Since I have not written a novel for 16 years, my interest in this discussion, though lively, has been dispassionate; it is this which encourages me to try to give a detached impression of what has happened. As you know, when a meeting of this kind is a failure, everyone says: ‘at least there were the personal contacts’, meaning the contacts outside the actual sessions. Well, many writers from the West have indeed got to know many writers from the East. But that is not all, and I want to suggest in what ways this first symposium has been a success, despite serious difficulties.

At first, things were complicated by the great diversity of points of view, especially in the West. It is very hard to imagine anyone being able to reply to some of the Russians in the name of all Western novelists. Each participant here spoke only for a specific group. In the second place, some of our Soviet friends expressed themselves in a manner which amounted to a refusal to discuss at all. But such extreme positions were rare, and compensated for by many others. In this respect our friends from the peoples’ democracies took up positions which helped us all to understand better each other’s point of view, and to see how the same principles govern the changes and developments in our ideas, whatever our standpoint.

Above all, we were able, if not to agree, at least to isolate a certain number of problems which should now be subjected to serious discussion. Do not misunderstand me: all the individual contributions have been of interest; but a discussion is really serious only when someone whose doctrine has been under fire is able to reply immediately, which is impossible in a meeting such as this. I think therefore that the problems which I am going to raise should be dealt with in another way, in a smaller committee.