The True Story of Yevgeny Polivanov
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…
Evenings with Prof. P.
The brilliant Soviet linguist Yevgeny Polivanov was killed in the Terror in January 1938. Although he wrote prolifically in many genres, he was unable to publish most of his work in his lifetime and after his death most of what remained was lost or destroyed. A fragment of his unfinished novel survives today on a…
The Taghiyev-Behbudov Affair
The events of May 16 would eventually become the subject of a criminal trial, in which Taghiyev stood accused of orchestrating an attack on Behbudov with the help of the six alleged accomplices named above. The courtroom, which was open to the public, was filled to overflowing, and some newspapers devoted several pages to the…
The Pre-Soviet Language Reform Movement in Azerbaijan
In 1909, Faig Omar Nemanzadeh wrote: ‘Turks are not alone in seeing barriers to progress in the alphabet. The old European pedagogue, Leibnitz, saw barriers to progress in one type of alphabet, saying “Give me a perfect alphabet, and I’ll give you a perfect language; give me a perfect language, and I’ll give you a…
Nations in Transit 2020 – Azerbaijan
I wrote the Nations in Transit 2020 report on Azerbaijan for Freedom House. The report described the state of democracy in Azerbaijan at the outset of 2020, so it focused on events that actually occurred in 2019 and that reflected the state of civil society, press freedom, etc. Long story short, the year was marked…
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Robert Denis 