p It would be very interesting, Konstantin Alexandrovich, to discuss a subject which no doubt concerns everyone who writes and thinks about literature. I mean the importance of material in the creative work of the writer.

p In controversies about the writer’s grasp of reality, the words “material” or "real-life material" are given different interpretations. By no means every fact of life as observed by the writer can serve as material. The only real material for the artist is what he has experienced, felt, and reflected on. Hard thinking is not enough. A syllogism is constructed by logic but is verified by life. In the same way, feeling, arising out of experience, must wait for the cementing action of thought if it is to become suitable building material for a work of art. From my childhood days I remember an old man dying in the street, in Saratov. He was sitting on a bench, waiting for a horsebus. Suddenly he started slipping down, twitched, and it was over. Half an hour later, the 288 seat was empty. The sun was shining. Except that some women were standing nearby and talking excitedly. From what they were saying, I learned what had happened. . . and that empty bench has remained in my memory ever since. I felt a queer, detached sorrow for the old man. But detached, that’s the point. I hadn’t experienced the impression of death. Material is born out of the depth of one’s impressions. The deeper they are, the more probable it is that they will subsequently become material for the writer. In this, the world of feeling is very important. Feeling must fix the impression. If it lives in you, then it is material for the subsequent work of the imagination. Everything is postponed, everything lies in the storehouse of the memory; but there comes a time when it is summoned to life and is organised as a planned work, a time when it is transformed by the imagination.

p What are the writer s sources of material? Not long ago, there were some discussions around the concept of "the study of life”. What interpretation do you give to this concept?

p The most important source of real-life material is one’s own personal experience. Tolstoi gained so much as a young man from his Caucasian and Sevastopol impressions that, other works apart, he was able to draw on them for War and Peace. If Dostoyevsky had not been condemned to death and then to penal servitude and exile, he would clearly not have written much of what he did. A great deal depends, of course, on who the writer is and what events he has actually witnessed or taken part in. The minds of the generation of Soviet writers who saw the Second World War were chock-a-block with war material, all their feelings were conditioned by war. And most of Hemingway’s works seem to be autobiographical.

p There is also another way of accumulating or gathering material; this is when the writer consciously searches for the impressions he needs. Hence, travelling assignments. This kind of experience ties in with one’s professional work. Everybody knows about Lev Tolstoi’s visit to the field of Borodino. This was not just a study of the locality, 289 but an imaginary participation in the fateful battle of 1812.

p A consecutive series of phenomena enables the writer to transport his accumulated impressions through time and space. It often happens that the imagination is struck by phenomena which have not been developed and fixed by nomenclature. Count von zur Miihlen-Schonau in my novel Cities and Years is a typical fascist. I already saw the beginnings of fascism in Prussian militarism during my four years in Germany (Spring 1914-Autumn 1918), and could, if necessary, transfer some of these impressions to, say, the forties.

p The more or less continual drawing upon a clearly defined circle of real-life phenomena and problems gives the work of the writer a consistency of subject matter which is not, of course, necessarily exclusive to him alone. For instance, people of my generation who began writing during the revolution “carry” with them something of the old intellectual. We come across this interest in the "old ‘uns” to a greater or lesser extent in Kaverin, Paustovsky, Tikhonov, and Leonov. The intellectual with his baggage of pre-revolutionary upbringing is disappearing from life and, as a character, from literature.

p What would you say about language as material for literature?

p Language is an instrument, a tool of the writer and, along with all that he has lived through, reflected on, and felt in life, it is an object, it is material for creative processing. I have already had the occasion to say that language always remains the basic material of a work. Writing is the art of words. Hence the importance to the writer of studying the verbal wealth of the people.

p Let us take a specific example—the representation of what is known as local colour. Authors are in the habit of going off into an imaginary city and imaginary places in order not to confuse the reader with too many inaccuracies. This is sometimes unavoidable. No one is going to bother me if I write that on the Liteiny, in Petrograd or on the Rue de so-and-so in Paris . .. this or that happened. But if I write that, in times gone by, in a small 290 town, or even in old Saratov, there was a demonstration on such-and-such a street, then they’ll be sure to start pestering me with corrections and complaints. Historical accuracy becomes more and more of a problem, the more specific the characteristics of the locality described. In my novel No Ordinary Summer, I transferred a kulak uprising to the imaginary village of Repyevka—in actual fact, similar events took place in other parts of the Volga Region, where the local kulaks savagely slaughtered Soviet people (I was present at the burial of the victims of one such uprising on the town square in Syzran). .. .

