Sweetly and Honorably. Nothing But Hope

The novels "Sweetly and Honorably" and "Nothing But Hope" conclude the extensive tetralogy by Yuri Slepushkin about World War II, which many call the "War and Peace" of the 20th century. Like in the previous novels ("Crossroads" and "Darkness at Noon"), they are based on personal experiences. The action in the novel "Sweetly and Honorably" unfolds in Germany. At the center of the narrative is the "conspiracy of the generals" of 1944, an attempt at a coup d'état. And although the war is shown almost exclusively through the eyes of the Germans, a significant portion of the plot describes the fates of the "Eastern workers" forcibly taken from the USSR. Among them is Lyudmila Zemtsova, the heroine of "Crossroads", whose chance encounter with one of the conspirators — a Wehrmacht officer — develops into a profound and strong feeling. The novel "Nothing But Hope" narrates the final stages of the war and the collapse of the Third Reich; for the first time in Soviet literature, the life of the "Ostarbeiters" (to which the Slepushkin family belonged) in German labor camps is depicted. In the novel, the fates of the characters unexpectedly converge, as the war leads them from romantic expectations to the realization of ruthless reality, which destroyed everything but hope.