The star of Chinese literature Mo Yan, who gathered a queue of a thousand readers in St. Petersburg on Liteiny Avenue, performed at St. Petersburg State University — and also drew a full house. Together with the director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, they outlined the recipe for the perfect journey, discussed Russian classics, and the difficulties of translation in case of communication with the ancients. The meeting in the assembly hall of the Twelve Collegia building was initiated by its host — the first deputy dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Professor Alexey Rodionov — who began with questions not to the speakers, but to the audience. By raising their hands, they found out that there were those in the hall who were learning Chinese, many had been to this country, and everyone had visited the Hermitage. The question of how many of those present had read the guest's books and in what quantities was diplomatically not asked. However, the tone of the conversation was generally not exam-like, but very friendly and half-joking: the Nobel laureate, despite his stern appearance, turned out to be a person with a sense of humor and great self-irony, insightfulness, and that degree of naivety that allows a solid person to be surprised by the new and to engage others with his observations. ### "You Need to Get Lost While Traveling" The first question concerned memories of early travels. "I left my hometown for the first time at 18 years old," Mo Yan recounted. "It was a trip to Qingdao. Although Qingdao is located literally just over 100 kilometers from my village, it was still a very distant trip. To get from my hometown Gaomi to Qingdao, the train made 24 stops. And today it takes 20 minutes from Gaomi to Qingdao. I stayed with my uncle, then went to the seaside for a walk, to the beach. And you know, at some point, I got lost. And I got lost in some warehouse where there was lumber. My uncle organized a search, many people looked for me and found me in that lumber warehouse, where I was lying among the logs and sleeping — I was just tired." When he later returned to his native county, young Mo Yan answered his parents' questions about the landscapes he saw on his trips by saying that there was just one tree around. "Of course, I have been to many different places since then, but this first trip left an indelible impression," the writer concluded. "And, of course, from my story, it is already clear how enormous changes have occurred in China over the past 40 years." Mikhail Piotrovsky, in turn, regularly traveled between Leningrad and Yerevan from the age of one and a half, where the family went for summer expeditions, and he is grateful to life in general for the many travels it has afforded him, as "traveling is great happiness and pleasure." "There is one very important thing: in the best travels, based on experience, you must get lost, " Piotrovsky shared. "You need to get lost, and then you will really get to know the place you have arrived at. That’s what I always do when I travel, and relatively recently, already at my age, I found myself in Cairo again, my favorite city where I studied. I purposely got lost. And I got very lost — more than usual, but I eventually found my way out. And it’s a wonderful thing: by getting lost, you learn everything. We learn a language in the same way: we know three words, and then [we immerse ourselves further]." ### "There Were Fewer Sheep Than I Expected" Mo Yan was asked about his trips to Russia. The writer recalled that he first visited our country in 1995, and it was just a two-day border trip "through the Manchuria station," apparently to Krasnokamensk. In Mo Yan's imagination, Russia was supposed to have huge herds. "But there were far fewer sheep than I expected," the writer suddenly noted, linking this to the norms: in China, there are conditionally 100 sheep per hectare, while in Russia — 10. "That’s why our sheep are thin, while Russian ones are quite fat," he concluded. However, he also remembers the empty shelves in stores. "Although on the other hand, I was amazed at how richly represented ladles were in the stores, for example, axes, some scoops, and other metal items." Mo Yan's second visit was in 2007 with a delegation from the Chinese Writers' Union to the Moscow Book Salon, but he did not make it to St. Petersburg: urgent matters awaited him in Hong Kong. However, he did visit Yasnaya Polyana at that time. I thought that such a great writer as Leo Tolstoy would have a large writing desk, a big chair, a big bed. But I found that his desk was very small, and so was the chair, and the bed was quite small. And I concluded from this that great works are written at a small desk. The Nobel laureate jokes that this observation coincides with his own writing experience: "I usually write at a small desk. But once I set up a large table in my apartment, one meter wide and two meters long, and I found that after that my works became shorter and shorter." "A very beautiful table: made of mahogany, with inlay," the writer said. "It’s pleasant to sit at, nice to stroke, nice to smell, but somehow it doesn’t inspire writing." ### Plans: A Play About Chekhov's Journey with a Chinese Official Mo Yan's third trip to Russia took place in 2025 — about which he and his friend, Chinese calligrapher Wang Zheng, recounted in their blog. They traveled to Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Olkhon Island, visited Vladivostok and Sakhalin. "Why did we embark on this journey? You know, mainly because of Chekhov, because of his 'Sakhalin Island,' because I read it in my time and was impressed," Mo Yan recalls. "For me, it is such a magical work. I promised that someday, if the opportunity arises, I must repeat Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin." Perhaps one of the next works by the Chinese writer will be dedicated to Chekhov and this trip. When Chekhov traveled by ship along the Amur River, he shared a cabin with a Chinese official from the Qing Empire. They smoked, drank, and communicated together. And this story is so interesting to me that I have repeatedly told my friends that I would like to write a play about this journey of Chekhov with the Chinese official. During this trip to St. Petersburg, Mo Yan visited the Dostoevsky Museum-Apartment (here Mikhail Piotrovsky asked him how he