Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview

For the first time in Ukrainian — Susan Sontag’s full cult interview for Rolling Stone magazine

American writer, journalist, and Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott recorded this candid and intellectually charged conversation with Susan Sontag in Paris and New York in 1978. Of the 12-hour conversation, only a fragment was published in the magazine — the rest remained inaccessible even to English-speaking readers for a long time. The full version was published in English only in 2013, and now it is finally being published in Ukrainian — almost 50 years after their meeting.

This is an informal and profound conversation with one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century at the peak of her career. Sontag reflects on culture, personal life, philosophy, music, and history. Here she appears whole—free, critical, provocative, and candid.

Topics of conversation range from personal experiences of illness and death, the ideas of Proust and Nietzsche, the music of Patti Smith and Chuck Berry, and the differences between New York and Los Angeles. Sontag talks about how rock and roll changed her life, how philosophical texts shape cultural perceptions, and why, for her, the gap between reason and emotion does not exist.