nerve-wracking everyday life of military correspondents. Directly and without embellishment, the author tells about those who took upon themselves the first—and the most terrifying—blow of the Hitlerite forces.