William Gerhardie was born in St. Petersburg in 1895, on the edge of all the twentieth century would become. His childhood home, built by his British parents, the father from a family long cotton brokers there, was “a baroque house, replica of a wing of the Vienna Belvedere, built as a permanent stronghold on a quay overlooking the Neva . . . which accommodated several big industrialists, the Swedish Nobel among them—each with his appropriate mansion next to his works . . . . An unfortunate combination,” since it suggested to the workers in the mills “that they were [working] to enable the owner to live in his mansion . . . which during strikes and revolutions prompted them to hurl stones through the windows . . . . We children would be drawn away . . . while a squadron of Cossacks, summoned by telephone, occupied the mill-yard . . . . So it came about that what had been built as stronghold was taken from us at the end of eighteen years.”

The first chapter in his Memoirs of a Polyglot(1931), an autobiography more or less confirming as fact much that he had already written as fiction, is entitled “Birth of an Author.” As the fifth child of six he would joke that his parents had had to produce four before achieving a masterpiece—for he was considered the family fool. His elder sister was “fragile, lovely and hysterical” and possibly an early prototype of his