The Living and the Dead. Soldiers Are Not Born

New stage, Large Hall

The central novel of the The Living and the Dead war trilogy — Soldiers Are Not Born (1964) — is dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad; the setting is January 1943. The characters are based directly on real people whom Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (1915–1979) — a writer, poet, and playwright who served as a war correspondent throughout the Great Patriotic War — encountered at the front.

For Simonov’s generation, the Great Patriotic War was the defining event that shaped their worldview and their destinies. As a war correspondent, Simonov visited every front, traversed Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Germany, and witnessed the final battles for Berlin. Soldiers Are Not Born, the second book in Konstantin Simonov’s The Living and the Dead epic, focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad. It is written from the perspective of someone immersed in the events. “In Stalingrad, I saw many things up close — at point-blank range,” he wrote in his wartime diary.

The novel The Living and the Dead represents a complex synthesis of artistic truth and near-documentary precision in its depiction of the reality of war. It is a book that commands belief. The war within its pages feels alive. It is examined philosophically — capturing both its grandeur and its absurdities and contradictions. It is an honest book that does not shy away from the errors and blunders for which people paid with their lives. Yet, beneath this unsparing truth lies deep pain and a profound love for the Motherland.

The future Victory was forged amidst the inhuman conditions and hardships of the war. Faith in that victory stemmed from the Russian people's deep conviction in the justice of the cause. In the novel, the Great Patriotic War serves as a yardstick for human morality.

This is a play about people — flawed yet strong in spirit, fierce yet full of doubt.

War consumes the whole person — their thoughts, feelings, actions, and destinies. The play seeks to understand not merely the facts or the chronology of the war, but the spiritual state of people facing this harrowing ordeal, the human essence behind their actions, and the inextricable link between life and death in wartime. It explores the cost at which people — amidst a conflict devoid of ordinary human logic — manage to preserve their humanity.

For them, war is work — arduous and exhausting. It is a routine, inescapable labor where even death — an extraordinary event in civilian life — becomes an everyday occurrence. The Battle of Stalingrad was composed of countless such days, where war became a way of life without ever ceasing to be a tragedy. Simonov wrote: “The war remained a tragedy to the very last day. We had to pay the highest price imaginable for victory and for every step taken toward it.”

The play premiered on February 2, 2023, in Volgograd, marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet forces' defeat of the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad.