p How do you feel about winning the Nobel Prize?

p I am naturally pleased that I have been awarded the Nobel Prize, but I beg you to understand my feelings correctly: what I feel is not the self-satisfaction of an individual, a professional writer whose work has earned this high international recognition. Predominant in my feelings is my glad awareness that I have done something, even if very little, to add more glory to my country, the Party in whose ranks I have been for a good half of my life, and, of course, our Soviet literature. This is more important to me than all my personal emotions.

p There is also the gratification of knowing that the novel genre, the very legitimacy of whose existence in the modern world has been questioned by certain literary figures, can be said to have been vindicated. A well-written book lives a long life, and no living thing can be disavowed without good reason.

p How did you learn the news?

p From a telegram sent me by Swedish journalists. But the news was late in reaching me: the telegram was delivered to me by Comrade Mendaliyev, secretary of the Furmanov district Party Committee, who ran me down to earth 140 kilometres away from the district centre. In order to cable my acknowledgment to the Swedish Royal Academy I had to fly to Uralsk in rather inauspicious weather. But altogether October 15 was a very lucky day for me: I got up at daybreak and made headway with that chapter from the first part of my novel which somehow I just could not get right. (This is the chapter where Nikolai Streltsov receives a visit from his brother, a general 204 whose image I modelled on the personality of General Lukin.) Late in the afternoon I learnt about the Nobel Prize, and in the evening I got two magnificent grey geese with two shots (the only two 1 fired). And, what is more, I got them at the farthest range, which doesn’t often happen, you know.

p And how has the prize affected the present routine of your life?

p You must know by now that it’s not so easy to knock me out of the saddle. As usual, I work, rest, drink lovely Kazakh kumiss, and sometimes when I go duck-shooting and get chilled to the marrow I allow myself a glass of Kazakh arakd. After Stockholm, I shall finish the first part of They Fought for Their Country. I firmly believe I shall. So everything’s in order!

p The Kazakh steppe may look desolate, but here, as everywhere else in the country, life is seething busily: the last hectares of land for autumn ploughing—over and above plan— are being upturned, the shepherds are getting ready for a difficult winter, farm-machine operators—the region’s best—get together to exchange experience, and so, here too, people work to the best of their ability, inspired by the Party’s concern for the economic and cultural development of the country. It makes me happy to feel myself a tiny particle of this powerful collective of people building communism.

October 21, 1965