Philip Nikolayev, The Poetry of Language

 

Philip Nikolayev

SPEAKERS

Philip Nikolayev, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will, hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Philip. Nikolaev, Philip, welcome to the show.

 

Philip Nikolayev  00:18

I will. Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here.

 

Will Bachman  00:21

So Philip, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Philip Nikolayev  00:27

Well, let’s see. I was supposed to graduate in 92 but I actually graduated a year later. In 93 I petitioned for my for my term at the college to be extended, because I was a transfer student out of the former Soviet Union, and I argued that I did not have enough of a Western education to be competitive, and it was taken seriously and understood, and I was allowed to do that, luckily. And then I graduated in 93 and I went directly into grad school at Harvard in the history department, where I spent the next several years, but I only got a master’s degree out of it for strange reasons. I don’t know if I should go into them or if they’re of universal interest, but my field, which was medieval Russian history, sort of collapsed on me as I was doing my PhD, because after the fall of the USSR in 1992 all funding dwindled for things, you know, for Russian studies and medieval studies were the first thing to disappear. It just the whole field disappeared, ceased to exist at American universities.

 

Will Bachman  01:44

This is this is really cool. Tell us. Tell us a little bit more about this. So, okay, before the Soviet Union collapsed, where was all this money coming from? Like the US government

 

Philip Nikolayev  01:58

during the Cold War, the standoff between the United States and the USSR, there was a lot of funding for the study of Russia, because Russia was the enemy. And then, you know, Perestroika took place, and Russia, you know, for a while, reoriented itself and started looking more toward the west. And we sort of, we decided that the Cold War was over, and this, this whole hostility, became irrelevant for for a certain period, as I was finishing my my, you know, as I was pursuing my studies in History at Harvard with a wonderful person, I should mention him by name Ned Kean and Edward Lewis Keenan, a great historian of Russia, was a very important figure for me, intellectually, you know, as a Russian, as someone from the USSR, it was very interesting for me to review the history of my own country, of my own society, from a Western analytical perspective, it certainly opened my eyes to a lot of things. But that’s I think I’m worried that I may make this too long. The long and short of it is that I decided that I was wasting my time because people who were graduated in medieval Russian history ahead of me. We’re not getting jobs brilliant people, wonderful historians, we’re not getting jobs in the field. And my wife and I had a young daughter, Sophia, and we badly needed money. And I’ll mention briefly that this was before grad students were unionized at Harvard. So we were, I was not being paid a lot for my for my two for you, for being a TA, and I quit. I was ABD, and I quit my grad school, my graduate program. I got my master’s degree, sort of semi automatically, but I was abd but I never got my PhD at Harvard, and I went and I worked as a software engineer for, you know, for my sins, for being a polymath for five years during the internet bubble, and then the internet bubble burst, and I went back into grad school and I got a PhD in textual Scholarship, which is basically very similar to an English degree at BU at Boston University, with another amazing advisor, Christopher Riggs, a well known literary critic, was my advisor at BU, and my dissertation was on the work of Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer who lived in Paris and wrote in French. So intellectually, my career has been sort of far flung, and I graduated from bu with a PhD in 2009 which was when the crisis. Had just hit and there were no jobs, and I had to go back into high tech, but I wasn’t writing code anymore by I was VP of Marketing for a high tech company, and then about a year later, I decided to strike out on my own, and I started a small business in marketing, and this is what has been paying my bills since I work in science and technic. Companies that are found my clients tend to be companies that are founded on breakthroughs in science and technology, because I you know, marketing can get very boring, and when I was just starting out, at one point, I was marketing things like oversized dog beds and whatnot. So I don’t want to do that kind of thing. I try to make marketing, you know, somewhat intellectually challenging and interesting. So I seek out clients such that I can study their technology and understand it and and find find ways of translating it into the language of the market. But apart from all that, my life, my the kind of the core of my life is the time of poets, and everything else is, you know, is structured in a way that can support this obsession, this mania. I’ve always been a poet from a you know, from an extremely young age, you might say. And this is what preoccupies as well a lot of my mental activity.

