Tag Bykov

Mmes. de L. and R.

On a slightly lighter note, Dmitry Bykov, “one of Russia’s most colorful, versatile, and recognizable public intellectuals” and currently a visiting professor at UCLA, occasionally suffers from a condition typical of preternaturally productive speakers and writers: getting facts wrong in…

The sleeper-waker

“If one uncouples the last car from a train, the train will have no last car.” This pseudo-paradox is supposed to illustrate a certain property of natural languages. “Russia’s next president will be Vladimir Putin” is based on a similar,…

Turgenev trivia

Going back to Erik McDonald’s latest post with this quote from Dmitry Bykov, But except for the Sochi Olympics, Russia hasn’t made any powerful contributions to international culture recently, I’m not sure the Sochi Olympics was a contribution to anything but…

Turgenev as a household name

“The only thing you never turned you hand to // Was teaching English in a boarding school,” wrote Auden in his 1937 Letter to Lord Byron from Iceland. Dmitry Bykov, an influential and remarkably prolific Russian columnist, novelist and poet,…