I Have Enough Grey Hairs

This is Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov (1814 - 1841; inclusive dates show that it sucks being a Russian poet), or as I prefer to call him, The Bane of My Existence. I was at the library, checking out a couple more books on Soviet theatre and drama because I'm at the point where I'm freaking out because I could be missing something important, when I saw a book called Soviet Historical Drama. Paustovsky's play, Lieutanent Lermontov is a historical drama, yes? Yes. So I picked up the book and looked at the table of contents. Chapter five is called "The Transformation of Lermontov." As I read it , my heart stopped beating and my fingers went numb. Since I started working on my dissertation, I've been searching all the major databases to ensure that I'm not redoing someone else's research. I have, so far, turned up nothing. And yet, here I was staring at the table of contents of a book that appeared to be covering my dissertation topic.

I flipped to the chapter hoping that author would be an idiot or that our approaches would be radically different. After some panic when I say Paustovsky's name mentioned, I waded impatiently through a bunch of stuff about how apolitical the "real Lermontov"was until the author started discussing a play called Lermontov by Lavrenev from 1952. Thank goodness. I can go back to worrying about missing other things like fancy-pants intricate conceptions of Socialist Realism. No one yet has written about my Lermontov play. I can also now pluck out the new grey hairs this scare gave me.

There's nothing below the fold.