p On this momentous occasion I should like to thank first of all the Soviet people who have armed me with a writer’s pen and provided me with an inexhaustible source of material for my novels.

p I also want to thank my numerous friends—the readers who have nominated me for the Lenin Prize.

p My heartfelt thanks to the Central Committee and the Soviet Government for so highly appraising my work. And I naturally want to thank the Lenin Prize Committee whose forgiveness I beg for mentioning it last.

p I know that when a person is presented with a prize it is customary for him to promise to work as hard in the future. My advanced years and the specificities of my profession compel me to be more cautious in this respect.

p Surely I can’t be expected to promise like a good schoolboy to get nothing but top marks for everything 1 write next year? But I can tell you with a man’s firmness and with absolute confidence in my abilities and powers that I shall continue to serve my Party and my people as faithfully with my pen.

p I have to say that my relations with readers are quite decent and, on the whole, they’re good. Constant contact with readers strengthens the author’s confidence in his powers and helps’ hirh in his work. But with some of my readers I’m not exactly on 241 At a session of the Bulgarian-Soviet Club of Artistic Youth Sholokhov speaks At home Sholokhov speaks at the Third All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers bad terms, but how shall I describe it—our relations are a bit cool. Often, the claims made upon the writer are quite exorbitant. One reader, for instance, complained in all seriousness that while the author of Yuri Miloslavsky had kept his heroes alive, Sholokhov had killed both Nagulnov and Davidov. “What has this got to do with socialist realism?" he asked. This is not the kind of advice that need be heeded. And in future, too, I shall write as I feel I must.

p Here’s one more example. I received a wrathful letter from the staff of Lestekhsyrye signed by the manager of the enterprise and three girls. What made them so angry was that in Virgin Soil Upturned where I wrote about a lot of different things I made no mention of the business of gathering medicinal herbs. That, too, is an impossible claim. There are many complaints of this sort. But I can’t please everybody.

p In my case the receipt of a Lenin Prize can be considered a past stage. Next year I should like to see a young writer (and if there are more than one, all the better) standing in my place.

p When we first started out on our literary careers we, writers of the older generation, were not pampered with excessive attention—awards and encouragements were not lavished on us. I do not mean to say that admittance into literature has been made so much easier, but what is taking place is the logical process of the old being replaced by the young. And I’m all for this rostrum being mounted by the young.

p I may safely presume that I shall never receive another Lenin Prize again, but from this statement it does not follow that I’m going to surrender my place in literature without a fight!

p I see here my comrades, writers of the older generation, and I think it won’t do for us, laden as we are with life and literary experience, to cede our positions without battle.

p I’m all for the young to replace us, but let them sweat a bit first before they can fall in line with us.

p I see here the previous years’ Lenin Prize winners, and it would not be a bad thing if their presence at the presentation ceremony became a tradition. Next year I shall also be sitting there among them as one of our young writers receives his well-deserved prize. It would not be a bad idea if it became a tradition in the sphere of literature and art to symbolically hand down the unquenchable torch of socialist art.

1960