Prussian Nights

Blurb

Prussian Nights is a long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a captain in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War. Prussian Nights describes the Red Army's march across East Prussia, and focuses on the traumatic acts of rape and murder that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march.
Originally it was Chapter 8 of his huge autobiographic poem Dorozhen'ka that he wrote in 1947 as a sharashka inmate. The original poem did not survive, but in 1950–1951, working in a hard labour camp near Ekibastuz, Solzhenitsyn restored Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 as separate poems. The poem is in trochaic tetrameter, "in imitation of, and argument with the most famous Russian war poem, Aleksandr Tvardovsky's Vasili Tyorkin."
The poem is based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences – he was a captain of an artillery battery which formed a part of the Second Belorussian Front, which invaded East Prussia from south-east in January 1945. The Soviet offensive followed the path of the disastrous offensive by the Russian Second Army under Alexander Samsonov during World War I; the comparison with the Soviet victorious offensive is one of the underlying themes of the poem.