To his last threshold
he was driven
fast
By his Altai soul
and his kind heart…

Give me, please, an answer,
Stop
your praising cry,
did you read his writings
only
when he died?!

Both of them were enthusiastic and faithful people, Robert Ivanovich genuinely believed that what the Communist Party was doing was righteous. He believed in these concepts, like ‘conscience’, ‘friendship’, and ‘ideals’. Rozhdestvensky had a very wide social circle which included war veterans, cosmonauts, scientists, doctors, and athletes. He was eager to know everything from the primary source, as he could write only about his own experiences. <…> Shukshin was very similar. Dip your pen in the truth — he would say. But he believed in other things, as he saw how much evil has been done and is being done in the village. That’s how they were created — Stepan Razin, the Lyubavins, his short stories about modern village life, the drama of those who cut ties with their own roots and move to an urban area. Shukshin believed in communal values, in the righteousness of the people’s concept of pochvennichestvo (support of complete emancipation of serfdom) and in the nature of the Russian person.