I think the gap between the rich and the poor is a dangerous phenomenon in Russia and it needs the attention of the state. The only reasonable way to correct the situation today is not to go after big businesses, but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and from corruption. It means investing the revenues from the national natural resources into the national infrastructure, education and health care. And we must learn to do so without shameful theft and embezzlement.

I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Work is what horses die of

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.