The Writer and His Roof

Recently I received a letter from a professor from England. He asked me to respond to a questionnaire about Sergei Esenin, whose works he had been studying all his scholarly life. Answering him, I inevitably thought: There, in England, just as in France, Germany, and Finland, Russian literature is still in demand. Books about Russian writers are being written and published (notwithstanding the market economy) and read (because, if there were no readers, they certainly wouldn't be published). An odd picture. There they need our literature; here we don't. This same Esenin has been sort of "tossed from the ship of modernity" by today's fashion. A scholarly work about him? Only if an author manages to get a grant from the Soros Foundation.