Yevgeny Polivanov (1891-1938) was perhaps the world’s greatest one-armed, opium-addicted, telepathic linguist, revolutionary, and spy. He has confounded his biographers by being so strange that even the most outlandish legends he told about himself sometimes turn out to be true. In 2020, I wrote this article about his life to accompany the publication of his unfinished novel, Evenings with Prof. P.:
Robert Denis 