Elena Shvarts' memoir, Vidimaia Starona Zhizni, is made up of little 1-2 page sections. According to my Slavicist pal Tom Epstein, there's a section toward the middle about me. I'm a little nervous about reading it (I identify with those graphomaniac failed playwrights whose scripts her mother used to find hilarious) so I'm starting the book at the beginning, in Russian, which with me is pretty slow going.

The book was published in Petersburg a few years ago. It's a nice little red paperback. It took me a while to find a copy, through a Russ bkstore in Boston (Petropol).

Tom says Elena has also written a short story in which there's a character who resembles me named "Henry Silver". Then there's the poem about the seagulls meeting over the Atlantic, which I posted here in translation many moons ago.

So it's been a bit of a Russ-American literary game, when you think of all the versified epistles (epiphanies) I've sent her way.