liked the writer's desk, to which Mo Yan noted that the classic's desk "is not even half" the size of his). And of course, he visited the Alexandrinsky Theater (where the premiere of the play based on his work took place on the new stage). "I sat in that chair from which Dostoevsky loved to watch performances — it’s small, but it was very comfortable to sit in it," Mo Yan continued to develop his theory. "And then the deputy artistic director of the Alexandrinsky Theater took me to the royal box, and I sat in the royal chair there. You know, although the chair is large, it’s somehow uncomfortable to sit in it." Mikhail Piotrovsky, in turn, mentioned that he had been to Shanghai, where there is "one of the best museums in the world," and a river along one bank of which are European buildings from the 19th to early 20th centuries, while the other bank features modern 20th–21st-century buildings. "I always want to see China, but they show me such places where a center of the Hermitage could be made," the museum director smiled. He also recalled the Gugong — a museum in Beijing, an exhibition from which will open at the Hermitage this month: they were friends with the previous director, as both are Arabists. ### "If You Read Li Bai's Poems to Him, He Won't Understand" Both speakers answered the question of whom they would like to meet from the past if they had the opportunity to travel through time. The host reminded that Mikhail Piotrovsky had named the Prophet Muhammad in one of his interviews. This time, the head of the Hermitage admitted that it was, of course, bold of him, but in his case, it has a special story. "First of all, he is indeed the greatest figure, and secondly, I have written quite a few articles about him," he recalled. "Moreover, I shamelessly thought, and still think, that I could communicate with him in the Arabic that I speak. There are many Arabic languages. And if I’m honest, there is one person from the past with whom I communicate all the time: that’s my father. I sit in his chair, in which he sat for 20 years, and I constantly correlate my actions — that’s how I communicate with him." Mo Yan also touched on the topic of translation in his response. I was once asked, and I answered that I would like to meet the great poet of the Tang dynasty Li Bai. I thought I would recite his poems from memory to him. But then specialists told me that if I read in modern language, he wouldn’t understand. Because the language of the Tang dynasty is very different from the modern one. "But if people from the city of Chaozhou in Guangdong province start reading Li Bai's poems in their dialect, he might understand them," Mo Yan continued. "Because in the Chaozhou dialect, many norms came from the Central Chinese Plain during the Tang dynasty and have been preserved. I then said, 'Well, okay, then I’ll just drink wine with him — in this we can probably understand each other' (when Li Bai drank wine, it inspired him to write new poems). But I was told, 'You know, you drink different alcohol; he essentially drank rice brew, while you now drink strong alcohol.'" ### "It Doesn't Matter Whether It's Good or Bad, Just Keep Writing" Mo Yan was also asked whether he rereads his novels and whether he would like to correct anything in them, to which the writer concluded that there is no need to correct anything because each work reflects its time and even the state of health and mood of the author. When asked which work came easiest to him, the writer replied that it was the one that was staged in St. Petersburg — "Tired of Being Born and Dying." He had been nurturing this novel for many years, and when he finally got to it, things went quickly: "This novel has about 430,000 characters, I wrote it in about 43 days, that is, 10,000 characters each day." And the most difficult for him was the novel "Big Breasts, Wide Buttocks," his longest work (about 500,000 characters). "The novel was difficult for me from a technical point of view: the narrative perspective changes constantly," the writer shared. "And I remember calling my good colleague, writer Yu Hua, for advice. And he told me, 'It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, the main thing is to keep writing.' I listened to Yu Hua and continued writing. And when I finished, I reread it, and I saw that it turned out well. In fact, it often happens to authors that you write and have doubts, but then it suddenly turns out that everything is fine." ### "You Turn Off the Computer — and It’s as if You Haven't Worked" Mo Yan was also asked how he works: whether he writes by hand (and if so, on what paper) or types, or dictates. "I initially wrote by hand, and when they started promoting the transition to computers somewhere around 1996, I also joined the modern trend, but after a few years, I felt that writing with a brush and pen is better," the author shared. "When you write on paper, a stack of sheets gradually grows next to you, you feel that you are writing something. But with a computer: you press a button, it turns off, and it’s as if you haven’t done anything at all. Therefore, I later returned to writing with a pen." Mo Yan uses large sheets of graph paper: two sheets equal 1,000 characters. "If I produce 20 pages in a day, then I am quite satisfied," he continues. "Now I write on special paper, which has an imprint with my name — luxurious, pleasant paper, but for some reason, it doesn’t write well. So it’s no longer as easy as it used to be to produce some text." Some writers in China, according to him, dictate texts and then refine them or even run them through a voice recognition software. But in Mo Yan's view, all these "devilish methods" are not as good as writing by hand. "Again, manuscripts will remain for museums," he smiled at the director of the Hermitage. Mikhail Piotrovsky, who recently also published a book — "I Am an Arabist," although he is friends with the latest technologies, as he has admitted several times in interviews, agreed. Mo Yan (born February 17, 1955, Shandong, PRC) is a contemporary Chinese writer, an honorary doctor of philology at the Open University of Hong Kong. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 for "his hallucinatory realism, which merges folk tales with history and modernity." Outside of China, he is best known as the author of the novella that was adapted into the film "Red Sorghum."