In 1985, an author has visions of a time traveler named Igor from 2099. The traveler is being sent by his comrades in the domed city of St. Petersburg back to the 19th century, where he is tasked with capturing images and audio of motherland’s supreme father of poetry, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin.

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).

Based on a review at the Modern Novel website, part of this story involves the devil showing photographs of the future to a man named Vanoski (an obscure author from the 1930s). So, we’ve got photos-from-the-future, but no actual time travel. However, there is time travel in another story (“Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099)”) from the Teacher of Symmetry Cycle. And just to pile satire on top of satire, the 16 stories in the cycle were purportedly written by an obscure Englishman named A. Tired-Boffin, and Bitov was merely the humble messenger who provided translations of these lost gems into Russian.

Also, according to Fantlab[/b] and Labirint, this is the central story of Bitov’s Teacher of Symmetry Cycle, which consists of 16 of avant-garde stories by an unknown English author, A. Tired-Boffin (1859–1937). Bitov purportedly found and translated some of these stories to Russian.