 

Will Bachman  06:38

Tell us about your work as a poet with it tell like, what you know sort of, kind of, yeah, speak or what sorts of writing tell us about that.

 

Philip Nikolayev  06:49

Yeah. Oh, so gladly, gladly. Thank you. So I started out as a writer, as a Russian poet, writing in Russian, and then I and, but I’ve always been bilingual. I grew up with English from from a very young age, even though I grew up in the USSR I grew up. How did that happen? I was born in in Moscow to student parents, and my dad was, at the time, a student at Moscow State University, a student of foreign languages, and he started teaching me English from Baby age. And then he also, you know, had peculiar ideas about how languages should be taught to kids. So he had the BBC and the Voice of America in the house on in the house pretty much all the time. We had a short wave radio. And, you know, the Soviets used to use jammers to jam these western radio services, but not in English, or not as much in English. Nobody cared about English. They would jam the Russian services. It was possible to listen to it in English. And so I, kind of, I grew up with that, and with a bit of a different perspective on things too, as a result, politically within the USSR at the time. And then I came to Harvard at the age of 24 and I became very deeply immersed in English, even though, you know, I started working as an interpreter and a translator when I was 18 in Moscow and I switched languages in terms of writing poetry. My first American poet friend, a man by the name of Ben Naser, saw some of my early attempts at poetry in English, and was very enthusiastic about them. He told me that I should absolutely, definitely continue to do it. And I continued, and perhaps went too far with it. I’ve published a number of books of poetry in English, as well as volumes of translation. I know various languages. I know about 10 languages. Most recently, I’ve learned Spanish, and the one before that was Ukrainian. So these are the two that I work with the most right now, and I’ve translated a lot of Ukrainian poetry, resulting from this terrible war that Russia is unjustly waging in Ukraine. And I’m happy to mention that a Ukrainian issue of a well known American Poetry Magazine called the cafe review has just come out, co edited by myself and Anna Halberstadt as guest editors, and it’s all Ukrainian poetry in translated into English by several translators myself and food. And they are very moving poems, I think, you know, like I strongly suspect that the most vital poetry that’s being written anywhere today is being written in Ukraine. In because they’re waging this, this Patriotic war, that of liberation that they feel very strongly about, and they they have to endure a great deal in the process as well. See, I’m giving you a very, very far flung response to all these things, but feel free to rein me in, or, I don’t know,

 

Will Bachman  10:21

absolutely not. This is like one, you know, one sort of bomb after another, of stuff to explore. Phillip in languages, okay, there’s so much to explore here, but I have to dial back a little bit, turn back the clock. You were 18 working as a translator. Tell me about the journey from being a translator. Who are you translating for? And how did you end up at Harvard at the age of 24 as a transfer student, like there were not that many students coming from, you know, the Soviet Union to Yeah,

 

Philip Nikolayev  10:58

happy to tell you about that. So I was born in Moscow, but I ended up growing up in Moldova, which is, oh, it used to be called Moldavia, and now the correct Romanian name is Moldova, and it’s today a separate, tiny country between Ukraine and Romania, with a population that’s that speaks both Romanian and Russian to two distinct ethnic groups. So I grew up there, and I love Romanian, even though I’ve become rusty in it. I fully intend to also brush up that beautiful language. But I grew up speaking language in the family to my dad and listening to the voice of America. And when I came to Moscow, somehow, through as a as as a young poet at the time, I met other poets in Moscow, and somehow, through those friendships, I got to be interviewed very quick, very soon by the USSR writers Union Commission for international relations, or something like that. The USSR writers union was a big organization. Was a big institution, sponsored by the state, and it had international relations, and they needed interpreters with various languages, and English was my language, and I was a quite a successful interpreter for a young fellow and translated a lot of writing into in a lot of literary writing into English, as well as worked as an interpreter for various interesting figures, poets and writers, and in fact, I was the interpreter kind of I was taking care of Northrop Frye, a famous Canadian literary scholar, American and Canadian literary figure of great fame, who was somehow impressed by me and wrote me a recommendation that I think got me into Harvard more than other factors. But I really wanted to go and study abroad, and I was fluent in English, and I, because of my work as an interpreter, I had various numbers of the American Embassy which were otherwise, you know, impossible to get they were not listed in any directories. So I, and this was at the time of perestroika, and, you know, rapid political change liberalization, and I realized that it’s no longer illegal to try such things. And I called the American embassy, and I said, I would like to go and study in the United States. How can I? Is the is it possible? What should I do about it? And they were happy to explain the whole process to me. So I went, and I took the SAT and TOEFL, a Test of English as a foreign language cold. I had never seen such tests before in my life, but I did well on them. And so the combination of these things, and I had only heard of three universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton and and those, those were the ones that I applied to, and I got into Harvard, and I think Yale said no, and Princeton put me on a waste waiting list or something, or it may have been the other way around, and I happily accepted Harvard, and I came and Harvard took extremely good care of me. I you know, many, many thanks to our alma mater for that.

