p 15th December, 1938.

p Dear Alexei Fyodorovich,

p Something has happened to you that very often happens even to experienced writers. Your material has been too much for you and you’ve lost your bearings. I can only give you one piece of advice: put off for a time your thoughts of writing a novel and use the material you have been studying to write an essay, a historical study. Then we shall see. In every creative work, including the historical novel, we value, first and foremost, the fantasy of the author who recreates the living picture of an epoch and makes it meaningful from scraps of documents which have been handed down to us.

p In this lies the radical difference between the artist and the researcher. The scholar need? a chain of consecutive facts in order to tell us about what actually happened.

p The artist has the courage, or the cheek—on the strength even of insignificant fragments—to write boldly and confidently about an era out of his Qwn imagination and his own intuition. He can sometimes be wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Only he never makes a mistake who does nothing, although this, indeed, is his fundamental mistake.

p You ask: may you "cook up" a biography for a historical character? You must. But you must make it probable, you must do it so that even if it (the fiction) is not actually true, it could have been so nevertheless.

p Second: is it possible to transpose a date? There are dates conditioned by the logic of historical events, by the logic of history’s dialectics. These dates are the nodes of history, as it were. But there are also dates which are fortuitous and have no significance in the development of historical events. You may treat these just as it suits you as an artist.

p Third: historical characters should think and speak as prompted by their times and the events of those times. If Stepan Razin starts talking about the primary accumulation of capital, the reader will throw the book into the waste-paper basket, and with reason. But the author himself must know of primary accumulation and bear in mind, and he must regard this or that set of historical events from that point of view.

p The strength of Marxist thinking is that it reveals to us the truth of history and interprets historical events.

p Fourth: historical design. This is the kingpin of the work. Documents often change the setting, veer off in another direction, and so forth. But, of course, the original design—unless it is radically misconceived—cannot be subjected to radical alteration.

p Fifth: get a copy of Professor Novombergsky’s Word and Deed. Finally: at the beginning of your letter, you write that you want to create a novel for the average collective farmer. Your design is wrong of itself. The artist must always aim for the heights. Whether he can make them or not is another matter. But to make it your 214 design beforehand to write an average work for the average reader means to condemn yourself to artistic failure in the design itself.

p Send me your published stories.

p Yours, Alexei Tolstoy,

Flat 69, No. 122, Gorky Street, Moscow.