Who Are You?

«Who are you?» is the question that Felix — his war-hardened enemy, friend, tormentor, and mentor — asks young Tymofiy again and again. «Who am I?» is the question that the nearly-adult, autobiographical Tymofiy asks himself at the end of the novel. This journey from an initial question to one's own identity is inevitable for any hero of a coming-of-age novel.
In the case of Artem Chekh, this development takes place in the shadow of the repulsive experience of someone else's war, which unexpectedly becomes a moral and physical preparation for his own conflict — although we do not see it in the novel. However, the reader may find here all the childhood and youthful initiations that we ourselves had to go through to reach adulthood, which turned out to be not at all what we expected.