Throughout the twentieth century war was at the forefront of the consciousness of the Russian people, and became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature and other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Voinovich among others.