[3] Bykaŭ's literary achievement lies in his sternly realistic, albeit touched by lyricism, depictions of World War II battles, typically with a small number of characters.

In the ferociousness of encounter they face moral dilemmas both vis-a-vis their enemies and within their own Soviet world burdened by ideological and political constraints.

This approach brought vicious accusations of "false humanism" from some Red Army generals and the Communist Party press.

"Vasil Bykov is a very courageous and uncompromising writer, rather of the Solzhenitsyn stamp," wrote Michael Glenny in Partisan Review in 1972.

An opponent of Alexander Lukashenko's regime and a supporter of the Belarusian Popular Front, he lived abroad for several years (first in Finland, then in Germany and the Czech Republic), but returned to his homeland a month before his death in 2003.