Vasily Terkin

"Vasily Tyorkin. A Book About a Soldier" (Russian: Василий Тёркин. Книга про бойца) is a poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky, one of the key works in the poet's oeuvre that has gained widespread recognition. The poem describes the life and wartime service of the fictional character Vasily Tyorkin, a Soviet soldier during the Second World War.

The poem began to be published serially in newspapers starting in 1942 and was completed in 1945. The first separate edition of the still unfinished work was published in 1942. The poem is mostly written in trochaic tetrameter, with some chapters in trochaic trimeter.

According to a sociological survey conducted in 2015 by the magazine "Russian Reporter", the text of the poem ranked 28th in the top 100 most popular poetic lines in Russia, which includes both Russian and world classics.