p The locality of the action may be invented but, in the dialogue, the writer must still adhere to a definite “ geography”. Attempts to write in some sort of “average” language will fail to achieve what is most important of all—artistic detail and verisimilitude. After all, language is a firmly fixed world of the objects, ideas, and concepts by which people live. In different regions people have their own distinctive characteristics, and their Russian is by no means identical. The old Volga, for instance, had its special words—galakh  [290•* , belyana  [290•** , nosak  [290•*** , sarpinka  [290•**** , and the like. In the first two books of the trilogy, where the action is centred mainly on the Lower Volga and in the town of Saratov, I found it essential to find a language which would not allow the Volga people to protest "But we don’t talk that way!" When collecting material for The Conflagration, I familiarised myself with the ethnography and dialect of the Smolensk country; but even before then, I had already lived in the Smolensk countryside and become accustomed to the local idiom.

p All the material of a work, all the experience of the writer, is expressed by and through language, and so polishing is the hardest part of the job. In the early editions of my novel The Brothers, the ice on the river Ural was broken, in my version, with a “crowbar” preparatory to 291 spearing sturgeon. Someone in the Urals sent me a most tactful letter on the subject, as a result of which, my face red, 1 deleted the crowbar and replaced it with a pick.

p The result of a writer’s study of life is what is usually termed his artistic grasp of reality. As applied to what has taken place in Soviet literature, it has frequently been observed that a writer’s artistic grasp of reality is lagging behind his political grasp of reality. Here is a typical example. Early in the twenties, certain Soviet writers stood on perfectly solid political ground. During the Civil War, they took up arms in the fight for Soviet power; yet artistically they were behind the times. Instead of fullblooded portrayals of Communists, they produced "leather jackets”, etc. Such charges were laid, notably, against your Cities and Years.

p What is your attitude to this problem?

p In my opinion, it’s a mistake to draw such a sharp line of demarcation between the writer’s artistic and political —I would put it more broadly—ideological grasp of reality. This is the aftermath of the over-simplified views at the root of which probably lies the conception of a work’s ideological basis as being rigidly set beforehand. But it is a single process. There is an extraordinary fusion here, and one must first answer—what is “aesthetics”, and does it not contain an ideological principle? Is it possible that the writer’s philosophical convictions should not be part of his aesthetic conceptions? Ideological and aesthetic principles are inseparable. Take the mystical and symbolist trends at the beginning of the 20th century. It would be wrong to think that the mystical views formed first and the aesthetic principles only afterwards. In actual fact, they grew up side by side and fused together. I was brought up in a religious home, learned the ritual of the church, was familiar with its history and, as a student, had to study divinity. If I had known only this, could I have possibly developed into a realist writer? The views instilled into me at home and at school were at variance with my studies of the natural sciences and the humanities and were at variance with reality. And so instead of acquiring artistic tastes that reflected a religious education 292 I absorbed the views of the materialists and the art of realism. It’s all fused together. Accepting definite ideological principles, the writer evolves definite aesthetic tastes.

p And now, about those "leather jackets”. Such people actually existed at that time. This fact produced in literature a conventional system of representation. But, there were other revolutionaries and other people too. There was Lenin! But for superficiality of literary portrayal, the blame must be put on the writers’ thinking, on their inability to grasp the characteristics of the epoch, and not solely on sluggishness of creative ideas, if such sluggishness there was. Incidentally, the importance of the "leather jackets" in the literature of the twenties is often exaggerated. By no means all the literature of the twenties was about "leather jackets”.

p Does the nature of the material affect the genre of a work, its form, etc?

p If we allow that the characters portrayed move the pen of the writer, then material also affects genre. It’s a matter of attitude, as when a journalist arrives on a much-praised building project intending to write favourably of it, sees an entirely different picture, and writes a critical article instead. .. . There’s a short story of mine, Affliction, about a little man. I made an attempt to write a novel using similar material. It was my first effort at the novel as a form—it was about the Cossacks of the Urals and what are known as the “out-of-towners”. It was a very weak novel and I scrapped it.

p I would like to refer to examples from your current literary work. How are you progressing with Book Two of your novel The Conflagration?

p Novy Mir is publishing this year Book Two of The Conflagration that is, several chapters on Tula and Moscow. Then there’ll be a gap. Of all my works, only Sanatorium Arcturus and Early Joys were published complete. Almost all the rest came out at intervals. In The Conflagration, the action extends from the beginning of the war to the expulsion of the Germans from Yasnaya Polyana. The Germans held Moscow in a pincer grip. The liberation of Tula and Yasnaya Polyana was an important 293 strategic moment. We began to force the pincers open. The result of the defeat of the Germans near Moscow was a break-through in the consciousness of the army and the people. To me, historical events are only a necessary background. What matters most is people. Their psychology transmits what is happening round them. Especially simple folk. A big part was played during the war by the heart of woman, and not only at the front—nurses, traffic controllers, signallers, etc.—and, in the family, in the rear,—the mothers. During the blockade of Leningrad, the women showed more physical "staying power" than the men—something, evidently, that lies in the depths of the female psyche and increases her powers of resistance. I think about this too in my war novel, in which the battle scenes don’t take up much space—after all, I’m not a battle historian. . ..

