War as a spiritual and moral test and frontier in the life and work of E. I. Nosov, a front-line writer

The paper deals with the short stories “Bassoon” and “Red Wine of Victory” by the writer and front-line soldier E. I. Nosov, which describe the first days of the Great Patriotic War and its end. The research was conducted in order to identify the creative mechanisms for understanding war as a spiritual and moral test and the use of the frontier motif as a transformative tool. The paper analyzes the artistic techniques used by E. I. Nosov to express attitudes towards life, death, the meaning of existence, and the issue of historical memory as a guardian of the spiritual and moral code of a nation. The conceptual significance of the transfer of military experiences is supported not only through a detailed description of military operations, but also by the emotional and subjective interpretation that a participant gives to events. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the military prose of E. I. Nosov is analyzed from the standpoint of the artistic representation of war as a spiritual and moral test, a challenge that heroes go through, experiencing the tragedy of war. As a result of the research conducted using the materials of the works by the writer-front-line soldier, a native of Kursk land, which for a long time was a Russian outpost and today found itself on the border of hostilities with Nazism, artistic means have been identified that made it possible to depict the war as a frontier for a person and the whole state through the lens of individual perception.