@ARTICLE{Tyszkowska-Kasprzak_Elżbieta_A_2020,
 author={Tyszkowska-Kasprzak, Elżbieta},
 volume={vol. LXIX},
 number={No 2},
 pages={273-287},
 journal={Slavia Orientalis},
 howpublished={online},
 year={2020},
 publisher={Komitet Słowianoznawstwa PAN},
 abstract={This article presents a picture of war in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel The Light and the Dark (2010). In the narrative, the author introduces a character who fought on the side of the Russian army during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China (1898–1901). When describing the events of that period, Shishkin relied on numerous archival materials, especially the study by Dmitry Yanchevetsky At the Walls of Immovable China. As a military journalist who participated in the rebellion, this author blamed the Chinese people, disgruntled with the domination of other countries in their country, for the war. Shishkin, abundantly drawing on Yanchevetsky’s factual research, in his book reevaluates the historical events and condemns the aggression of the Eight-Nation Alliance on China. The writer compares this war to the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939 citing a term from Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s poem: “the infamous war”. Because Russia’s participation in quashing the Boxer Rebellion remains a little-known fact among Russian readers, it becomes a generalized representation of war in the novel: a universal one. Shishkin adopts a pacifist attitude here. He debunks the myth of war, which presupposes a sacralization of killing and a heroic death of soldiers. There are no glorious warriors on the battlefield, only corpses of anonymous soldiers, blood, the smell of rotting bodies, chopped off heads, flies, and dirt. In this novel, war is an evil that alters one’s perception of reality and emotional reactions and destroys elementary moral principles.},
 type={Artykuły / Articles},
 title={A Picture of War in Mikhail Shishkin’s Novel "The Light and the Dark"},
 URL={http://journals.pan.pl/Content/116790/PDF/2020-02-SOR-06-Tyszkowska-Kasprzak.pdf},
 doi={10.24425/slo.2020.133661},
 keywords={Mikhail Shishkin, war, Boxer Rebellion, picture of soldiers, death},
}