THE BIRTH OF SOVIET CINEMA IS COMPARED TO THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. THE LETATLIN: A DREAMING MACHINE. THE WEAPON OF PATIENCE. MAYAKOVSKY DIDN’T WANT DEBTS. DIGRESSION ON PASTERNAK’S POETRY, BULGAKOV’S NOVELS. SHKLOVSKY BEGINS TO WORK IN CINEMA, HE WRITES INTERTITLES AND THEN SCRIPTS. HE MEETS EISENSTEIN. WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF DISHES IN THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION? SOME FILMS SHKLOVSKY WROTE: BY THE LAW, BED AND SOFA, MININ AND POZHARSKY. SHKLOVSKY TEARS APART TARKOVSKY’S ANDREI RUBLEV. AN UNUSUAL EDITING JOB. AN EVEN MORE UNUSUAL WRITING JOB.
For today’s conversation, Viktor Borisovich, I’d like to propose a topic that I know is dear to you: film. You witnessed, one could say, the birth of the great Soviet cinema firsthand . . .
Imagine the creation of the world. The world doesn’t exist yet: it’s being born. Some of the people who were working in pre-revolutionary Russia, good writers, good men in cinema, many of them had left, very few remained. Only in a second phase did some of them start coming back. The post-revolutionary cinema was a cinema that was learning how to be cinema. Almost all the new directors, before then, had never worked in the cinema. They came from painting, from sculpture, from medicine. And it wasn’t like that just in film. It was the era. We young people suddenly found ourselves on an open shore. And we dreamed. There were architects, like Melnikov, designing buildings with enormous interior spaces, with stairs that passed through rings—wonderful projects, but we didn’t have the materials to accomplish them properly. In those years nice houses were built, interesting constructions, but made with shoddy materials. What to do? There was nothing, in the cities people were even plowing the patches of land between the buildings trying to grow potatoes. There was hunger. And with that great, vast hunger, we young people, whose stomachs were by no means full even before the revolution, raced to create the world. Just think of Tatlin’s invention, the Letatlin, on the tower of the old monastery, where the Aleksandr Nevsky cemetery is. The Letatlin was a flying machine. It was a copy of a bird, it had a very light metal structure. But it couldn’t fly. It could only dream. It was the dream of flight. The dream of a great man. The same Tatlin designed the famous building that was supposed to stand at an incline and rotate on itself at the same time. It was a monument to the October Revolution. I saw the model, now it’s at the Architecture Museum. I don’t know if it’s intact, if the mechanism still works, but that tower gives an idea of the magnitude of his dream. I’ve been told that many architecture projects from that period were built later by Finnish architects. They have the materials and the desire to do it. You see, it was as if we were all in uncharted territory, you could do anything, invent the Letatlin for example. I remember that it was exhibited at the Writers’ Union. It was very beautiful. Some people came from Denmark to film it. But they wouldn’t let them. Because, you see, the Letatlin wasn’t on the Soviet regime’s list of works, it was as if it didn’t exist. And Tatlin was not liked. They said that the place where the Letatlin was had been recently painted. The Danes responded that it wasn’t a big deal, they had come from Denmark for the sole purpose of filming it, they would fix it afterward, repaint, but they still didn’t let them do it. Later, after a great deal of effort, Konstantin Simonov managed to put together a Tatlin exhibit. And the press started talking about him again. You see, an artist’s most important weapon is patience. An artist can’t expect to be liked immediately. Picasso, for example, possessed the gift of patience, Chagall had it too . . .
Perhaps poets need it too, sometimes. In your opinion, for example, did Mayakovsky possess this weapon?
No, not always. But there was another problem, you see. Mayakovsky allowed himself to be seduced by theory, an incorrect theory, about the end of art. Yet he was a poet, a great poet. His theme was love. But they tried to prove to him that this wasn’t valid, constructive. And Mayakovsky lived, in some ways, a double life.
Do you mean, in other words, that Mayakovsky had two sides, that he didn’t believe in what he wrote?
No, Mayakovsky believed in it, always. He lived extremely modestly. He scrupulously kept track of his expenses and income, he didn’t want to spend more than he had, because the day could always come when you absolutely needed money, no matter what. Debts are a burden, they restrict you. And he didn’t want to be in debt to anyone. When he writes “Pro Eto,” Mayakovsky defends the right to poetry. And you see, this existence of art at multiple levels simultaneously is our secret. Mayakovsky wanted to be liked, liked right away. To be liked, first and foremost, by the Revolution. He wanted the workers to like him, on their terms. He wanted another audience, another public. I believe that all the great poets have two sides. Just think of Dante, who creates his Inferno and puts in all the great men of Florence, all the popes. And in The Inferno there’s a revision of everything, of every value, even though Dante wants to go down in history as a champion of Catholicism.
