Photo: Evgenia Anfimova
Anna, you became the author of the 20th anniversary Total Dictation. What will the text be about?
Anna Matveeva: This is an essay dedicated to such a phenomenon and genre as the diary. What it is, how the history of diaries developed in literature, etc. It has a certain connection with my novel Every Hundred Years. The text turned out to be of medium difficulty, so I hope everyone gets good grades. However, even if someone makes a mistake, there is no need to get upset: absolutely literate people do not exist in nature.
The organizers of the dictation, including philologists, annually work with the text, complicating or simplifying it. Is it possible to preserve the author’s style and intonation?
Anna Matveeva: Of course, I wanted it to look like the text was written by me, and not someone else. Fortunately, prose is like fingerprints. I deliberately did not overload the text or simplify it, I wrote as I always write and our excellent philologists, in general, treated it quite delicately. It was an interesting experience, although the idea of hundreds of people writing my text at the same time still makes me a little uneasy. In a good way!
Is it possible to prepare for a dictation?
Anna Matveeva: Now there is an online school of Total Dictation, there are four free classes. They are based on my texts: philologist Vladimir Pakhomov analyzes my stories with energy and joy, explaining, among other things, why I am weak in constructions. It was interesting to read the comments from people who had already seen the lessons and heard the story behind the commas and other grammatical subtleties, felt it and shared their impressions.
Have you ever written it yourself?
Anna Matveeva: Never, but last year she was a dictator in Kamchatka. I hope that this year all my loved ones, family and friends participate in this wonderful event. I will dictate the text on April 20 in the capital of Total Dictation 2024, Tomsk. I was never there, but my mother defended her doctoral thesis many years ago at Tomsk University. When she was a child she thought Tomsk was named after my mother, after all, her name is Tamara, Toma.
Today, technology can not only correct errors in the text, but also write the text itself for the author. Is it even necessary to be literate in the modern world?
Anna Matveeva: It is important to know how to read and write, despite the assistants. A literate person is an educated person, it is the same as an educated person. When they write me ignorant messages or letters, I get angry, to say the least. And now even books come out with errors and typos… I would like people to learn to speak competently one of the most beautiful and complex languages in the world: Russian. Total Dictation works in this direction and also promotes modern Russian literature. The author of the Total Dictation receives public recognition, even those who have never read it know about him. In Moscow alone there will be several hundred places for participants in the dictation.
Have you ever asked a neural network to write a text for you?
Anna Matveeva: For the first time in history, I and 15 other writers, including Tatyana Tolstaya, Ksenia Burzhskaya, Islam Khanipaev, Dmitry Zakharov, Helena Pobyarzhina and others, wrote stories in collaboration with artificial intelligence. My text for the collection is about the future, it is called “The Last One.” The book will be published by the publishing house “Alpina.Proza” and will be called “Let’s solve it?” I admit, it wasn’t easy. Strange but interesting experience. So far I don’t see artificial intelligence as a competitor, but rather as an assistant if you know how to use it. But even setting up the right problem takes quite a bit of time; It’s easier for me to do it myself than to write technical specifications for a neural network. Furthermore, the neural network is still focused on a happy ending, and for a writer like me, this is irrelevant. Everything is the same in my life.
By the way, the neural network is already capable of writing well for children. This year there will also be a Children’s Total Dictation, for children from 7 to 10 years old. It’s literally just a few sentences. I turned to artificial intelligence for ideas and it helped me find something, but I wrote the text myself, as before.
Meanwhile
Who will conduct the Total Dictation in various metropolitan spaces?
Registration is now open to participate in the Total Dictation. Traditionally, famous people become dictators on various platforms.
The text will be taught by actor Viktor Dobronravov at the Center for Diagnostics and Telemedicine of the Moscow Department of Health, and by TV presenter Yana Churikova at the Higher School of Economics.
In the Moscow Kremlin Museums, participants in the action will write a text dictated by Elena Gagarina herself, general director of the museum, and in the Russian State Children’s Library the text will be read by theater and film actress Lyubov Tolkalina.
At the Moscow City Pedagogical University there are several dictators on different platforms: the singer Yulia Savicheva, the actress Elizaveta Arzamasova and the singer Rodion Gazmanov.
In Library no. 261 the text will be dictated by the writer Evgeny Rudashevsky, and at the Association of Writers and Publishers of Russia, by the winner of the Big Book Prize, Yuri Buida.
