With the advent of perestroika, the theme of the Great Patriotic War in Tatar prose began to be viewed as a tragic history of the Soviet system, in the frontline reality of which many problematic moments in the relationship between power and man were clearly reflected. In modern Tatar prose, developing these traditions, a characteristic feature of ideas about the Great Patriotic War is the assessment of military, socio-political events in close connection with national problems through the prism of universal philosophy, the predominance of deep psychologism. An analysis of the novel by Zulfat Khakim “Ber sagatte niche mizgel bar?..” (“How many moments in one hour?..”, 2022) allows us to trace the features of the modern Tatar novel about the Great Patriotic War. The writer chooses the path of philosophical understanding and not artistic recreation of reality. The novel is dominated by biography in the form of an internal monologue or a deep philosophical generalization of the heroes’ disputes, which is a successful technique for displaying the spiritual world of the characters, their character traits, and contradictions in their views. The assessment of the Great Patriotic War in the plane of universal philosophy is not new for Tatar literature. In the new novel, the author touches upon the importance of everyone’s choice: an act in an instant can be an important decisive moment for the fate of one’s people, future generations, and humanity. The presentation of the concept of a strong man in the person of a Tatar soldier, a fighter, is the central point of view that allows one to feel the possibility of preserving national identity. Around this, a problematic consonant with traditional motives for Tatar literature is developing. Such, for example, is the motive of the unjustly convicted, which has repeatedly sounded in post-Soviet literature, the motive of preserving humanity, mercy in critical conditions, disregard for the interests of an individual in the name of public interests. The article examines the plot, motivation of the hero’s character, the role of artistic detail, subtext, associative parallels, dreams, songs, poems, paradoxes, the author’s mask in revealing the idea of the work. It is noted that the philosophical nature, lyricism, depth of psychologism, which are transmitted through the “stream of consciousness”, helped the author to more deeply reveal the leitmotif of the novel.