Seeing as the discussion has returned to poets, I’d like to take advantage of this to fill some serious gaps in my questions. I haven’t asked you, for example, about Pasternak.
Yes, I remember, I remember Pasternak well. For some time we lived in the same house, on Lavrushinsky Lane. We both published in LEF. Then he started writing for other magazines and I remember Mayakovsky saying: “They took one of our own.” I like Pasternak as a poet, as a complex poet who, in my opinion—though he would get offended when I told him this—had taken a different poetic path, following Igor Severyanin, that is, writing poetry that introduces the everyday into the aesthetic sphere. Pasternak, let’s say, writes that a skating rink is a giant mirror, or he compares raindrops to cufflinks . . . There’s nature and then there’s the level of the intimate, the everyday. In other words, Pasternak was able to introduce objects into poetry that previously had been excluded. He was very good friends with Mayakovsky. After Volodya’s death he wrote a couple things about him. One was published, have you read it? Later, though, he said that Mayakovsky didn’t exist, as a poet. I argued with him, actually there was never a real disagreement—it was simply that our paths diverged. So, while Mayakovsky was a friend, a close friend, Pasternak and I never “saw eye to eye.”
Viktor Borisovich, I’d like to devote a little more time to other great figures of Soviet literature. I realize we haven’t spoken much about the prose writers. Do you like Bulgakov?
Bulgakov is a wonderful, incomparable writer. When I read, for example, The Master and Margarita . . . I fall apart like clothes in the rain and humidity. In the novel, Bulgakov describes the building where we writers had a kind of restaurant, which overlooked the street. And there, a few feet away, Mandelstam lived behind one wall, Platonov lived across the way. Mayakovsky lived in a room. For a while Pasternak lived there. Shostakovich was there. It was the old Herzen House, on Tverskoy Boulevard—on one end there was the Danish embassy and on the other were the rooms where the writers lived. What am I getting at? That it wasn’t such a bad or insignificant era. Not at all. There were still the Futurists, there was still Opoyaz. But it must also be said that Bulgakov was a great artist. The Master and Margarita is a very strong work, especially the beginning: Pilate with his headache, the apostle looking for a knife to kill someone . . . I like the end less though, when the Master meets Christ they have nothing to say to each other. Because Christ is better informed, he has all the news, he’s more interested and involved in the problems of the world. And there are witches in the novel . . . When I was young, a long time ago, we were all interested in the topic, there was a whole literature on it. No, I’m not talking about folktales, it was scientific research, volumes and volumes of it. Bosch, for us, was completely comprehensible. From an ideological perspective, The Master and Margarita is related to Goethe’s early works, and to Hegel. But I found Bulgakov’s other novel, A Dead Man’s Memoir, more striking.
Since I certainly won’t have time to ask you about every single prose writer, I’d like to at least ask you this question: who was, in your opinion, the writer who did the most for Russian prose of our century, for the language of Soviet narrative?
I couldn’t say. The official verdict, in my opinion mistaken, claims it was Gorky. That’s not true. Gorky was a romantic when he started out, later on paying more attention to the realm of the everyday, and there are perhaps traces of this later phase in Ivanov. I am of the opinion that, even if for a short amount of time, Andrei Bely’s prose mattered a great deal.
All right, then let’s return to the topic “of the day.” Why did you, Viktor Borisovich, begin to work in cinema?
The story goes like this: I wasn’t teaching anymore—as I’ve said, I had some troubles because of formalism. And in that particular period I had a child on the way.
So, you came back from Berlin, in late 1923, if I’m not mistaken. And you moved to Moscow? When?
