Boris Slutskii pointed out that there was one section of Soviet society which had gained something from the war. While others had lost limbs, writers had acquired an assortment of things:

(Some—memory. Some—recollections. Some—nervous laughter, some light sleep. Some—just a list of the dead, fifty or a hundred persons. Some—plots. Some—just themes. Some—a sense of duty and guilt before those who died early, those who did not return from the war.)

Of this list, it is the final item, the awareness of the debt owed by the living to the dead, which receives most of Slutskii's attention in this poem. The memory of the war dead and the commemoration of the victory they had died to bring about is a constant theme in post-war poetry, one shared by the literary establishment and those on its margins, though each group naturally had its own interpretation of the theme. The war as a literary theme should not be considered as being the exclusive property either of conformist writers or of writers critical of the state. That the defeat of fascism had been a tremendous achievement, and that the people of the Soviet Union had undergone terrible suffering was beyond debate.