Size: 20.5x13cm./8×5.1inch.
Weight: 526gr./18.5oz.
Year: 1976
Pages: 513
 
Book made in the DDR, 1976, by publisher Bibliothek Des Sieges (Library of Victory’s). The title of the book reads:”The Last Summer” and is part III in a romantrilogy written by Konstantin Simonov and first published in the Soviet Union in 1959.
The Living and the Dead is a trilogy of novels by Konstantin Simonov. It consists of the three novels, The Living and the Dead, Nobody Is Born As Soldier and The Last Summer. The trilogy is probably Simonov’s greatest work. As a war correspondent, Simonov served in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Germany, where he was present at the Battle of Berlin. After the war his collected reports appeared in Letters from Czechoslovakia, Slav Friendship, Yugoslavian Notebook and From the Black to the Barents Sea: Notes of a War Correspondent.
For three years after the war ended, Simonov served in foreign missions in Japan, the United States and China. From 1958 to 1960 he worked in Tashkent as the Central Asia correspondent for Pravda. His novel Comrades in Arms was published in 1952, and his longer novel, The Living and the Dead, in 1959. In 1961 his play, The Fourth, was performed at the Sovremennik Theatre. In 1963–64 he wrote the novel Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia, which can be translated as “Soldiers Are Made, Not Born” or “One Isn’t Born a Soldier.” In 1970–71 he wrote a sequel The Last Summer.
For two spells, 1946–50 and 1954–58, Simonov was editor in chief of the journal Novy Mir. From 1950 through 1953, he was editor in chief of the Literary Gazette; from 1946 through 1959 and from 1967 through 1979, secretary of the Union of Writers of the USSR. In the year before his death, Simonov tried to create a special archive of memories of soldiers in the archives of the Defense Ministry in Podolsk, Moscow Region, but leaders of the army, in the high echelons, blocked the idea. Simonov died on 28 August 1979 in Moscow.