 

Will Bachman  14:34

Okay, so talk to me about kind of the role of poetry in your life now you’re actively mentioned. You just guest edited this thing you’re translating it is, you know, in terms of a typical week, are you running your marketing consulting practice, sort of Monday through Friday, and this is on the weekends, or is a good chunk of each day, or writing poetry,

 

Philip Nikolayev  14:58

like what? Good question. So I’m sort of, you might say I’m a workaholic, and I work from home, and I don’t make a sharp distinguished distinction between weekdays and weekends. It’s just like all one and one on the same process for me, and I have, you know, marketing is my job. I I do that a substantial amount of time. I have a team also that I work with and but yes, I also find time for poetry. And married to a poet, my wife, Katya kapovic, is a wonderful poet herself, also a bilingual poet. She has a couple of books in English and so our conversations tend to be very literary all the time, and I don’t write nearly as much as she does. I envy her productivity, her prolific kind of ease. But I write in in spurts, but I think about poetry all the time. And I think, you know, like, we don’t always write stuff down that comes into our heads, but I guess I compose a lot in my head, and then sometimes it makes, makes it to, to into some other medium. Yeah, talk

 

Will Bachman  16:22

to me about learning 10 languages.

 

Philip Nikolayev  16:29

Yeah, so I got into languages apart from English, and let’s see, Romanian was my third language after Russian and English. And then as a student in Moscow, I learned French to a point of fluency, and I really enjoyed learning it. I For me, languages are there’s something divine about their beauty. You know this when you grasp their structure, the structure of their sounds, the phonemes, the kind of phonetic music of it is just marvelous. I i love doing exercises that most people hate to learn a language, like, you know, phonetic drills or grammar exercises, those things can give me pleasure and being able to gradually gain the ability to think in a language and to, you know, eventually let go of your own language, and, you know, immerse yourself into this other language. Those things are extremely thrilling, addictive for me, and I haven’t pushed it as far as I could have. I know some people who know 30 languages or more, but I am attend right now, and no complaints. They’re not all in the same kind of state of immediate fluency right now, but I can bring them back pretty quickly when I need to.

 

Will Bachman  17:53

How do you work to maintain them? Do you kind of read poetry or novels in these foreign languages? So

 

Philip Nikolayev  17:58

poetry is is a great way to get into a language, because it’s very economical. And for some reason, people think that poetry is more difficult. Poetry is easier than prose because it has, it usually is in a symbolic language, and it’s a it’s kind of formulaic, and it has a lot of it’s minimalist. You there’s a lot in a poem that you can focus on, but the reading of it doesn’t take that much time. Any kind of like if you get memorizing poetry is great in particular, and the poets know how to use language well, and they kind of encapsulate the whole soul of the language in poems. So I think poems like right now I’ve been reading Lorca, you know, the great Spanish poet, and translating some of his poems. His his language is very simple. You know, blue sky, Cielo, a soul Campo Maria. So blue sky, yellow field, Blue Mountain, yellow field, but very evocative and vivid, and I’ve been enjoying Lorca very much.

