Boris Lvovich Vasiliev, having ended up at the front as a young man, knows about war firsthand. Telling the story of the main character of the novella “Was Not Listed,” Lieutenant Pluzhnikov, the writer describes the path he himself and his contemporaries went through. This is the path of forming genuine personal and national dignity—one that forces the enemy to salute a boy who declares: “I am a Russian soldier.”
Boris Lvovich Vasiliev (born 1924) is a laureate of the USSR State Prize. Published in 1969 in the journal “Yunost” (Youth), the novella “And the Dawns Here Are Quiet…” sparked an endless stream of letters to the editorial office and brought the author true fame. In 1941, seventeen-year-old Boris Vasiliev went to the front, fought in airborne troops, was twice able to escape enemy encirclement, and was shell-shocked. After the war he graduated from the Military Academy of Armored and Mechanized Troops named after Marshal Malinovsky, but the calling of a writer won over a military career. Films based on his scripts became cult classics, and for several decades his war prose has been read by millions of readers.