There, Under a Foreign Sky

5 hrs. 59 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Sergey Nikolaev

Narrator Larisa Yurova

Description

The genre itself can’t really claim to be as grand as the narratives of Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Simonov, Mikhail Alekseev, Alexander Bek, or Vasil Bykov. And the author doesn’t set himself such a task, knowing—as any artist does—that, for example, just one poem by Mikhail Isakovsky, “Enemies burned my native hut,” can turn even a hardened soul, fill the heart with a worldwide tragedy that passed through the heart of an ordinary fighter and of the entire people.

Every grown man who has dipped a ladle from an army cauldron knows for certain: no serious offensive begins without reconnaissance. Reconnaissance comes in different kinds—regimental, divisional, front-line, with crossing the front line and radio interception—but the most terrible are reconnaissance in force. And the writer—rightly in the past called an engineer of human souls—first of all is interested in the condition of that very soul, hidden beneath uniform cloth.

Sergey Nikolaev’s novella “There, Under Another’s Sky…” enters into a polemic with falsifiers of heroic battles of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, even though its heroes don’t perform anything supernatural—they appear before us as ordinary hard laborers of war. But these very people broke the spine of a strong, treacherous enemy. And now they have come to liberate other lands from fascist filth—in this case, East Prussia—under the command of the legendary marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky.