Madam, – We are used to an author’s 50th and centenary anniversaries being feted. Now apparently we have the phenomenon of the “70th anniversary of the author’s death”.
It was wonderful to see the excellent work of Mikhail Bulgakov being discussed in your paper (Arts, February 12th) but the ending statement (“To mark the 70th anniversary of the death of Mikhail Bulgakov, Vintage Classics is republishing five of his novels”) inspired the raising of an eyebrow sympathetic to Bulgakov’s own cynical take on the materialism of the world.
The 70th anniversary of a writer’s death now marks the point where the work published in his lifetime goes out of copyright. – Yours, etc,