When the German armies invaded Russia in 1941, all of the poets with whom this chapter is concerned were barely on the verge of adulthood – most of them were still in school. The war thrust them abruptly from youth into maturity and influenced their characters decisively, both as individuals and as poets. During the war itself, most of them were too young, and too preoccupied with the shock of growing up in the midst of holocaust, to write and publish significant verse. A certain distance, therefore, separates their war poetry from the events that inspired it. But the psychological and moral traces of this formative experience are indelible not only in their war poetry but also in verse written two decades later, on themes that seem totally unrelated to the war.

Front-line lyrics written during the war emphasized proud suffering, the heroism of the fatherland's defenders, and the political and national cause for which the war was being fought. A decade later poetry had become more elegiac, had begun to concentrate more heavily on the moral and psychological aspects of combat and the tragic cost of war, and frequently had strongly pacifistic implications. The realization that Russia's appalling losses were partly attributable to Stalin's blundering and callous waste of lives, and the feeling of betrayal caused by the senseless cruelty and injustice of his postwar domestic policies, placed the war itself, for many poets, in altered perspective. The just purpose of the war – the defense of the fatherland – was never in question. But as it became possible to write more candidly and intimately about the war, new notes of reappraisal and skepticism appeared.