A few of those have had to be skipped because, by a kind of awful alchemy, and not merely by a good shake, my authentic response got so hopelessly mixed with the artificial color of human interest, added by the manufacturer, as to defy separation. In other cases I have had no trouble in leaving out the wellmeant little touches (as well as the gaudiest journalistic inventions), thus gradually eliminating every element of spontaneity, all semblance of actual talk. The thing is transmuted finally into a more or less neatly paragraphed essay, and that is the ideal form a written interview should take.

My fiction allows me so seldom the occasion to air my private views that I rather welcome, now and then, the questions put to me in sudden spates by charming, courteous, intelligent visitors. In this volume, the questionandanswer section is followed by a few Letters to Editors, which are «selfexplanatory», as lawyers put it in their precise way. Finally, there is a batch of essays, all but one of which were written in America or Switzerland.

Swinburne has a shrewd comment on «the rancorous and reptile crew of poeticules who decompose into criticasters». This curious phenomenon was typical of the situation in the small literary world of the Russian emigration in Paris around 1930 when the aesthetics of Bunin, Hodasevich and one or two other outstanding authors underwent particularly nasty attacks from variously «committed» criticulcs. In those years I methodically derided the detracters of art and enjoyed tremendously the exasperation my writings caused in that clique; but translating today my numerous old essays from my difficult Russian into pedantic English and explaining nice points of former dislocation and strategy is a task of little interest either to me or the reader. The only exception I have allowed myself is the piece on Hodasevich.

In result, the present body of my occasional English prose, shorn of its long Russian shadow, seems to reflect an altogether more agreeable person than the «V. Sirin», evoked with mixed feelings by emigre memoirists, politicians, poets, and mystics, who still remember our skirmishes of the nineteenthirties in Paris. A milder, easier temper permeates today the expression of my opinions, however strong; and this is as it should be.