I can't believe I did that!

I've had this blog going for over a year and a half, and all this time I've had the Great Man's name mispelled in the blog title! Arggh! Fixed it now.

I've done that before more than once. Typed 'Solzhenitysn' (wrong) rather than 'Solzhenitsyn'. At least once I've done it in a Google search, and Google says "don't you mean Solzhenitsyn" and I say "that is what I typed" until I look closer.

Paradoxically, the name is harder to spell in the Latin alphabet than in the Cyrillic. There are two hard parts. Solzhenitsyn or Solhzenitsyn; and Solzhenitsyn or Solzhenitysn. But both of those involve two letters in our alphabet where the Cyrillic only has one. ж is 'zh' and ц is 'ts'.

I wonder if Solzhenitsyn might have sold more books if he'd picked a pseudonym. He used 'Gleb Nerzhin' as the pseudonym of his autobiographical character in First Circle and in the lesser known Prussian Nights. Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, even Lermontov and Turgenev had shorter names than Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky is almost as long, but it seems easier to spell. (And you have two chances to get it right, Dostoyevsky and Dostoevsky are both accepted). But Solzhenitsyn did well enough with his name as it was.