I have also received some information about Akhmatova, but with the strictest order to not tell anyone for the time being. Unlike the author of the letter about Mandelshtam, A.A. is mortally afraid of any communications with émigrés and foreigners...

I have read the article in “Literaturnaia Gazeta.” I am surprised that it can actually produce an impression on anyone here, since it contains a ludicrous phrase suggesting that our publishing house “pursues the goal” of printing works “that due to reasons of ideological and artistic immaturity” (highlighted by me - G...

Many thanks for your proposal to publish the novella by L. Chukovskaia under the brand of our publishing house. I haven't received the second half of the novella yet since I don't yet have the 84th volume of Novyi Zhurnal. As soon as I receive it (this will be any day now)...

About Chukovskaia: my publishing budget is not impersonal but distributed between individual authors and books. I, alas, cannot, for example, replace one book with another, and even publish a book by scrimping on printing costs for other books. Chukovskaia's novella would...

I am not a fan of Akhmatova’s Requiem: I think, with the exception of a few lines, it is forced, and more importantly, too declamatory: you don’t really believe it. For me, Akhmatova exists mainly thanks to her “New Year’s Ballad,” “Northern Elegy” and “Poem Without a Hero...

About Bulgakov’s works: there is no play “Ivan Vasil’evich” in his 1962 collection published by Iskusstvo. But Bulgakov’s Collected Works in several volumes were being prepared for publication in Moscow. I do not know if it was published – or if it is still being prepared for publication...

Thank you very much for Arzhak’s books! I managed to read only one of the stories – “Hands.” What a horror! But how much sincere humanity in the portrayal of the former Cheka officer. There is the image of the entire offended Russian people in him...