Note: A dissertation by [ex=bare]Гулиус Наталья Сергеевна | Gulius Natalya Sergeevna[/ex] notes that this story is part of Bitov’s Teacher of Symmetry Cycle, which consisted of a series of avant-garde stories purportedly written by an obscure Englishman named [ex=bare]Э. Тайрд-Боффин | A. Tired-Boffin[/ex] and loosely translated to Russian by Bitov. The English version of “Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099)” was said to have been called “Shakespeare’s Photograph” (or possibly “Stern’s Laughter” or “Swift’s Pill”), and presumably it was about Shakespeare rather than Pushkin.

Sergeevna explains that all this artistic mystification was part of an extensive footnote to “Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099),” but up in the ITTDB Citadel, we’ve yet to track down the footnote. Perhaps it was part of the 1987 publication in [ex=bare]Знамя || Znamia[/ex], or maybe it did not appear until the story was published along with the rest of the cycle in Bitov’s 1988 collection, [ex=bare]Человек в пейзаже | Man in the landscape | Chelovek v peyzazhe[/ex]. It is not listed in the table of contents of [ex=bare]Преподаватель симметрии ] | | Prepodavatelʹ simmetrii[/ex](2008), which was translated to English as Symmetry Teacher (2014).