V. PIKUL’S UNFINISHED NOVEL ABOUT THE WAR (A VIEW FROM THE 21st CENTURY)

The article is devoted to some narrative features of Valentin Pikul’s last unfinished novel The Square of Fallen Fighters. The first book of the unfinished dilogy, “Barbarossa”, saw the light in the early 90s of the 20th century, after the writ er’s death, and demonstrates a peculiar shift towards the so-called non-fiction lit erature, which later became especially popular. The central event of the book was to be the Battle of Stalingrad — a topic deeply personal for the author. Pikul dedicated his Square of Fallen Fighters to the memory of his father, who died in Stalingrad. Reconstructing the history of the Stalingrad confrontation, the author brings many historical characters to the pages of the book. However, a broad panorama of military and political events of the 30’s — early 40’s is brought only to the end of August 1942. Among the features of Pikul’s narrative style are various forms of authorial presence in the text, deliberate publicistic assessments of individual characters and events, original compositional move, and making the German Field Marshal F. Paulus the central linking figure of the novel, which at the end of the last century could look unusual and even defiant. Work on the novel was carried out in the years when the reader learned about the war at first hand from front-line writers. Today, the unfin ished novel of reflection, based on a multitude of written sources and documentary evidence, reveals its other facets. It has anticipated a new direction in the development of literature about the Great Patriotic War.