Anatoli Pristavkin: Response To A Questionnaire
from Voprosi Literaturi (Problems of Literature), 1962
What experience of life did you have before you took up writing? When and where were your first works published?
This was my experience: dozens of children's homes, years of vagrancy over the face of Russia during the war, a job in a canning factory at the age of twelve, then in an aircraft factory, a wireless operator at an aerodrome and so on until my military service started. Perhaps that is why my characters are either former inmates of children's homes or people who began working at an early age.
My poems were printed in various newspapers and anthologies from 1952 onwards but I consider that my literary career began in 1959 when Yunost published my first sketches.
What problems, characters and conflicts in the modern world do you consider topical? How do you study life? How do you gather material for your works?
Each generation has its main tasks. Every person who shuns that principal task finds himself on the fringe of life. We are first and foremost the representatives of our own generation, our task is to see the main thing and to write about it.
The scale of a writer is formed by three factors -- his talent, his civic or human qualities, and his correct understanding of the tasks that face the generation he belongs to. As concerns the latter, I am firmly of the opinion that one must live with one's generation, not merely visit it on a special assignment but live with it, that is, experience all its difficulties, and its joys. That is fully within the realm of possibility for young writers, and some do it. I too try to do it.
What do you consider to be the writer's responsibilities in the process of forming new, communist qualities in society?
I see here two sides of one and the same thing. The formation of the man of the future is impossible without struggling against what hinders the process. At present that means, no doubt, struggling against the vestiges of the "cult of personality." The "cult" engendered not only bad methods of leadership but brought with it indifference, bureaucracy and the degradation of the human personality.
Probably the most grievous thing we had to experience in those years was the oblivion of the main thing in life: everything we do should be done for man. From a match-box to the Bratsk Power Station, everything is for him, for the man of today, our own kin, our living contemporary.
In my opinion, communism is not only a society of abundance, it is something loftier, a society of great respect for the human personality. The writer is obliged to help bringing to the fore everything that serves that cause.
Which traditions in classical and modern literature do you respect? What experiments in the field of literary form do you consider the most promising?
Strange to say, my first prose was strongly influenced by lyrical poetry. But Gorky is vitally dear to me and I found it more difficult not to be true to him than to myself. I return more and more frequently to the prose of Tolstoy and Chekhov too and sometimes it seems to me that it is not in departing from them but, on the contrary, returning to them at a new stage, to their power of profound analysis, to the dialectics of psychology which so many scorn, that true innovation is to be found today.
In general I am fond of the lyrical, diary form, for it provides scope and opportunities for unaffected expression; I consider it one of the most promising forms which reaches with ease the heart of the reader. In this I include sketches too. I recognize any form if it enables one to use modern means to attain a truthful representation.
Who of the writers of the older generation gave you professional help and what form did it take?
My instructor in the seminar at the Literary Institute was the poet Lev Oshanin to whom I owe much in my development. My other "teachers" were the editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta.
But I feel a latent resentment towards the older generation of writers in general. I know from what I have read that the writer Grigorovich, having read the first stories written by the young Chekhov sent him a friendly letter. I know that Gorky of his own free will sent his good wishes to many of the living writers of the older generation. I swear that neither I nor many of my writer friends received any such letters on their successful debuts in literature.
We who are often working in the dark, sometimes find a few warm words indispensable. We don't want to hear them from the platform, nor at a section meeting of the Writers Union. We want to hear them as we did from Gorky, the kind and understanding man. Kind words to writers are like plant food for plants, they could make us work twice as hard and grow proportionally.
What are your creative plans for the near future?
I am writing a book about the beauty of nature, about sunrises, about fishing, about wild strawberries and cream and all kinds of very tender green and blue things. I have dreamed for years about that book, I've collected notes, tales and impressions and have told no one about my intoxication with the beauty of the earth when I wandered over its surface with a rucksack and a tent.
My plans for the near future are to write a novel about my generation. I want to speak at last about the main thing I saw and understood during the several years I lived at Bratsk. After that I'm going to spend another long spell at some construction site. So that I can live and work with those about whom and for whom I write.
