In the afternoon I was interviewed for a Ukrainian literary magazine. It was a very long and painful experience. The editor, a sharp-faced alert little man, asked questions that were two paragraphs long. They were translated, and by the time I understood the last part I had forgotten the first part. I answered them as well as I could. This would be translated to the editor, and then the whole thing written down. The questions were highly complicated and highly literary. And when I answered a question, I wasn’t at all sure that the translation was getting over. There were two problems. One was my complete difference of background from the interviewer, and the second was my English, probably quite colloquial, which did not register very clearly with the translator who had been trained in academic English. To make sure that I was not misquoted by accident, I asked to have the translation of the Russian back into English. I was right, the answers I was supposed to have given did not very closely approximate what I had said. This was not done on purpose; it was not even the difficulty of trying to communicate from one language to another. It was more than language. It was translation from one kind of thinking to another. They were very pleasant and honest people, but we just could not communicate closely. And this was my last interview; I never tried it again. And when in Moscow I was asked for an interview, I suggested that the questions be given to me in writing, that I be given a chance to think them over, to answer them in English, and to check on the translation. And since this was not done, I was not interviewed again.

Wherever we went, the questions asked us had a certain likeness, and we gradually discovered that the questions all grew from a single source. The intellectuals of the Ukraine based their questions, both political and literary, on articles they had read in Pravda. And after a while we began to anticipate the questions before they were asked, for we knew the articles on which they were based almost by heart.

There was one literary question which came up on all occasions. We even knew when to expect it, for our questioner’s eyes sharpened, and he leaned forward in his chair and inspected us closely. We knew we were going to be asked how we liked Simonov’s play The Russian Question.

Simonov is probably the most popular writer in the Soviet Union at the present time. Recently he came to America for a while, and on his return to Russia he wrote this play. It is probably the most performed drama of the time. It opened simultaneously in over three hundred theaters in the Soviet Union. Mr. Simonov’s play is about American journalism, and it is necessary to set down a short synopsis of it. It is cast partly in New York, and partly in a place that resembles Long Island. In New York its set is approximately Bleeck’s restaurant, near the Herald Tribune building. And the play is roughly this: