"The author of the most poignant books about the war", "the most widely read Belarusian author in the whole world", "the last writer of the realistic sense of Europe" — all this is said about Vasil Bykov. Three days before the start of the Great Patriotic War, Vasil Bykov turned 17 years old. In 1942, yesterday's student of the Vitebsk Art School and the external Vitebsk School of Factory Training was called up to the front, where he participated in the battles for Krivoy Rog, Alexandria, Znamenka, passed through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, was wounded twice. In 1947, the first story of the young writer was published. Bykov's works marked a new stage in the literature of understanding military events, combining the tragic specifics of the war, the "trench truth", with the "eternal" problems of being. How can humanity be preserved in inhumane circumstances? What to save amid the horrors of war — body or soul? What does a person suffer for, does he live only for himself? The heroes of Vasil Bykov, an outstanding master of military prose of the twentieth century, are looking for answers to these and other questions. The collection includes the famous stories "Alpine ballad", "Sotnikov", "Obelisk", "To live until dawn", "His battalion", "To go and not return".