Look, I don’t remember. Go ahead and write that I don’t remember. Anyway, when I came back from Berlin, I went to the NKVD for my documents and they told me: “Don’t go to Leningrad. Because we know. They don’t.” They were referring to my case, which had been closed by Sverdlov. So I thought I wouldn’t tempt fate and fortune and I stayed in Moscow. As I said, I was about to have a child. I had no money. My wife couldn’t go to the hospital because I hadn’t paid the union fees. I was told that you could make money, anyone could make money, in cinema. So I went, I went to the Third Factory, the one that provided the title for one of my books. There was . . . Actually, no, it was like this: I’d asked for help from a writer, who, moreover, never loaned out money. He was the one who suggested that I work in the cinema. So I went, albeit reluctantly. I said I needed money. They didn’t give me any right away, naturally. They told me: sit down and write the titles for his film, when you’re finished we’ll pay you. I sat down and began to work. I turned the projector by hand. And from then on I kept working in cinema. And I wanted to understand what it was, what it was about. It simply didn’t exist. Films were often shot in these small ateliers that looked like photography studios. They had to start from scratch. Besides that, the most important thing is that there were no directors. There was nothing, just the movie houses abandoned by their owners, many of whom had emigrated. Some of these former owners were smart people, good craftsmen. The former owner of the Third Factory for example, Kozlovsky, who was a camera operator himself. You know what he was like? They were shooting a scene with a bear. The animal jumped on the actor with a menacing look. And Kozlovsky, who was directing, said: “Keep filming the bear, for heaven’s sake!” The bear was killed. “You ruined my shot!” On another occasion, he was shooting a scene with wolves, a wolf lunged at the cameraman, and Kozlovsky says: “Don’t stop shooting!” These people were absolutely possessed by the fever of cinema. They were like the first aviators . . .
How long were you writing intertitles?
After the titles they had me doing scripts. I rewrote scripts by other screenwriters. I wrote with incredible speed. Then I got fed up with that job. I wrote my own script. It’s a film that everyone has forgotten today: The Wings of a Serf. But I know in the West it had a fairly wide distribution. And so, in short, I kept working in cinema.
Where you met figures who are now legendary . . .
I can tell you in two words who Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was. He studied at the Architecture Institute, he was going to become an architect, he wanted to build houses, but he went on to the theater, the most “left-wing” theater at the time, and there, for the production of Ostrovsky’s The Wiseman, he made a short film that was put into the show. That was how, in a completely unexpected way, Eisenstein became a film director. And then Pudovkin was an engineer. He’d gone to war, he’d been in prison. He shot a short film on Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes. Pavlov saw it, he liked it. Anyway, Pudovkin also ended up in cinema completely by chance. Eisenstein went to the First Factory to do a test shot but it was lousy, mediocre. The second one wasn’t any better. It was bad film. For the third and forth tries, cameramen and workers got involved, and the director of the First Factory, Mikhin, also lent a hand; he was a man who should have a world patent for the invention of the movable background, made with molding and plywood. That became the film Strike.
Could you tell us something about Eisenstein the man?
I feel entitled to do so as someone who was his friend during his lifetime, and because I’ve studied his archive. He was a man who knew how to move but couldn’t dance. Broad-chested, his reddish hair always standing on end, young and cheerful, with an incredible, exceptional memory and mental ability. He’d studied Japanese, but I don’t think he spoke it. But he knew the theory of painting to a T. He was an excellent painter, he painted every frame of his films, he was a great theorist of painting. His works were published in three volumes, but there are still many other studies on the theory of montage that ought to be published, and they’re full of his sketches. See, I’m afraid of repeating myself on Eisenstein. I’ve written a book about him that has been translated into several languages . . . He was your typical great man. And he was also a poor man who didn’t know it, who paid no attention to his own poverty. His father lived in Latvia, the old government was still there, the Eisensteins were rich, they owned multiple houses. But he didn’t go back. He didn’t leave because in the early years of his work, he had found freedom. Yes, he was a Letatlin, a machine that was able to take flight in the new Soviet Russia.
And Eisenstein on the set?
He never went near the camera, he never checked the frames. He didn’t want to meddle with the camera work. He would design the frame, drawing it in every minute detail, or, for example, he would get involved with the makeup and so on, but once they started filming he everyone do their work, let Tisse do his work.
What kind of relationship did he have with the actors?