 

Will Bachman  19:11

I want to get back to explore something you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the experience of studying Russian history, medieval Russian history, in particular, from this western perspective, after having grown up there and I guess, imbibed it from the local educational establishment. Tell me about that different perspective that you gained and what that was like, and

 

Philip Nikolayev  19:38

explore that well in Russia, the history, it tends to be written as I guess. It’s normal. It’s an international within a nation, its history tends to be written with a patriotic bias, often. And this combines very well with the i. Romantic tradition of interpreting history during the Romantic era, we have these first kind of model histories of France, of Germany as nation states, and the idea that a nation has always been a nation in a kind of a quasi modern sense, is a romantic idea. They tend to romanticism claims that nations are very ancient, and they have these ancient traditions, and the soul of the nation lives in its history and so on. But if you look at it historically, nations are a recent development in in history. They’re kind of post capitalist. The idea that all the people of a country form a single nation with one ideology and similar ideals and values is a very new idea. You may think of Napoleon, who exploited it. He was one of the first people who exploit exploited this idea of nationhood to to create an ideology that would persuade Frenchmen, or so called Frenchmen, who spoke, you know, sometimes French and sometimes Italian and sometimes Spanish, to enlist in in this first army, the first mass levy army, and to give their lives for France. You know, it’s an ideological change that you can die for patriotic reasons for your country and so on. This it’s a new historically, a new idea, but we perceive it often through the this lens of romanticism, retroactively, as if our entire history were informed by similar sentiment, sentiments and ideologies and a sense that we all in Russia, for example, if you look at the 16th century, or before, the czarist did not have a notion that they belong to the same nation as the people in the villages, the peasants who tilled the soil. Yes, they spoke the same language. There wasn’t, there wasn’t the idea that we’re all Russians. We’re all we all belong to the same nation. These. The word Russia was coined under Peter the Great in the early 18th century. And you know, Russia is a Latinized kind of form of the name. It shows a Western influence the word, the old word is Rus, which is the name of the first dynasty that came to rule in this space that became famous, the there’s a, you know, the Scandinavian dynasty, of the Varangian dynasty, that was that, for complicated reasons that I don’t want to go into too deeply, came to rule this space that eventually became Russia and Ukraine, or the heart, the heart heartland of of those two nations, Ruth was their name, and that is what gives us the word Russia. But the the dynasty was of Scandinavian descent. And the the idea that we’re all Russians is a very, very late idea in history. Whereas, if you read histories like those of karamzin, one of the the first great romantic Russian historian, they will make you think of a continuous history of Russia as one nation from the I don’t know, from the ninth century, from the eighth or ninth century in until the present, but it’s a presumptive continuity that is A kind of an illusion.

 

Will Bachman  23:41

I want to ask about kind of the network of other poets and writers and translators and editors that it seems that you are kind of embedded in this world, and I’m curious just tell us a little bit about that you’re translating writers from like, multiple different languages. Just tell us about that aspect of your life a bit. Is it, you know? Is it, you know, there in person meetings that you get invited to, you know, book launches or book parties or or is it

 

