{"id":2209,"date":"2008-08-06T17:03:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T17:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/02\/20\/literary-musings\/"},"modified":"2019-02-20T21:57:17","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T21:57:17","slug":"literary-musings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/08\/06\/literary-musings\/","title":{"rendered":"literary musings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alexander Solzhenitsyn<\/a> was laid to rest today, if you believe getting planted is restful. I read A Day in the Life…<\/i> in 7th grade. It was powerful then, lined up against books like The Bell Jar<\/i> and Man’s Search for Meaning<\/i> as literary examples of duress and faith, at least as i was reaching out trying to figure out how religion (or my problems with it) played against the experience of the writings. I remember, distinctly, my father commenting on the book, which I had left out somewhere around the house, concerned that I was getting into “pinko propaganda”. <\/p>\n

When I read about the re-translation in the early 90’s just before Y2K (I had read the Bantam edition, a hand-me down from the local book fair), I found myself amazed at what a few years and a new set of eyes on the text can do to change a book. Shukhov changed, as I had changed, but the plight, and the unfairness was no different.<\/p>\n

I read Solzhenitsyn before I read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. It is his voice I hear when I think of Russian. Well, to be fair, it is his voice I do my translating in – most actual “voices” seem to be some version of Vysotsky – but Solzhenitsyn’s tone – his ability to break the emotional into the atomic parts of language and experience which came from such a different pragmatism than anyone in this country knows. That is what got me into things Russian. Lukyanenko was a close run for a while, but I’ve found the longer I have gone without reading any of his stuff, the less his voice overrides my head.<\/p>\n

Rasputin has always enthralled me, as has the entire Romanov saga. It was the reason I was so enthralled by HBO’s Carnivale<\/i> years ago, and the reason I ultimately hated it as it evolved. My love of Russian folk songs is how I came to know Tom Waits (though it would be an ill-fated trip to a Super-K in Ohio that would really seal my love for the music he makes).<\/p>\n

I feel like a little bit of me got lost today, and the world is a little more dim for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest today, if you believe getting planted is restful. I read A Day in the Life… in 7th grade. It<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"chat","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-chat","hentry","post_format-post-format-chat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4782,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions\/4782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}