p In the creative work of a writer, what has been done in literature before him is taken into consideration one way or the other. In The Conflagration, one feels an attention to the tradition established by the author of War and Peace, and especially to the philosophical conception of the epic. If I am not mistaken, you have already written or spoken about this yourself. It would be interesting, in connection with this, to know your attitude to Soviet literary works about the last war—what has attracted your attention, and what, if anything, do you think ought to be discouraged?

p At the present time, more and more memoirs are being written. This is a genre which has been lying dormant, or even hibernating, for a long time. General Gorbatov’s memoirs are interesting, for example. I had the pleasure of knowing him personally. I met him on the Orel front. The position is more complicated with fiction, although talented authors and books make their appearance. Of the books published in recent years, Vera Panova’s The Fellow Travellers is outstanding, very intelligently written, and evidently based on personal experience. She’s altogether very gifted (Seryozha, for instance, a short novel, is superb). V. Nekrasov’s In the Stalingrad Trenches has the ring of authenticity and is written with talent. Some very good war books have come from E. Kazakevich and 294 K. Simonov (especially his latest novels) and others. But a cursory enumeration of names and titles can only give a very small part of the picture as a whole.

p I’ve been dissatisfied, and still am, by the portrayal in some of our war books of characters purely in terms of their heroic behaviour. As a phenomenon, heroism is extremely complex, and the artist should give not just behaviour, but should disclose the sources—moral, social, —of the act of heroism. Heroism displays itself unexpectedly in war, and it is sometimes difficult for a woman to imagine how she would behave in a given set of circumstances. Here, the force of example plays a decisive role. When everybody else is forging ahead, it’s easier to get up under a hail of bullets.

p The heroic in our novels is too often depicted in a very trite sort of way, and the heroic actions of the characters are accomplished without motive, or are stereotyped. Yet the portrayal of heroes in great literature is very complex and many-sided. Pierre Bezukhov’s heroism is actually rather silly (when he attacks the French patrol in Moscow). But Nikolai Rostov’s is traditional heroism. Both are heroes, yet when they meet, they fail to understand one another. And so there are personalities in classical literature who are more real to me than some of my acquaintances. Raskolnikov, Protasov—both are personalities. Our contemporary novels should also create personalities who will stay in the memory. Konstantin Simonov has done a great deal towards this: his Serpilin is memorable, and his Sintsov too.

p There is in your trilogy a person who is always behind the scenes of the action, but who is one of the most significant characters in the work. I mean the image of Lev Tolstoi, who now and again disappears into the depths of the consciousness of the playwright Pastukhov, and then appears to him in his imagination during moments of difficult decisions, or "comes to life" for the reader independently of Pastukhov s experiences. Would you tell us, Konstantin Alexandra-inch, even if only briefly, about the “material” which determined the occurrence of the theme and image of Lev Tolstoi in the trilogy, especially in The Conflagration?

p In 1910, I was an eighteen-year-old graduate of the final class of a commercial institute in Kozlov. Lev Tolstoi’s “flight” and death were something which I felt very deeply. Kozlov (now Michurinsk) is on the same railway line as Astapovo. What happened there shook the most diverse levels of Russian society, of the people, to the core. The earth tremors that accompanied the last living step and the death of Lev Tolstoi were felt keenly in our little town because of its proximity to Astapovo. To me, the death of Lev Tolstoi was a personal shock.

p Artistically, I came to accept and understand Lev Tolstoi somewhere near the beginning of the forties, when he became for me the supreme authority, even somewhat supplanting Dostoyevsky, the idol of my youth. Shortly afterwards, I began visiting Yasnaya Polyana. I particularly remember one of my first trips there, in winter. There was a savage frost. I was met at Zaseka station by a sheepskin-clad coachman of Tolstoi’s times. Sophia Andreyevna’s grand-daughter, also named Sophia Andreyevna, was waiting for me in the house. A room had been set aside in Sophia Andreyevna Senior’s half of the building. Everything was kept as it had been when the master was alive; they hadn’t even laid on electricity. The cook, who had served Tolstoi, brought in the supper—milk and bread—by candle-light. At night, I could hear the silence. There’s no silence like it anywhere else. A fantastic silence. And there was an amazing atmosphere of concentration. I spent six weeks there in Yasnaya Polyana, and finished Sanatorium Arcturus. After that, I visited Yasnaya Polyana many times.