Philip Nikolayev  24:21

I understand the question? I think, yeah. Well, I mean, I think you’re asking about how poetry functions as an institution, or as a kind of a, as a, as a network, yes, and yeah. So there, there’s a lot of us, there’s a lot of poets, 1000s and 1000s of poets. And you know the all of all of that poetry is just impossible to know, but it’s an enormous ocean. But there are very. Institutions that serve poetry. There are poetry festivals that are one of the kind of organizing and mobilizing things that many poets enjoy, including myself, when I get invited, and I do get invited once a while. And then there are various poetry magazines that publish poets. Some of them are well known. Others are born and die quickly. And of course, there, you know poetry more, I think, than any other profession is founded on, on personal friendship. Poets have to seek out other poets and to have poet friends and talk about poetry and so on. And I’m not original in this regard, I’m just like any other poet. I have my poet friends. I have some favorite poets. If you want me to name a few names, like, if people want recommendations about what to check out in poetry, I can name a few names I would like I’ve mentioned my wife, Katya kapovich And my friend Ben Mazer. They’re both wonderful poets, and their work is easy to find on Amazon and elsewhere on the web. There is a terrific poet in India named G tayl Who writes in English. He’s also a very well known novelist. There is a young poet in Kolkata named sushmid Panda, who also writes in English, and I think is extremely talented. I like Glyn Maxwell in Britain. And George Herbert, a Scottish poet. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bill, Bill Herbert. George Herbert is another great poet, but I’m talking about wn Herbert. Bill Herbert, the Scottish poet, and many in the States, I could go on and on. Worth mentioning. Steven sturgeon and Blake Campbell is a is a very interesting, wonderful young American poet, well worth checking. Checking out.

 

Will Bachman  27:01

How would you describe your body of poetry? Are there certain themes that you dive into, or certain kind of forms that you that you typically focus on? Writing in

 

Philip Nikolayev  27:19

very good questions I originally was, and remain, to a large degree, a poet of traditional forms in Russia that was the kind of like still remains almost the default. You might say, free verse has never taken off in a similar way in Russia to the same extent. Now it is popular. It has become popular over the last 25 years, maybe. But in general, we are very formal poets. We tend to write in Raim and meter. And I carried this, this over into English, but then I also started to experiment with various other forms. And I I realized that today we live in a kind of, you know, poetry exists in a state of formal anarchy. It’s not it’s not what school you ascribe yourself to or or claim to belong to, but what you can achieve within a text, a text needs to be self justifying to to merit the reader’s attention, it needs to be doing something on its own terms. And I’ve written in a lot of my style has evolved in a way that I could not have predicted myself. It has gone through some wild transformations. So I’ve written some very formal traditional verse, as well as very experimental and perhaps sometimes obscure, avant garde verse, and a lot of just standard lyric free verse, you might say. And it’s a very it ends up being a very eclectic body of work, but I think my tone, my my themes, my thoughts are what kind of holds it all together. And you asked me about my themes, I personal experience, or kind of philosoph the philosophical distillation of personal experience, you might put it this way, plays a big role in my in, you know, is a big part of poetry. For me. It’s a kind of self reflection, a kind of meditation on, on how we, how I, how one has got to be, where one is, and where it’s going, and so on, and making it too abstract, it’s often much more specific, and poetry very much more situational. Poetry is situational. This kind of mic, you know, each poem is a is a microcosm of sorts, you might say, and various philosophical. Themes interest me, and occasionally political themes, though I am not, not always a political poet, and rarely, you might say a political poet. Yet it does happen as well. But basically, I think poetry is what allows us to express our humanity, and importantly, helps us resist becoming robots or AI, or, you know, we have AI, which is an this amazing tool that I, you know, like, use my a lot in my line of work, and I admire a lot, but, and I want to say it has liberated us. I think the way photography has liberated art, when painters no longer have to be representational, they can paint their mental life and so on. Poetry wise, we no longer need to do what, what chat, GPT can do? We, we can. We can. Somehow this is deeper than I think I can express right now, but I think we need to think through about where we go we’re going, as you know, where the arts are going, given that AI is out there, I think it’s an interesting philosophical kind of problem to ponder.

 

Will Bachman  31:20

So this would be spur of the moment request, and feel free to say no, but would you like to share one of your poems with us now, recite one or or sure read one that that

 

Philip Nikolayev  31:34

with pleasure? Yeah, thank you. I’ll, I’ll read an old it’s, it’s the first poem in a collection of mine that I think is my best poetry collection, if one doesn’t count translations. It’s called Letters from oldenderry, and the poem is titled eagles. Two eagles circled over Cambridge today, a rare sight, lovely against the chalkboard sky. Drawn to stare, I soon noticed that they went around in near perfect circles at even speed. In fact, they looked exactly identical. Their widespread wings didn’t so much as flutter. I heard a thin electrical whiz, and wondered if they carried tiny surveillance cameras on board that could scan Shakespeare and the pathos of rambling that I was reading.

