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.

Representations of loss, grief and mourning are have a prominent place in Mikhail Shiskhin's fiction. They coexist with other parathanatological themes such as funerals and reflections on life after death. As funerals provide the proper opening of periods of mourning, the first part of the article deals with the characters’ reactions to the scenes of death and burial. It is followed, in the second part, by a close examination of the internal life of selected female characters who experience grief after the loss of a person they love. On the whole, Shiskhin's characters seem to be less preoccupied with the funeral as a social institution, but rather tend to experience bereavement in a way which is typical of a melancholic. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of mourning, the article demonstrates how Shishkin's female characters conceal mourning by the act of incorporating the dead into their own bodies and allowing them their voice. At the same time, the activity of letter writing enables them to hinder or even deny bereavement, and in this way, hold off the admission of a complete loss.