Petr Aleshkovsky is a prose writer and historian, author of novels “The Fortress” (Russian Booker Prize, 2016), “Fish,” “The Life of Khork,” and “Vladimir Chigrintsev.” After graduating from the Department of Archaeology at Moscow State University, for several years he worked on restoring monuments of the Russian North. The novel “Arlequin” is a biography of an unjustly forgotten Russian genius, poet of the early 18th century Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky—educator, translator, academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, creator of the system of Russian verse that we use to this day.