Focusing on a wide range of poetry written between 1941 and 1945, this work explores Soviet poets' response to World War II. It also traces the influence of Stalinist culture, and departures from literary conventions established in the pre-war years. In a chronological survey, the poets' immediate reaction to the events of the war is placed in its historical and literary-political context.
The use of pre-war, official literary conventions associated with socialist realism is discussed in relation to the portrayal of heroes and leaders. The book then describes of the rise of the common man, epitomized in Tvardovskii's "Vasilii Terkin", which provides an alternative to the faceless, superhuman hero, and relates this to the potentially subversive revival of lyric poetry.
While the bulk of poetry concentrates on war as a masculine affair, women did play a role, both as poets and the subjects of poems. Questions of the perception of femininity, women's place in wartime, and the feminization of heroic paradigms, are examined in relation to the representation of women as soldiers, the symbol of Mother Russia, and the work of women poets.