Siberian novelist Viktor Astafev (1924-2001) spent much of his fifty-year career writing about the Second World War (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War), focusing initially on the distant effects of the war, in the rear and in military hospitals, and on its long-lasting after-effects. Through a broadly chronological analysis of his output the thesis argues that the war is a key theme, underlying most of his major works. As Astaf ev developed as a writer he felt better able to write about military operations and battles, with a growing emphasis on the laborious work of war, while continuing to consider the war's wider effects. Some character types remain constant throughout his work, such as the quietly heroic signaller, while others change: Germans are initially absent and then denigrated, but are later portrayed as sympathetically as their Russian counterparts, while Soviet commanders are more frequently featured as time goes on, and more negatively. What runs through all Astafev's prose about the war is a belief that war is inhuman, and a desire to tell what he saw as the whole truth about the war as seen from the trenches, which he felt was missing from many Soviet accounts.