1. Understand everything in context, personal and historical. A woman today wears perfume in order to smell good; 500 years ago she wore it in order not to smell bad; and these two are not the same. A gourmet chef today cooks food in spicy sauce to demonstrate his culinary sophistication and cosmopolitanism; but the sauce was invented to hide the rancour of high meat. So we must read every text through the lens of its era, and not forget that language too is in constant flux.

2. Some years ago I was attending a conference of the Board of Jewish Education in Toronto, Canada, where a good friend who happened to be a Rabbi told a story that summed up my entire attitude to writing and publishing, explained why it took me forty years before I published anything, and still with reservations now that I’ve started. The story of a student who was given an assignment by his professor, on which he worked, fastidiously over many weeks, researching as thoroughly as he could, attending lectures and seminars to obtain background and to hear the arguments pro and con debated; then he wrote, redrafted, asked friends to read and comment, rewrote again, and finally the day came when he had to submit the paper. He waited for the professor’s response, but what came back was simply his own essay, without marking, comment, marginalia, a grade, anything; only a single question at the foot of the final page: “Is this the best you can do?” The student was mortified. After all this endeavour, so brusque and unequivocal a rejection. Undaunted, he returned to the task, went over his research again, rechecked his findings, re-examined the arguments on every side, found new material, restructured his presentation of the whole; and submitted it again. And again the professor’s response: no grade, no marginalia, just the terse and succinct disparagement: “Is this the best you can do?” He rewrote it a third time, had friends read it and reassure him there was nothing left to add or modify…but this time he did not submit it in the usual envelope; he took it by hand, and knocked on the professor’s door. “You cannot imagine how much work I have put into this,” he explained, and the tension in his voice was evident, the cracks through which a sound like tears was echoing. “How many hours, how much revision. And all you can do is throw it back at me with ‘Is this the best you can do?’” “I didn’t throw it back at you,” replied the professor. “I asked a simple question, and I am still waiting for you to answer it.” The student looked perplexed. “What question?” “Is this the best you can do?”. The student stood, bemused, bothered and bewildered. “Yes,” he said, “this is the best I can do. Believe me, it’s the very best.” The professor smiled. “In that case,” he said, “I shall be pleased at last to have the opportunity to read it.”

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the human mind, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t ntaetr in what oerdr eht ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt thing is that the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the human mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig, huh! Yaeh, and I awlyas tghuhot slpelnig was ipmornatt! And if you raelly can’t raed this, you may be dyslexic.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Soviet poet and novelist, born July 18, 1932 in Zima, Russia - part of the Literary Genealogy section of my novel "Going To The Wall".

   His novel “Wild Berries” (Yagodnyye Mesta, 1981) starts so badly you wonder if he wasn’t deliberately trying to put off the average reader, or simply misleading the lazy censor. Crassly sententious pastoral with love interest, poorly written in formulaic clichés…but keep going long enough and politics takes over, all manner of dialogue and narrative for which a man could be sent to Siberia. And then, all on one page, three very particular moments of redemption:-

1.   “I stood in line all night at the Writers’ Bookstore to buy the one-volume Mandelstam, but didn’t get it. I found it on Nevsky for fifty, from book scalpers.”

   As did I, Yevgeny; as did I.

2.   “Which contemporary poet do you like? Krivtsov?”

   “Pushkin.”

   “No, you didn’t understand me. I’m asking about contemporary poets.”

   “He is the most contemporary.”

   “No, I mean contemporary in the sense of being alive.”

   “He is the most alive.”

   A dialogue I have conducted many times over the years, though I usually choose Aeschylus

3.   “What about Yevtushenko?”

   “His stuff is passé.”

   Nice touch! Nice touch!

   And then another fragment catches my attention:

   “You typed the whole novel ‘The Master and Margarita’! Seryozha exclaimed. “How much time did it take?”

   “Much less than it took Bulgakov to write it,” Kostya joked. “What else could I do? I couldn’t get the book. I don’t have pull. And a book like that should always be around. So I typed it. By the way, it’s very beneficial. You really come to sense the author’s style, the course of his thoughts; you feel every word. I managed to get Mayakovsky and Yesenin. But I had to re-type Pasternak’s one-volume collection. And then I understood with my own fingers that his early poems are denser, more complex; the later ones are more transparent, but diluted. He gained something, but he lost something too.”

   And concealed within this commentary on how to read properly, the continuing act of keeping banned and murdered writers alive and read, by the simple act of mentioning them, which nobody but Yevtushenko could have dared to do and got away with – an act of literary heroism which few western readers now will even recognise.