Levon Khechoyan’s novel Black Book, Weighty Bug (1999), awarded the State Literary Prize of the Republic of Armenia “Golden Reed,” stands as one of the most significant works of late 20th-century Armenian war prose. Drawing from his own experience as a participant in the First Karabakh War, the author rejects traditional heroic narratives and romanticization of conflict, portraying war instead as a universal ontological catastrophe that dismantles human identity, moral foundations, perceptions of time and space, notions of good and evil, and interpersonal bonds. The narrative is structured as diary entries by the writer-artist Onan Karayan, blending documentary authenticity with profound philosophical reflection. The central symbol of the “weighty bug” – a harbinger of death and soul-loss – permeates the text, underscoring the inevitability of psychological trauma and the Nietzschean “eternal return” to destruction (with parallels to Nietzsche, Dante, Camus, and Sartre). Khechoyan raises questions of universal human tragedy: the absence of true victors in any war, mutual soul-destruction, the silence of God, and fear as an ontological constant of existence. A comparative analysis with Viktor Astafiev’s Cursed and Killed and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front reveals similarities in reliance on personal frontline experience, yet highlights Khechoyan’s distinctive shift from historical-social to metaphysical interpretation of war as the absolute defeat of humanity. The study demonstrates that the novel revitalizes living traumatic memory, urging recognition of war as a crime against reason, culture, and existence itself, where salvation lies solely in dialogue, responsibility, and the renunciation of hatred.