In the morning we worked on the mail. We put stamps on commemorative diplomas for completing the flight program. They have a landing date of October 31, but now we’re landing December 10, so on Earth they’ll have to correct the landing date by 40 days.

In the afternoon there was a meeting with artists — Maya Kristalinskaya and Nikolai Afanasyevich Kryuchkov. We relaxed and sang a rousing song from the film The Celestial Slowpoke: “We’re friends, migratory birds… first things first — airplanes, and the girls, well, the girls can wait.” I told him that he’d been my favorite actor since childhood, and that the fact we became cosmonauts and have been flying this long is partly his considerable contribution, because our generation of boys was raised on the heroes of films like The Star, Courage, A Fellow from Our Town, and we tried to be like them. They instilled in us a belief in ourselves, in the finest qualities of people, and kindled bright feelings toward life, toward people, toward the homeland. Our generation is one of happy people — we had someone to emulate and to learn from. We ran around libraries searching for interesting books, dreamed, fantasized, tormented ourselves and others with questions, doubted, searched for answers.

I watched the sunrise again. Very beautiful — when a dense pink oval appears on the cloud cover at sunrise and then, expanding above the horizon, rises as a yellow-orange band, very similar to a wheat field in the steppe at sunset. And above it a dark band, then a gray-blue layer, then more dark bands. Then, as the Sun continues to rise, a beautiful delicate pink layer appears near the Earth, followed by a wide, brilliant white-silver layer, and above it a diffuse pale blue. And then a red glare appears from the blazing furnace building beneath the horizon, and in the light of the solar lava you can see black masses of clouds drifting along the horizon. Suddenly a sliver of Sun appears and, rising, darts about like a fireball in the mirage of the Earth’s atmospheric veil, shifting against the motion of the clouds, as if searching for a place to rise above the horizon. And then, having burst through the Earth’s envelope, it stands above the horizon, illuminating it with the bright white light of day, overpowering the other colors, which begin to gradually dissolve further and further along the horizon.

It’s hard when someone on the communication link is tactless. You’re defenseless up here; you can’t snap back — first, you can’t, everyone is listening, and then you feel sorry for the person. That’s why you need a sober mind and truly strong nerves to hold yourself in check in time, because if you lose it once, it’s like an avalanche…