appear blurred and sketchy if I did not describe how, together with all
the Soviet people, they had borne the dreadful ordeals of the war and
won it.
I had known from books, reports and personal impressions what
peacetime life was like among those people, who had worked to turn the
Northern Country into a smiling hospitable land, who had tapped the
incalculable resources that lay within the Arctic Circle, who had built
towns, docks, mines and factories there. Now, during the war, I saw all
this prodigious energy dedicated to the defence of this land and of these
gains. I might be told that the same thing happened in every corner of
our land. Of course it did, but the severe conditions of the North gave to
it a special, expressive touch.
I don't think I have been able to answer all the questions of my
correspondents. Who served as the prototype of Nikolai Antonich?
Where did I get Nina Kapitonovna? What truth is there in the story of
Sanya's and Katya's love?
To answer these questions I would have to ascertain, if only
approximately, to what extent one or another figure was an actor in real
life. As regards Nikolai Antonich, for instance, no such effort on my part
would be needed. I have changed only a few outward features in my
portrait of the real headmaster of the Moscow school which I finished in
1919. The same applies to Nina Kapitonovna, who could but recently be
met in Sivtsev Vrazhek, wearing the same green jacket and carrying the
same shopping bag. As for the love of Sanya and Katya, I had had only
the youthful period of this story told to me. Exercising the prerogative of
the novelist, I drew from this story my own conclusions, which seemed
to me only natural for the hero of my book.
One schoolboy, by the way, wrote telling me that exactly the same
thing had happened to him-he had fallen in love with a girl and kissed
her in the school grounds. 'So that now that your book Two Captains is
finished, you can write about me,' the boy suggested.
Here is another incident which, indirectly, answers the question as to
what truth there is in the love of Sanya and Katya. One day I received a
letter from Ordzhonikidze (Northern Caucasus) from a lady named
Irina N. who wrote, 'After reading your novel I feel certain that you are
the man I have been looking for these last eighteen years. I am
persuaded of this not only by the details of my life given in the novel,
which could be known to you alone, but also by the places and even the
dates of our meetings in Triumfalnaya Square and outside the Bolshoi
Theatre...' I replied that I had never made any dates with my
correspondent in Triumfalnaya Square or outside the Bolshoi Theatre,
and that I would have to make inquiries of the Arctic pilot who had
served as the prototype for my hero. But the war started and this
strange correspondence broke off.
Irina N.'s letter reminds me of another incident, which equated
literature, as it were, with real life. During the blockade of Leningrad, in
the grim, forever memorable days of late autumn of 1941, the Leningrad
Radio Broadcasting Committee asked me to convey a message to the
8
young Communists of the Baltic in the name of Sanya Grigoriev. I
pointed out that although I had portrayed in Sanya Grigoriev a definite
person, a bomber pilot, who was fighting at the time on the Central
Front, he was nevertheless only a literary character.
'So what of it,' was the answer. 'It makes no difference. Write as if
the name of your literary hero could be found in the telephone book.'
I consented, of course. In the name of Sanya Grigoriev I wrote a
message to the Komsomol boys and girls of Leningrad and the Baltic,
and in response letters addressed to my literary hero came pouring in,
expressing confidence in victory.
I remember myself a boy of nine entering my first library; it was quite
a small one, but seemed very big to me then. Behind a tall barrier, under
paraffin lamp, stood a smooth-haired woman in spectacles wearing a
black dress with a white collar. The barrier was so high-at least to me-
and the lady in black so forbidding that I all but turned tail. In a voice
overloud through shyness I reported that I had already turned nine and
was therefore entitled to become a card holder. The forbidding lady
laughed and bending over the barrier the better to see the new reader
retorted that she had heard of no such rule.
In the end, though, I managed to join the library, and the time flew so
quickly in reading that one day I discovered with surprise that the
barrier was not all that high, nor the lady as forbidding as I had first
thought.
This was the first library in which I felt at home, and ever since then I
have always had this feeling when coming into a house, large or small,
in which there are bookshelves along the walls and people standing by
them thinking only one thing-that these books were there to be read. So
it was in childhood. And so it was in youth, with long hours spent in the
vast Shchedrin public library in Leningrad. Working in the Archives
Department, I penetrated into the very heart of the temple of temples.
Raising my eyes-tired, because reading manuscripts makes them tire
quickly-I watched the noiseless work of the librarians and experienced
again and again a feeling of gratitude. That feeling has remained for a
lifetime. Wherever I go, to whatever place fate brings me, I always ask
first thing, 'Is there a library here?' And when I am told, 'There is,' that
town or township, farm or village, becomes closer, as if irradiating a
warm, unexpected light.
In Schwarz's play 'The Snow Queen', the privy councillor, a dour
individual who deals in ice, asks the storyteller whether there are any
children in the house, and on learning that there are, he shudders,
because at the sound of children's voices the ice of the blackest soul
melts. So does a house in which there are books differ from those in
which there are none.
The best writers can be compared to scouts into the future, to those
brave explorers of new and unknown spaces, of whom Fridtjof Nansen,
the famous Norwegian explorer, wrote: 'Let us follow the narrow tracks
of the sled runners and those little black dots laying a railway, as it were,
into the heart of the unknown. The wind howls and sweeps across these
