Viktor Petrovich Astafiev is an outstanding Russian writer, who volunteered to go to the front in 1942 and served as an ordinary soldier throughout the war. The experience of 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 living conditions. The novel "Cursed and Killed" is written based on the real, turning point events of 1942. Astafiev summed up his thoughts on war as a “crime against reason.”