A work of experimental nonfiction that spotlights the so-called Undesirables of recent history, forced into martyrdom and infamy.
Daniel Elkind’s hybrid-genre debut, Chizhevsky’s Chandelier is a nonfiction experiment that tells the story of A.L. Chizhevsky, the inventor and father of the field of heliobiology, who — like his hero Galileo — was punished for daring to suggest that human history revolved around the sun.
This expansive narrative of historical reckoning stages a confrontation between factions of American anarchists, disciples of the Báb in 19th-century Persia, Jewish baseball players, and the quixotic quest to grow enormous chickens. Nested within is the story of the last Soviet generation (the “Tetris generation”) and its dreams and illusions. In biographical chapters recalling his experience as a refugee from Soviet Russia, Elkind finds echoes of the exile of Emma Goldman and other political Undesirables from America to their “native” land in 1919, then in the throes of revolutionary fervor.
The result of this literary experiment is an irreverent and deeply personal investigation into what it means to record and remember in today’s oversaturated world, where all of the stories we tell ourselves have been turned inside-out.
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