In the annual Nobel Prize section - “The Storyteller”: this is what the 2012 laureate Chinese writer Mo Yan (1955) called his lecture. I know that in the soul of every person there is a certain foggy area where it is difficult to say what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. This is exactly where the writer’s talent can develop. And if a work accurately and vividly describes this controversial, nebulous area, it certainly goes beyond politics and determines a high level of literary skill. Translation from Chinese by Igor Egorov.