“I Will Come to You as a Victor”: Frontline Letters as an Experience of Creation

This article attempts to interpret letters from the front dated 1943–1945, addressed by SMERSH captain Georgy Momotov to schoolteacher Tamara Gabova, who would subsequently become his wife in 1947. It demonstrates the correspondence’s typicality and its differentiation from analogous sources in terms of context, form, and content. The author emphasises that, having bridged the gap between letters exchanged by strangers and letters exchanged by close people, Momotov’s messages to Gabova, at first glance, were no different from the letters of hope that made up the vast majority of personal correspondence during the war. At the same time, G. Momotov’s letters offered more than mere hope. They were letters of creation — the creation of a new life, a new reality replete with new people and new circumstances. Pushing the motif of doubt to the periphery, it was the motif of creation that sounded louder and more confident in them, setting them apart from the general mass of wartime letters, which traditionally returned their senders and recipients to the past, to the pre-war era of peace. Regarded from this perspective, G. Momotov’s letters are letters that brought Victory and the future associated with it closer, not in a figurative sense but in a very tangible sense. It appears that together with other such examples, the actualisation of this example (strategy?) of individual experiences of war will help researchers of the Great Patriotic War to better understand the collective military experience of an entire generation and an entire era.