ARTISTIC STRATEGIES FOR DEPICTING WAR IN K.M. SIMONOV’S NOVEL THE SO-CALLED PERSONAL LIFE

K.M. Simonov’s latest novel, The So-called Personal Life, which fo cuses on the events of the Great Patriotic War, incorporates the plots and motifs of the writer’s war diaries, his essays and short stories from the war period, and po etry from the same period. Pretexts do not just provide material for the image, but are included in the semantic field of the work. Prose enters the novel through fic tional texts, Lopatin’s correspondence, which have prototypes in Simonov’s own work. Poetry is introduced through direct quotations, less often allusions, and in troduces wartime topoi significant for Simonov. The strategies for depicting war given in the text are replaced in the novel by others, but the very fact of their presence is important, creating an effect of overlapping several points of view. The novel’s subtitle, “From Lopatin’s Notes”, is a narrative paradox, since the text is written in the third person. Pointing to the hero’s focusing role, the writer declares a new strategy for depicting war in prose — through human consciousness absorbing the entire experience of life, not only military. Thanks to the subtitle and reflection of the principles of text creation in the novel itself, the strategy found is the property of both the author and the hero.