He didn’t care for them. Eisenstein didn’t like working with actors. He dreamed of having Ulanova, the ballerina, act for him. He said of her: “Now that’s what I call an actress.” His ideal actor was whomever he hadn’t worked with. No, he wasn’t fond of actors, even though he worked with some great pros. In general, if he could have, Eisenstein would have shot much more film, so he would have more footage to choose from. That was what he wanted most of all. And I must say that, there at the Factory, he was the favorite of the set workers. Because he didn’t give them a drawing of the set design, he gave them a blueprint. He was well versed in these things, he had his architectural background. And the workers built the sets twice as fast for him as they did for any other director. The administrators, the heads of the cinema factory, were actually a little afraid of Sergei Mikhailovich. Even later, when he ran into some trouble, some ideological “fiascoes,” as we would say, the administration continued to respect him. And Eisenstein, who was incredibly young, there at the factory he was always the oldest, the “captain.” At the screening of October, Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, said: “It’s very interesting, but I don’t know if dishes played such a big part in the October Revolution.” And at the premiere of October the audience was disappointed, they didn’t like the film, they grumbled. I remember Pudovkin came up to me and said: “How I wish I had, what I’d give, for a flask of that energy. From now on everyone who was in the theater, including us, will work in a different way . . .”
And you, personally, what do you think of those notorious dishes?
Eisenstein doesn’t care for the object in itself, what interests him is the reciprocal interaction of objects and ideas. To speak in formalist terms, in Eisenstein the word as such doesn’t exist. And it’s precisely his objects that demonstrate how art as such comes from the collision of opposing concepts and structures. That art isn’t structure, but the conflict of structures. Art is the catastrophe of structures. And if one can say that imagination is better than reality, art is even better, because it’s the dream of every structure’s collapse and at the same time the dream of the construction of new structures.
And, in this dream, what role did the technique of montage have for Eisenstein?
We were at the initial phase of montage then, montage was a continual discovery, the directors didn’t know exactly what it was about yet. There was Kuleshov, a former painter, an educated man with exceptional talent, who had his own particular destiny in the history of world cinema. This man taught the art of montage. To the young directors, the young cameramen, even to Vertov. And all this, you see, happened in the next room, a few feet away from where, perhaps, Eisenstein was working. It was an atmosphere of communal exploration. What did Kuleshov do? He didn’t give practical demonstrations, but he talked about the “Kuleshov effect.” That is, if you film an actor’s face and surround it with shots of the most disparate content, according to whatever is put around it, the actor’s face will be read differently every time. As if a completely extraneous word from one sentence were put in another sentence. Montage, the issue of who had first invented the new montage was the cause of the fight between Eisenstein and Vertov. Eisenstein wrote a very elegant article about it. Do you remember Gogol’s Inspector General, when Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky come to announce the inspector’s arrival, all out of breath, each wanting to be the one to give the news and at the same time arguing over which one was the first to say “Eh”? Eisenstein’s article was called “‘Eh!’ On the Purity of Film Language.” The issue, therefore, was who had created the new montage. Eisenstein joked that his name began with an E and therefore the credit should go to him. But he was kidding, of course. It was the right time, the era, to speak that “Eh!” It’s time that crowns the kings. Eisenstein said that he had been invented by the revolution. Yes, the revolution created him, invented him, and then it crushed him. I saw the Battleship Potemkin dossier with my own eyes. There’s a short script, the original one, unfinished, and there’s also a half-sheet with the fine the director had to pay for having spent more than the allocated budget. And he overspent only by a small amount. Everyone marveled at the success, the glory of that film. When they showed Chapayev to the director of a movie theater, he said, “Sure, that would play all right for a few clubs.” It’s hard to foresee, to see success. With some films they throw events, they spend a ton of money, and nothing comes out of it . . . But I was talking about Eisenstein, about the issue of montage. Vertov, one could say, would go a little overboard. In his films there’s a multiplicity that’s hard to follow. In film jargon this is called “camera abuse.” Look, in cinema, as in every other art, to create the effect of sound there has to be silence first. To create the effect of surprise everything beforehand has to be taken for granted. You have to create a temple before you can destroy it. Like the Gospel says, “I can build and then destroy.” Build the world and then destroy it—shamans can do that too, but to comprehend and give meaning to the destiny of creation and destruction, only the artist can do that. Take Tolstoy: he starts off with a description of a serene, carefree woman, Anna Karenina, and a carefree young officer who’s satisfied with himself, and then he brings everything down, he destroys what he has built, and in this destruction he brings out and exposes the mechanisms of humanity.
You’ve had a long and prolific career as a screenwriter. Somewhere I also saw that you wrote a manual on How to Write Scripts. Would you like to say something about this work, the conclusions you’ve drawn from it?
