This article presents a picture of war in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel The Light and the Dark (2010). In the narrative, the author introduces a character who fought on the side of the Russian army during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China (1898–1901). When describing the events of that period, Shishkin relied on numerous archival materials, especially the study by Dmitry Yanchevetsky At the Walls of Immovable China. As a military journalist who participated in the rebellion, this author blamed the Chinese people, disgruntled with the domination of other countries in their country, for the war. Shishkin, abundantly drawing on Yanchevetsky’s factual research, in his book reevaluates the historical events and condemns the aggression of the Eight-Nation Alliance on China. The writer compares this war to the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939 citing a term from Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s poem: “the infamous war”. Because Russia’s participation in quashing the Boxer Rebellion remains a little-known fact among Russian readers, it becomes a generalized representation of war in the novel: a universal one. Shishkin adopts a pacifist attitude here. He debunks the myth of war, which presupposes a sacralization of killing and a heroic death of soldiers. There are no glorious warriors on the battlefield, only corpses of anonymous soldiers, blood, the smell of rotting bodies, chopped off heads, flies, and dirt. In this novel, war is an evil that alters one’s perception of reality and emotional reactions and destroys elementary moral principles.

In the paper results of single- and double-pulse LIBS (Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy) measurements in collinear geometry are described. The experiments were performed using a unique self-made Nd:YAG laser operating in the Q-switching regime, where the laser transmission losses are switched. Such a laser allowed for an easy and quick change of the operating mode (one and two pulses), free shaping of the energy ratio of the two pulses (division of the energy of a single pulse into two parts) and a smooth change of the delay time between pulses in the range from 200 ns to 10 μs. To our knowledge, such a laser was used in LIBS measurements for the first time. LIBS experiments revealed strong self-absorption depending on energy ratios carried out in the first and second laser pulse in the double-pulse mode. This was confirmed also by statistical factorial analysis of LIBS spectra. Plasma temperature and LIBS signal enhancement were measured both for energy proportions between the first and the second laser pulse and for the first-to-second-pulse delay.