The October Revolution could not but influence my work since it took away my 'biography', my sense of individual significance. I am grateful to it, however, for once and for all putting an end to my spiritual security and to a cultural life supported by unearned cultural income…. I feel indebted to the Revolution, but I offer it gifts for which it still has no need.

The question about what a writer should be is completely incomprehensible to me: to answer it would be tantamount to inventing a writer, that is, to writing his works for him.

What is more, I am deeply convinced that, in spite of all the limitations and dependence of the writer on social forces, modern science does not possess any means of causing this or that desirable writer to come into existence. Rudimentary eugenics alerts us to the fact that any kind of cultural interbreedin or grafting may produce the most unexpected results. The State procurement of readers is a more likely possibility: for this there exists a direct means: school.

Osip Mandelstam, responding to the questionnaire: 'The Soviet Writer and October'