If there’s one thing about the writing life that recommends itself to young people, it’s the limited capital outlay. You don’t need to pay salaries, rent a recording studio, or make weekly trips to Denver… but does that mean it’s all about sitting back and watching the money roll in? Alas. Today I bring you a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wind up with between $817–$1,067 work-related expenses.
It started one day in August, when I received a notice for a missed UPS delivery. The only package I was expecting at that time was the first uncensored translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, which the publishers had been trying to mail me for some weeks, as part of a campaign to get people to write Solzhenitsyn profiles:
Although Solzhenitsyn died last August, the following individuals are available for interviews: Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia (who made headlines last month when she rebuked Vladimir Putin during a meeting with him); the author’s son, pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is musical director for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., the noted Solzhenitsyn scholar. They can discuss:
· Where Solzhenitsyn fits in to the great Russian literary realist tradition bequeathed by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky;
· The two decades he spent as an exile in Vermont, stripped of his Russian citizenship. How he lived in such fear of the KGB that he built a barb wire fence around his home;
· The differences between Stalin’s regime and the Russian leadership of today—and what might happen if Solzhenitsyn were writing today;
· How he damaged his reputation in the West by championing Christianity and railing against American pop culture in a rambling commencement speech at Harvard;
· The “censored” portions of IN THE FIRST CIRCLE, which included suggestions that Stalin had been a double agent, and that the Soviet Union should not possess the atomic bomb;
· And much more.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974)
Being overdue on three deadlines, I am obliged to leave the Solzhenitsyn-profiling to other and better C-list writers, whom I certainly wish a pleasant phone chat with the musical director of the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra on the subject of AS’s famous “rambling speech” of 1978.
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