p But the Tolstoi theme in my novels was not inspired solely by these writer’s reminiscences and literary attachments. The plan as a whole was determined by the time of the action of Early Joys—1910. And would it have been possible, depicting the Russian intelligentsia of that time and the lives of people in the arts, to overlook such an event that year as the death of Lev Tolstoi? The actual pictures, of course, were prepared to a great extent by old memories. In Early Joys the atmosphere of the events, taking place at the time of Tolstoi’s death is reminiscent, but the incidents are invented, although not all to the 296 same degree. The newspaper correspondent actually did send in the news of Tolstoi’s death—this is a historical fact which I once experienced, and it was woven into the texture of the novel.

p In my conception, historically substantial motifs again brought the Tolstoi theme to the foreground in The Conflagration. In 1941, the same people as in 1910 were still alive and active alongside my new characters. And this situation led the author to resolve the theme which he had opened in Early Joys and intended to conclude in The Conflagration. But the “image” of Lev Tolstoi in The Conflagration is not just the “voice” of the writer’s conscience, which often troubles Alexander Vladimirovich Pastukhov, and it is not just a conception of the mission of the writer.

p I have already mentioned the forcing open of the German “pincers” round Moscow in the decisive months of 1941. The military operation at Tula had great moral and historical significance. I was attracted by Tula, because there, as in the Civil War, everything was critical, as in the revolution, everything was at stake. To be or not to be? One distinguished general, who was in charge of the defence of Tula in 1941, gave me the following detail. Tula was almost cut off. The Defence Commander rang Supreme Command H.Q. "The Germans are bringing up fresh tank units! We’ve got nothing but bottles of fuel mixture! Send us anti-tank equipment.. ..” H.Q. answered, "Message understood. Hang on! We’re sending everything we’ve got!" And they sent 14 anti-tank rifles. It was all that the country could let them have at that critical and decisive moment. That’s how things were. ...

p And at that moment, the people rallied and smashed the Germans. "Stick it out in the trenches!" In the West, they couldn’t understand how the Russians managed to hold out. The explanation for the miracle was sought in War and Peace. And it was this same novel that inspired the Soviet people to beat back the enemy. So a “Tolstoian” theme occurred in real life. At that time, many of our newspapers had closed down owing to the paper shortage; there wasn’t even any paper for the leaflets; but Lev Tolstoi’s War and Peace was published in an edition of 297 one hundred thousand copies. In The Conflagration, one of my characters from not far away is bewildered by it all. "Nothing to roll a cigarette in, and look at all this luxury!”

p It was because Lev Tolstoi came to life again everywhere during the Patriotic War that this theme had to be developed extensively in the novel. And the special significance of Tula, its proximity to Yasnaya Polyana, made it a very “convenient” locale for the action in The Conflagration.

p Konstantin Alexandrovich, I would like to speak in defence of one of your characters. As an intellectual with the "baggage of a pre-r’evolutionary upbringing”, Pastukhov should be classed as one of the people "disappearing from literature”. But the conflict between conscience and situation with its frequent resolutions in moral compromise, which is the basis of his character, is absolutely real, contemporary, and not only in the literary world! What’s more, if one thinks about it, it isn’t only Pastukhov who goes through such trials in the trilogy; Tsvetukhin, in his traits of character and some of his behaviour seems to be a kind of "Pastukhov in reverse"....

p Yes, Pastukhov, with his spiritual discord, is going to take up a lot of space. Dealing with him is going to be a difficult and tricky business. Of course, Pastukhov is not Startzev in Cities and Years, or Karev in The Brothers. He is one of the old intellectuals who went through everything "in their own way"—through errors and mistakes, to the acceptance of socialism. But he also has something new in him. He is capable of patriotic fervour. And Tsvetukhin can even die a heroic death.... The definite spiritual kinship between Pastukhov and Tsvetukhin is with me, a novelist, something akin to the leitmotif with a composer who distributes the same melody to the different instruments. The same line is given to the various timbres: the flute takes it up, then violin, then the bassoon—and the problem is resolved now by harmony, now by contrast, but always for the fullness of the whole.

p The prose writer also is faced with the task of instrumentation. In literary criticism, for instance, as distinguished a researcher as M. Bakhtin has given this 298 phenomenon in literature the name of “polyphonism”. It’s a good word, defining, perhaps, one of the reliable methods of the epic genre, or the way from contradiction to harmony. In my opinion, the writer’s job consists, not in taking the reader by the hand to one window and saying "Look!”, but in throwing wide open all the windows to show him the world in the multiplicity of its colours, flooded with the light of a future worthy of struggle in the name of humankind.

May, 1965