 

32:35

Thank you.

 

Philip Nikolayev  32:37

My pleasure, and it’s a true story too. I think those were real eagles, not drones, but somehow I had premonitions of all this drone stuff. This was written, I would say around 2005 we didn’t hear much about drones and all and that time, but the Eagles seem suspiciously Perfect.

 

Will Bachman  33:03

Well now they is getting to the point where they very well could be drones. Yes,

 

Philip Nikolayev  33:07

indeed.

 

Will Bachman  33:11

Now I wanted to ask tell me about you just happened to finish up ABD and get your master’s degree, and you just happen to also be a computer programmer and get a job, you know, in the tech industry. How did you happen to also,

 

Philip Nikolayev  33:28

I guess that really requires an explanation. I in Moldova, I, you know, the Soviet Union had very strong math schools, and my school had my high school had a math division, a math stream that I was a part of. I was a bit of a mathematical prodigy as a child, and lots of people thought I was going to become a mathematician, and I considered it closely, but I was already too infected poetry literature won over. However, I retained some mathematical interests for a very long time, and I still retain them. It’s quite recently that I have dipped into math again. But at Harvard, I became very interested in analytical philosophy, which is basically a combination of philosophy and logic, philosophy and math. And through that, I took some math courses, like some, you know, fairly basic math courses like set theory, Introduction to topology. Those are a couple that I remember, not, not a great deal. And I studied math, logic, deductive logic. And then toward the end, as I realized that I was there may have to drop out of my graduate program, I took CS 50 and CS 51 to amaze. In computer science courses that made me employable in the industry.

 

Will Bachman  35:06

Amazing. I want to also hear about this transition from your PhD in textual studies and then ending up running a marketing firm like tell me a bit about how that came

 

Philip Nikolayev  35:21

out. So I could not have predicted that either. I all my life, I had assumed that I would be some kind of professor. I never questioned it. It was just always completely obvious to me. But I guess it wasn’t meant to to be, as they say, Tell tell God your plans if you want to make him laugh. And when I graduated with my PhD, this was the time of the 2008 2009 crisis, and there were no jobs in the humanities, I I tried to find a job. For the first year I was looking for jobs, I was sending out my CV and cover letters, and once in a while, rarely, I would hear back from some departments that said that they would be interested in me under normal circumstances. But all the jobs were everything was in a freeze. Nothing was available. It was it was just hopeless, so I quickly had to find a source of income. And I went then worked for, for a high tech company, for, for a company that did, you know, large scale email delivery, smtp.com, I guess it’s still there, but it’s been a long time.

 

Will Bachman  36:46

Do you feel that? I don’t want to lead the question. I’m curious to what degree would you say that not being an academic, but instead, you know, running a marketing agency? To what degree does that actually allow you to have, maybe more freedom as a poet and with these outside interests that you have and not like being so closely tied to academia?

 

Philip Nikolayev  37:13

Yes, I agree with you. I think it’s very perceptive what you’re asking. It does give me a degree of freedom. I often think about in academia, you’re you there is a different sense of like, when you do research, when you study things, there is a different sense of what’s important. Things are important for different reasons. In academia, there’s, you know, often they’re important because someone was influential, and some ideas had had an influence, and they had a history, and these influences and histories had to be studied. There’s stuff out there to study and and there is some, you know, a degree of consensus about what, what things, what sorts of things merit studying. But when you’re a poet, for your own sake, you know, out there on your own, your concerns are also different. You you you think about what matters to you, what informs your vision, your esthetic vision, your ethical and philosophical vision. And a lot of that is very personal, and as the word goes subjective, I don’t think poetry is subjective in the way people often make it out to be. I think it’s, you know, a valid art form with its own criteria. But the process is is highly sensitive, highly subjective, highly sensitive to everything, to climate, to your current mood, to the changes in your life, but also to what you’ve been reading to you know, to what your to the poem that your friend emailed you, and so on. And not being in academia, I’m free to think about these things and to to process them in a way that intuitively makes the most sense to me and not obligated to any external criterion or to any to peer review or other people’s preconceptions.

