C.S.: Let’s summarize. There are several means of grasping the self. First, through action. Next, through the interior life. As for yourself, you declare: The self is determined by the essence of its existential problem. This view has a number of consequences for your work. For example, your insistence on understanding the essence of situations seems to you to render all descriptive techniques obsolete. You say almost nothing about the physical appearance of your characters. And since the investigation of psychological motives interests you less than the analysis of situations, you are also very parsimonious about your characters’ past.

The Possessed. If you analyze that novel from the purely technical viewpoint, you see that it is made up of three lines evolving simultaneously, each of which, if need be, could make an independent novel: (1) the ironic novel of the love between Madame Stavrogin and Stephan Verkhovensky; (2) the romantic novel about Nikolai Stavrogin and his amorous relationships; (3) the political novel about a revolutionary group. Since all the characters know one another, a subtle storytelling technique easily manages to tie the three lines into an indivisible entity.

M.K: Another important lesson from music. Like it or not, each passage of musical composition conveys an emotional expression. The sequence of movements in a symphony or a sonata has always been determined by the unwritten rule of alternating slow and fast movements. Those emotional contrasts soon become an oppressive stereotype that only the great masters could overcome (and even they not always).

Not even Beethoven in his Sonata Opus 26 avoids the stereotype— he follows a funeral march (the third movement there too) with a cheerful finale. But the fourth movement in the Chopin sonata is altogether strange: pianissimo, fast and short, with no melody, absolutely unsentimental: a distant gust, a muffled sound that heralds the ultimate forgetting. The juxtaposition of these two movements (sentimental-unsentimental) makes you gasp. It is absolutely original. I mention it to show that to compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side— and that, to me, is the writer’s subtlest craft.

C.S.: So there are two archetype-forms in your noels: (1) polyphonic composition that brings heterogenous elements together within an architecture based on the number seven; (2) farcical, homogenous, theatrical composition that verges on the improbable.

M.K.: I dream constantly of some great unexpected infidelity. But so far I have not managed to break out of my bigamy with those two forms.