We didn’t have this skill, the profession of screenwriting. Because visual representation is without time. You can show ten, a hundred frames per minute, and the result is comprehensible, the eye and the brain can follow. But in music and speech there’s the time-element. Music and speech—they have to finish coming out, finish being heard. So, therefore, we had to build a system of relationships between image and text, ex novo. Eisenstein worked with Prokofiev, they worked side by side, Prokofiev and Sergei Mikhailovich wrote music together, but I think that the true language of cinema still hasn’t been invented. I mean, not as a living language, like that of the ancient orators or that of all true literature. Sometimes we have an explanatory language, but that’s not what it takes. We have good directors, good cameramen, but not good screenwriters. And I myself wasn’t a good screenwriter. With Kuleshov and his collective, I remember, I wrote the script for a film called By the Law, adapted from a Jack London story. The shift from the literary work to the film was interesting. The story is about a group of gold prospectors. They’re about to set off, one of them is missing. When he shows up he shoots at the others. A woman and man are still alive, the woman disarms the assailant. The three get stuck in the cabin because of a snowstorm, the man and woman want to kill the assassin, but they think he should be tried first. And since they’re cut off from the world they try him themselves and then they hang him. We made a good film out of it, but what did we have to do? From the start there were technical problems, we had an extremely reduced budget, so the snowstorm was substituted with the Moskva, which, since it was spring, was thawing. Moreover, we didn’t want to content ourselves with the text of the story. I began to think: why did that man shoot them? So we presented him as a laborer hired by the prospectors. He’d found the gold, and the bosses wanted to take it for themselves. In short, it was attempted robbery. There wasn’t much text in the film. I wanted the man to escape, tear off the rope. How to show, then, that he realizes he’s still alive? Here’s what I did: the man is on the ground, passed out, and suddenly he opens his eyes and sees these ants on the ground next to him. Since ants aren’t associated with either death or eternal life, the man realizes he’s alive. The film was a success, people liked it. It was an ongoing experiment with a cinema built on a minimal number of characters, hardly any exteriors. We filmed with enormous limitations. Things went very well with Kuleshov because his cinema was based on psychological action. So I wrote the script for the Third Bourgeois. Abram Room directed it. The film had an odd destiny. I had originally titled it Triple Love. In Germany they called it Basements of Moscow. Just think, not too long ago I was in East Germany and I saw that film was still being shown. Put on by a women’s organization. In France, apparently, it elicited a reply in René Clair’s Under the Roofs of Paris. In that film there was the story of a three-way relationship, a new formulation of the problem of the love triangle. There’s a working-class family, a husband and wife. An old friend of the husband’s comes over because he can’t find a place to stay. When the husband goes out of town—you can fill in the rest. Then the husband comes back, the wife is with the other guy, but the husband doesn’t know where to go; he builds houses, but he has nowhere to live. The woman ends up leaving both men. Even though she’s pregnant and doesn’t know by whom.
I haven’t seen that film, Viktor Borisovich, but I can see why it would have been screened at a women’s organization. It was a prophetic film, ahead of its time on certain topics, certain ideas . . .
As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that film anticipated many of the films made later in Europe, films based not on major events, but on everyday private life. When it came out here it raised lots of controversy and I was criticized quite harshly.
And the film that’s remained closest to your heart?
I wrote the script for Minin and Pozharsky. A sensational fiasco. The film was directed by Pudovkin. Of course, if a film doesn’t do well, the writer always blames the director . . . Anyway, I loved that script. I knew the characters well, I had studied the source materials exhaustively. I loved the character of Pozharsky. He was a wonderful scribe. And a good historian. He loved music, he would invite skomorokhs over. A Dutchman who knew him—I found this tidbit somewhere—wrote that if Russia had been an educated country like Finland or Holland, that man would have had a retinue of musicians singing his praises. He died in virtual oblivion. But he was a true historian. I wanted to make him into a kind of “Idiot” like Prince Myshkin. The director told me: Your Minin and Pozharsky are like members of the government, of the Politburo. You don’t know what to make of them. They can’t be offended or refuted. Anyway, I liked that idea, but nothing came of it.
And what relationship do you have with the cinema now?
Now I don’t write scripts anymore, but I must say that I know them. I’ll tell you a story. There was a screenwriting contest. I was on the jury (the judges were paid). I read them fast, very fast; one screenwriter saw me speeding through his work and he complained to the minister, who called me in. I tell the screenwriter: “Open the script to page X, and start to read, you’ll see that there’s a dog or a cat.” He tells me there isn’t. I say, “Go on, it’s there.” Astonished, he says: “How did you remember that?” Because, I told him, at that point in the action you all write the same thing. Ah, yes, it’s hard to write a good script, and even I, as I’ve already said, don’t consider myself a good screenwriter.
Who do you like out of the contemporary directors?
I like Fellini. I like Pasolini, especially that wonderful film where he was able to depict the Gospel with so much freedom of vision. I’ve also seen other films of his, but they didn’t leave as much of an impression.
And among the Soviet directors of today? In Italy right now people are talking a lot about Tarkovsky.
I saw his Rublev. I didn’t like it. I’ll explain why. I know Russian history pretty well. And a little about Rublev too. You see, for Rublev to emerge, Rublev’s art, there had to be a certain climate, culture. And in fact, Rublev had some friends, he was well known and respected, he was probably paid well. In subsequent eras, a good painter of icons occupied the seat of honor at the tsar’s table. And that story about them poking artisans’ eyes out so that they could never build a more beautiful monument . . . That’s a universal legend, an extremely widespread legend about the construction of churches. Also, it seems to me that Tarkovsky doesn’t know ancient Russian art so well. The Russian churches from that period didn’t have smooth walls, they didn’t use plumb lines yet. And it’s precisely the roughness of the walls that gives them their characteristic sense of mass, of massive solidity. But Tarkovsky’s churches all have smooth walls, as if they were marble, they look like the walls of the Moscow metro. No, that’s not what they were like. And that matters a great deal. I’m talking about the sense, the flavor of an epoch. And then the abundance of horrors . . . You see, at that time in Russia, quartering was not practiced. But that’s not all. The Russia of that time, Russia before the Tatar invasion, was a relatively cultured country. The constructions we still have from that time don’t at all seem the work of primitives. And Rublev—he was a great school unto himself, with his own vision of the world, with his own systems, his own perspective, a uniquely precise ability to distill and reveal his principal figures. Yes, of course, the problem of the freedom of the artist . . . Rublev was a man surrounded by glory. Even if an artist, I think, always has a hard life. Almost always. Especially when he’s good.
From 1926–30 you wrote the scripts for nineteen films. Subsequently, as of now, you’ve written only seven others, with huge intervals between. What was your reason for virtually giving up all work in the cinema?
Because by then, in film, I had done too much.
You got sick of it?
No, we got thrown out of that too. I was associated with Eisenstein. As I told you, in the early days of cinema I had gone into it reluctantly, but then it grew on me, I became passionate about it. Some students came out, there was a little cove of formalists. You know, it’s like when you add a pinch of yeast. And some positions, by then, had been taken over. Ah, I’ve got some strange stories about the cinema. One time, a director, Mikhail Kalatozov, shot a film from a script written by Tretyakov. It was called Salt for Svanetia. The film didn’t pass the censors, they told the director not to come back. He asked me for help. I went to the office that handled those things and proposed reediting the film. They replied that there were no more funds available. “Twenty-five rubles, would that be possible, at least?” I asked. They acceded. I watched the film and re-edited it. You know what the editing consisted of? I simply took out five hundred meters of film, and with the director’s consent, added another five hundred that were completely neutral. That is, I added some extra frames so that the viewer wouldn’t have trouble following the pace. When they saw it again, the film passed, and it was shown to great success. But I hadn’t changed anything, I’d just taken out five hundred meters of film.
First the “problems,” as you call them, with literature, and then with cinema. Allow me to ask a slightly personal question: what did you live on after you left cinema?
I had put aside some money from my film work. I also wrote articles—you can see my bibliography for yourself, I don’t remember, what did I write after the cinema? Articles, reader’s reports, lots of them . . . And anyway, you know, there’s another peculiar job—writing things for someone else. I have created a few writers that way. One time, for example, I wrote for a very important writer. Here, this is called “revising” a text. I was asked to “revise” this person. He sent me a stack of papers. I read them, then I sat down and wrote the book. It was translated into fourteen languages . . . Of course, life isn’t easy . . .
Yes, I’ve seen your bibliography, you’ve really written about all kinds of things: prose, poetry, film, painting, scripts, cars. And you’ve written novels, literary theory, scripts, essays. You’ve also written other people’s books. Is there anything, Viktor Borisovich, which you haven’t done in your life?
Yes, there’s one thing, actually two things, that I’ve never written: poetry and denunciations.