Vasil Bykov, 79; War Novels Irked Soviet Leaders

Vasil Bykov, 79, a Belarussian novelist who irritated Soviet leaders with his bitter descriptions of war, including vivid details of the conditions that prompted soldiers to desert, died of stomach cancer June 22 in a clinic in Minsk.

Called the Andrei Sakharov of Belarussian literature, Bykov fled Belarus in 1998 after frequently criticizing its president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The author moved to Finland, then Germany and then the Czech Republic, writing dark prophecies about his beloved Belarus, which became a country in 1991 after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Himself a soldier, Bykov wrote about the brutality of World War II without sugarcoating events in the typical Soviet romantic style. The government, angered by his candid depictions, censored his books.

“The Dead Do Not Feel Pain,” his best-known book, was heavily censored when it was first published in the mid-1970s, but it was later printed in full after a campaign by the literary journal Novy Mir.

Bykov recently published his memoir, “The Long Road Home.”