The article examines the problem of national character, embodied in a literary text as a fundamental component of national identity. The material for the study is the trilogy of the Chechen writer Kh. Oshaev, which has not yet received a comprehensive literary interpretation. The genre of the historical trilogy allows us to consider the process of personality formation against the background of global historical events that inevitably put a person before a moral choice. The focus is on the personality of Akhmat Shapiev, who can be recognized as an advanced person, and in whose character the national and universal are organically combined. This thesis is confirmed as a result of textual analysis and is based on scientific literary concepts. To reveal the author’s idea, the specifics of his artistic method are determined, which combines the features of classical and socialist realism. The author’s departure from the tendency of romanticization and idealization of life and representatives of his ethnic group is noted. The author strives for objectivism and historicism, creating ambivalent characters and putting his heroes before a moral choice. As a result, it is noted that the problems actualized by the Chechen writer turn out to be typical for multinational Soviet literature and despite the fact that H. Oshaev creates a new concept of personality, the main idea of the work is an objective reproduction of the course of historical events, and the trilogy, which has the features of a family saga, to a greater extent corresponds to the genre of revolutionary-historical prose.