 

Will Bachman  39:19

You say that you’ve gotten back into math. Tell us about that. Are you dive What are you diving into there?

 

Philip Nikolayev  39:28

I I became interested in quantum computing with and I have to preface this by saying that I merely dabble in these things from the business side of things. I’m not any kind of quantum physicist, or not even remotely. I just, I try to understand some of the basic concepts and so on. But the Mathematically, the most the most recent math book that I read was an introduction to the math that you need. To do quantum computing, which is a new kind of computing that is not real yet. There are some developments and some breakthroughs that suggest that we will probably have quantum computers or quantum extensions in our conventional computers sometime within the next 10 years or so some with, you know, hopefully it’s sort of like aI took a long time to to become real. And in fact, I one of my positions in the business world as the director of is, is that of a director of business development for a company called Aspen quantum consulting. We do technical due diligence for quantum computing and quantum technology companies. I don’t do it myself. I merely work with physicists who, you know, great, great quantum physicists who really know this material. But I help on the business side, and it’s very interesting for me to work in this field, it’s a very exciting development in in tech, or at least promises to be when it starts bearing fruit.

 

Will Bachman  41:10

You’ve already mentioned a couple, but are there any other courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you? Oh

 

Philip Nikolayev  41:17

sure. I want to mention Michael Witzel, who was my Sanskrit teacher. I never took Sanskrit officially, but I studied Sanskrit at Harvard for some years by attending Sanskrit courses without taking them for credit. And Michael Witzel, the great sanskritist, who is now retired and lives in Japan, was very tolerant of my interest in Sanskrit, and very encouraging of those studies. I want to mention Diana Eck, who, as you can tell, I have an interest in India. That is another theme that can I can talk about for a long time, but Diana Eck was a professor of Hindu studies. With her, I took an introduction to Hindu religion or whatever, wherever the course was called at the time. She was a terrific teacher. I’ve mentioned Ned Keenan, the historian that I worked with closely, both as an undergraduate and and in grad school. Oh, and definitely James Hankins, who is still teaching a great historian at the history department. With him, I took my introduction to Western civilization, and it was also very eye opening for me, and I’ve retained a close friendship with this professor over the years. In fact, I think I will be seeing him in a couple of days for lunch. I haven’t moved very far from Harvard. I still live pretty much and like I’ve lived within two miles, I think, a two mile rack radius of where I landed, where I first came in 1990 I still, you know, it’s still five minutes away from a five minute walk from Harvard Square. Wow,

 

Will Bachman  43:04

Philip, what. What an extraordinary polymath you are. The longer we talk, the more, the more that comes out. Oh, quantum computing as a side interest. Where can listeners find you online? Let’s mention the name of your marketing agency, and where else can people find you.

 

Philip Nikolayev  43:28

So my marketing agency is rebranding. The old brand was search benefits. And if you search as in, you know, Google search and so on, and benefit as in, benefit if you Google it, the very old website that is still, you know, this kind of ugly will come up. But I recently bought the domain science marketer, which no longer has, I’m sorry, which still doesn’t really have a website, but that will be the new brand. And I think the kind of the brand name emphasizes the fact that I chiefly target science and technology companies who want to work with technological breakthroughs.

 

Will Bachman  44:15

Fantastic. Okay, well, we’ll include those notes, as well as a link to letters from Alden Derry, the book that you were kind enough to read a poem from, and we’ll include a link to that. Philip, many

 

Philip Nikolayev  44:29

thanks. And feel free to include my LinkedIn link. If anyone you know, I’d be glad to hear from my classmates, of course, and feel free to reach out to me and an open book.

 

Will Bachman  44:41

Alright, Philip, this was so much fun to speak with you, and

 

Philip Nikolayev  44:44

my pleasure entirely. Thank you so much. Bye.