Publishing: Land of Opportunity

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"I am not going to become a very rich woman," said Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilueva Stalina, 42, when she arrived in the U.S. "It is absolutely impossible for me to become a rich person here." She planned to give away large sums, and had no idea how much money she would be making. But, as every immigrant knows, America is a land of opportunity. Since she arrived, bids to publish and serialize her 80,000-word memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend, have poured in from much of the world. The Book-of-the-Month Club, for instance, last week paid $325,000 to distribute the book when it is published next October, which is $75,000 more than it paid for William Manchester's Death of a President and about $260,000 more than it usually pays for a book.

For the book rights to Twenty Letters, Harper & Row paid $250,000. After paying an estimated $400,000 for serialization rights, LIFE magazine will run a 30,000-word excerpt in the issue that goes on sale Oct. 10. The New York Times paid about $250,000 for an equal number of words to be run in six installments beginning Oct. 8; these will be made available at a surcharge to the 175 North American newspapers that subscribe to the New York Times News Service.

LIFE tried to buy foreign rights to the book, and even explored the overseas possibilities on Svetlana's behalf. Her U.S. lawyer, 77-year-old Edward S. Greenbaum, listened to the sums involved and then decided he could make a better deal by hiring a literary agent to negotiate with European publishers. As bids feverishly escalated, he was able to turn down an $850,000 offer from Italian Publisher Giorgio Mondadori for exclusive foreign rights—one of the largest prices ever offered in Europe for a book. By week's end Greenbaum had concluded lucrative agreements with publishers in most European countries. The prices were all the more remarkable since none of the buyers has read the book. It is still in the process of being translated into English by Priscilla Johnson MacMillan at her family's home on Long Island, where she is being assisted by Svetlana. Moreover, the memoir is said to contain few political revelations and not much awareness of Russian politics. The book, as Harper & Row puts it, is a story told "with a rare lyric intensity by a Turgenev heroine." Except that Turgenev never made $1,000,000 or more on a single book, no matter how lyrically intense.