Letter to Tsion, December 16, 1932

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Answers to Personal Questions

Dear Sir:

The questions you pose, I must admit, surprise me somewhat: Are they really sufficiently appropriate for defining a person?

“What is your favorite occupation, besides hunting and fishing?” Hunting and fishing, for me, are not occupations but relaxation. My “favorite occupation” is mental activity: reading, thinking, and perhaps, writing.

My “favorite” Soviet writer? The events of the past twenty years have greatly narrowed down the amount of attention I could give to imaginative literature. I did have “favorite” writers twenty-five or thirty years ago. Now the person I read with perhaps the greatest interest is Babel.

Of foreign writers it is even harder to speak. I do not know the contemporary writers well enough, and my comments would be totally accidental in nature.

Your question about philosophers is also difficult. I look at philosophy (to the extent that I am familiar with it) in the way it develops. And I would be very hard put to specify by name a philosopher who in my view stood “higher than the others.”

The same is true, in a certain sense, of historical figures as well. I can say that Friedrich Engels, as a human figure, impresses me in the highest degree. Of course, the historical role of Marx was much greater.

What time of my life do I consider my happiest? I simply do not know how to respond to this question. In all periods of my life there has been a mixture of good and bad. To draw the “balance sheet” on particular periods is something I have no right to do, nor have I ever regarded my life in that way.

That is all I can say. I wish you every success.