Eng2601
In: English and Literature
Eng2601
ENG2601
ASSIGNMENT 1
Extract 1

The Forest of Souls
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.”-
Robert Lewis Stevenson
This quote sums up my experience in comparing and contrasting the extracts from The Forest of Souls by Carla Banks. In order to truly understand what the writer is trying to say, a combination of language features, language strategies and other components are put together to create a mind-boggling, attention-grabbing novel. A novel that consist of different contexts, different genres and different tone and writing styles combined, letting the reader experience exactly what the writer is trying to say.

Extract 1 is an account of the first public hanging that took place in the city of Minsk, Soviet Union under the Nazi occupation. (Mullany, 2010) The men, Kiril Trus and a sixteen year old Volodia Shcerbatsevich were members of a partisan cell organizing anti-fascist resistance. The seventeen year old girl, Masha Bruskina was a nurse who had been caught aiding the partisans. She provided civilian clothes and papers for wounded Red Army soldiers under her care and smuggle them back to the resistance. It is an in depth description of the brutality of this event, with emphasis on the circumstances under which this event took place. Extract 2 is an account, sixty years after this event. A journalist Jake Denbigh is working on the experiences of war-time immigrants during the 2nd World War. (www.carlabanks.uk/forest/) Jake is visiting a museum in the city of Minsk that is devoted to the atrocities of the Nazi occupation and is experiencing some of the events through looking at photographs.

Extract 1 is set in the city of Minsk in the Soviet Union, four months after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June, 1941.