Neal Stephenson: evaluation

Transcript context

…To get into the headspace or the feel of writing about the Soviet Union of that time, are there specific things you do? You put on Prokofiev, or you open Doctor Zhivago, or what? How does that work for you? Or you just do it? I like to find first-person accounts. I like to look at pictures to the iconography of the Soviet Union. There are various people who went there in the ’20s and ’30s and wrote memoirs, Americans who wrote memoirs describing their experiences there. And because they were written at the time before people knew about Stalinism and the excesses of Stalinism, it’s written without a full premonition of how bad things were going to get. In particular, there’s an account of an American engineer who went and worked at this huge steel mill at Magnitogorsk in the ’30s and helped them build that. He’s got a memoir telling about just his day-to-day experiences of working with these people, the good and the bad mixed together. Is there much in Soviet fiction that you admire?…

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