A Pair of Turgidovskys

Further to yesterday’s post, you may be interested to know that, in the absence of Paulo Zilotti, most of the lecture time was given over to the second speaker, the aforementioned ‘gaunt man with the beard’. I had never come across him myself, but he turned out to be none other than a cousin of Mr Misery-Guts himself: Pyetr Turgidovsky – a writer whose visual appearance is thought by many to be the perfect reflection of his prose (Heidi Kohlenberg writes about meeting him here).

As for Valery Turgidovsky (for that was the man’s name) he was much merrier than you might expect from a fellow of such perilous slimness that automatic doors were in the habit of shutting in his face. At times he was, in fact, uproariously funny (he was reading, in case you wondered, from his book of short stories The Constant Fumbler). Having said that, I’ve always thought Pyetr is far more comic than he is ever given credit for.