Alexey Slapovsky, winner of the All-Russian Playwright Competition, four-time Booker Prize finalist, talks to Psychologies.
1. What are you reading now?
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (AST, 2011). For some reason I didn’t read it before. I enjoy and envy myself. I sympathize with followers and imitators: Mann, with German punctuality, cleared out the creative field in which he worked, so that not a single spikelet was left.
2. An author to whom you keep coming back?
To Dostoevsky — mentally or re-reading. All his characters are suffering, toiling, looking for something, I feel myself among them in my company, I am not alone with them.
3. The book that you re-read in difficult times?
I usually have difficult not minutes, but days. I don’t read anything, I don’t watch anything, I don’t know how to have fun, only work saves me. Such is obtained labor self-psychotherapy. I sublimate my problems into texts. Not always successful: too personal always interferes with quality. But it eases. This is generally one of the main incentives for writing — to feel better.
4. A character that you are especially close to?
There are many of them, and the spread is wide — from Andrei Bolkonsky to Venichka. From noble (why?) pride, ambition, the search for fame, and then wisdom — to a lumpen-intelligent glass and a conversation with drunken angels. We could chat for weeks. Now there are two or three days a year. Wrong angels went.
5. The book that inspired you to write?
«The Adventures of a Prehistoric Boy» by D’Hervilli (Eksmo, 2009). At six or seven years old. When I finished reading, I thought: “How does the author know about the boy, he is prehistoric? So, did you compose? How great it is to invent entire worlds and make readers believe! I want that too.» In Soviet times, this was called «early career guidance.»
6. What are your criteria for a good novel?
The feeling that this is not written, but has always been. And there is no other way. And I can’t stand boasting of style: when words interfere with reading themselves. Or, conversely, clumsiness. I am very squeamish about badly written texts — as if I entered an elevator where a company of homeless people had recently passed. To physiological disgust.
7. Which writer, living or dead, would you like to talk to in person?
I already communicate through books. Living writers are always just a part of themselves. Often not the best part.