Topos of War in Modern Ukrainian Combatant Prose

The paper deals with the problem of the literary development process during the war. The object of analysis is combatant prose, which would not exist without wars. The human culture is strongly shocked in war circumstances, that affect both society and the individuality, and this experience becomes the driving force for the emergence of art patterns that are inherent only in a certain time frame. Combatant literature is a phenomenon that appears after each war, but at the same time it is tied to an era that generates its own characteristics. The Russian-Ukrainian war, which began in 2014 as the Donbas War, was a tragedy that prompted its participants to begin describing their unique experiences as well. The paper states that the reasons for the appearance of combatants texts are more in the need for self-reflection than in the desire to write a work of art. In fact, it is not surprising that many of these texts are not entirely artistic. This is why a large number of texts are close to documentaries and are subjective in thoughts expression, and the dominant genre is that of diaries and memoirs. The main subject of the study is the topos of war in combatant prose, which is considered on the basis of the books written both by fighters who have no writing experience and by professional writers who participated in fight in the eastern Ukraine. Analysis of the texts showed that, despite the differences in writing experience, they have common features, which can be traced at the level of the war topos reflection. The study concluded that the topos of war in combatant prose also appeared as a space of change in addition to the space of trauma and death, by getting into it, the characters change both externally and internally, and the latest changes are irreversible.