Roger Pulvers

I was born in 1944, so it's still the height of the Cold War, almost the Cold Hot War.

And, of course, I read...

Crime and Punishment, I remember, and I think that's probably all.

It wasn't particularly an interest of mine until I started to teach myself Russian when I was 13, and that certainly didn't make me fluent enough in Russian to read a novel.

But I took Russian when I went to university at UCLA, and I was very lucky to have

At UCLA, one of the most amazing and legendary figures in the United States as a Russian professor, Vladimir Markov, who wrote a book on formalism, was an expert on Mayakovsky, was the first person to translate Emily Dickinson into Russian.

He was my first teacher of Russian.

Then when I went to Harvard, I was taught by Kirill Taranovsky, who was an expert on Pushkin and Mandelstam.

And the best of all was Roman Jakobson, who's considered the father of modern linguistics, particularly phonology.

And he was a friend of Mayakovsky's, and he knew all of the poets from the early part of the 20th century.

And he was amazing.

I took his seminar, which was in Russian, on Russian prosody.

And that really interested me for the first time deeply in Russian literature.

Whereas I was studying political science.

Oh, reading in Russian.

By then, yeah, I made my first trip out of the United States in 1964.

I'd just turned 20, and I went to the Soviet Union for four weeks.

And then in 1965, I went again for four weeks.

hitchhiked around, traveled around.

And so, and I got my master's at Harvard in Russian.