By the way, I forgot to say that one of Ivan
Golovin's many pen names was "Nivolog." Golovin's first book was, if I remember
corectly, "A Trip to Sweden" (1839?). But it was signed not "Nivolog" (a nom
de plume he adopted after he had taken out, sometime in the
nineteen fourties, British citizenship).
Also, today is the 170th anniversary of Pushkin's
death. One feels it "with one's skin," particularly if one's window gives directly on Styx (as I dubbed,
following the example of Sergey Stratanovsky, St. Petersburg's Black
River).
Alexey