Viktor Petrovich Astafiev is an outstanding Russian writer who volunteered for the front in 1942 and served as an ordinary soldier throughout the war. Experienced in the war, the war, as the writer saw it on the front line, became the central theme of the writer's work. The war appears to the reader as difficult everyday life in difficult climatic and everyday conditions. The novel "Cursed and Killed" is written on the basis of real, turning points in 1942. Astafyev summed up his reflections on the war as a "crime against reason."