p Questions

p 1. At what age did you start writing, and when do you consider that your career as a professional writer began?

p 2. When do you begin your working day? How do you arrange it? How long do you spend at your desk? Do you write by hand, or do you use a typewriter?

p 3. What is your attitude to the writer’s scribbling pad, notebook, or diary? Do you consider them necessary, or do you consider that it is enough, when writing, to draw on the ideas as they occur?

p 4. When working on his novels, Zola kept a personal dossier on each character, working out the plan of the whole project in the minutest detail. How do you go about it? Do you have a plan of the book as a whole, plans of the chapters, plans of separate episodes? Or is the work built up in the process of writing, with the characters coming to life and behaving according to their nature and convictions?

p 5. How, in your opinion, can and should the Soviet writer learn from Russian and world literary classics?

p 6. What use do you make of the riches of the popular speech, folklore, riddles, proverbs, fairy-tales?

p 7. What are your views on one writer helping another? Do you consider it possible for a writer to "poke his nose”, in Gorky’s words, into a fellow writer’s manuscript? How do you help young writers?

p 8. Should it be necessary for a writer’s personal behaviour to conform with what he preaches in his writings?

p 9. What did the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union add that was new to your personal interpretation of the writer’s duty?

p 10. Your immediate creative plans.

p Answers

p 1. 1910; between 1919 and 1920.

p 2. About ten in the morning. My arrangements are haphazard. From twelve to sixteen hours a day.

p By hand. Always by hand. And only by hand.

p 3. I respect notebooks and envy those who use them all the time.

p A jotter is a luxury. I make my notes on any scraps and sheets of paper which come to hand. I’m curiously stingy with good paper.

p Since diaries are only of interest to those who ought not to look into them, they’ve gone out of date.

p Alas, if the ideas that come into one’s head at work were sufficient, there wouldn’t be any literature. But the most important part comes at the writing desk more often than not.

p 4. I’m always drawing up plans and then breaking them in the course of work.

p Non-living characters don’t exist. They’re living characters because they’re free to act as they find necessary and possible in the predicament into which the author puts them or into which they land of their own accord. They mustn’t be pushed in any direction.

p 5. He should learn from them. And he should do 286 something over and above what he’s learned. That’s a must!

p 6. I make use of them. But I can’t "embrace the unembraceable”.

p 7. If I’m better at something than somebody else, then I am prepared to help, if the other wants me to. I’ve got my nose so much to the grindstone that it costs me quite an effort to tear myself away. I give my books everything I’ve got. But I can’t give more than that.

p 8. One should behave well.

p But one must know superlatively well what is “bad”. Without yeast, the dough of art won’t rise. The holy fathers bake unleavened bread.

p 9. The Congress reminded me that I have not paid my debt as a writer to society and it still has to be paid!

10. I’ve had a long life and I wouldn’t want to make all my plans “immediate”. But which am I to begin with, when there are so many?