For a recent student, and since February 1942 — a front-line translator Elena Kagan, the martyr city of Rzhev has become "fate, a literary name, an indelible pain." From the records of that time on the move, the vivid impressions heard from soldiers, from village old women and children, from captured Germans, the story "Near Approaches" was born. "The raging Heat" is the result of post—war reflections: the writer Elena Rzhevskaya constantly returned to that experience, to the fate of the people she met at that time. She reacted sensitively to how the memory of the war is "nationalized", how attempts to comprehend the experience that do not correspond to the official rite are squeezed out of the public field. This is evidenced by the pages of the 1962 diary supplementing the collection (published for the first time), interviews and essays.