During those years, it seemed to me that I was living together with the characters created by Sholokhov. I went to sleep and woke up thinking about them. These were very hard but also very happy years… Mikhail Sholokhov described his characters so vividly that I knew them better than my closest friends, and I had no difficulties whatsoever with depicting them. As for landscapes and domestic scenes, they were not merely described but almost painted in his novel. There was truth in all of it, and all I had to do was not to distort it.