The strong temptation is to begin every session here with the words ‘The irony is …’ I’m poor in everything but ironies, and to be truthful, I’ve forgotten what’s so good about irony in the first place. It’s just the resting state of the universe. Johnson puts it best in a section I can recall from memory. ‘The real state of sublunary nature,’ he calls it, ‘in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose.’

But the truth is that the irony he describes in those easy pairings – revellers sharing the world with mourners, Wile E. Coyote foiled by the Road Runner’s cheery energy – is simply the last available meaning before the significance of anything decays to random chance. Many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose. Good becomes bad, bad good; love degenerates to dullness and senseless animosity. Irony is not order, but it gives a shape to things. We can’t believe that a rational God had a hand in this chaos, but we’re not quite ready to sign up to the devastating truth of Johnson’s last line. Our faith in irony is a sticking plaster to restore our loss of Faith in its larger sense. God is not just, perhaps, but his grasp of irony shows that at least he has a sense of humour. That is supposed to be comforting.

*

I’ve tried to tell the truth since the moment I got here, but the baroque involutions, the doublings and false corridors of my story have clearly done me no favours with the chumps who run this place; even to me, as I relive it, it resembles some half-understood allegory – a form that I loathe. I know it partakes of the comic – necessarily: the conventions of genre are not shared by the true state of sublunary nature – but it is not funny. In the end, only two facts stand out to me with absolute clarity: I love my children and I’m going to die. And then again, of whom has that not been true?

The first week of my incarceration, I began a letter to Lucius and Sarah in which I attempted to set out briefly what I believe has happened to me. I had to stop after a few paragraphs. Now, addressing myself to the same question in this longer form has led me to wonder whether, even if it were possible, it’s desirable for them to know my story. Better perhaps for them to believe what the world believes: that their father died in a road traffic accident. Although there is a larger ethical principle at stake. What was done to Jack was wrong. Whichever Ivan or Mikhail or Dimitrii they have parked me in must have been taken by force or deception and dispossessed of everything he had. I may be, broadly speaking, the beneficiary of the deed, but that doesn’t make me blind to its depravity.

*

The three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth involved me in a host of academic obligations, colloquia, symposia, festschriften – even television programmes. I gave a talk at Johnson’s house in Gough Square and addressed the Streatham Historical Society when they unveiled a plaque outside the Samuel Johnson, a pub with no connection to the man, and whose illiterate and violent clientele present us with another joyless irony. There was a slew of new biographies, capitalising on the rare currency of their subject; and the third volume of my edition of the Letters was due to be published in December. In the end, the book would miss its deadline and publication would be set back to the following year, but I spent the second half of May revisiting the letters as I began the slow work of proofreading and finalising the indexing.

The last section of the book includes a number of undated letters that have turned up since the Hyde edition of 1992–4, as well as the letters of 1784 which Boswell suppressed because of their unpleasant content. In them, Johnson recounts at painful length his struggles with asthma, dropsy and insomnia. I was working off new transcriptions in many cases, some of which I’d made during a two-month sabbatical in America. One was a defective fragment that I had found in the Beinecke Library. I give it in Chapman’s 1952 version as my own is unavailable to me:

… bleeding, and Physick, and … innumerable Miseries. There are many Ups and Downs in the world, and my dearest Mistress, I <have?> been down, and up, and down again. When you are up again, keep up.

As I pored over it in mid-May, a week or so after the encounter at the St James’s Square mansion, it struck me how inferior it was qua Johnson to Jack Telauga’s work. And yet it is undeniably the real thing. Where are the sonorous Latinisms of Johnson in his pomp? All gone; all lost; instead only weak little words, and the desperate, failed attempt to think up a sustaining apophthegm – and is there a scoutmaster or an agony aunt on earth who would demean themselves to the point of offering when you are up again, keep up as counsel to the bereaved and hopeless? The wisest man in English letters is reading us the contents of a fortune cookie. It is tragic in the truest sense: the young lose their youth, the beautiful their beauty and the wise their wisdom.

I had mentioned nothing to anyone about my work for Hunter or the meeting with Jack Telauga. The episode was simply too humiliating, too redolent of failure, too reminiscent of Ron Harbottle’s catastrophic lapse.

From here, the DHU, fetid antechamber to the afterlife, I see that one of the most harmful patterns in my previous existence was my pose as an emotionally invulnerable intellectual. It flattered me and concealed my hurt and resentment at the world; but like all such damaging routines it was barren and self-perpetuating. How different things might be today if I had been able to admit someone else to the sanctum of my fear and worry.

But over the next few days, the immediate sting of embarrassment lessened. I found a new freshness in Johnson’s writing; there was less drudgery and more horripilation. As I read, I thought of Telauga’s wounded eyes, and the ghostly voice of the forged letters: abhorrent machine.

*

On the weekend of the second May Bank Holiday, Leonora took the children to visit her parents in Oxford. I stayed in London, ostensibly to catch up on work and marking. On the Monday morning, I cycled across Clapham and into the West End with a leather-bound copy of Fanny Burney’s Evelina and a box of alphonso mangoes. There were Bank Holiday crowds along Piccadilly and outside the Royal Academy, but St James’s Square was quiet.

Vera Telauga answered the door in slippers. I told her that I was just passing by and wanted to drop off some small gifts. Her face betrayed no surprise. She invited me in.

‘My brother is asleep,’ she said, as she led me into that enormous drawing room.

‘I hope you don’t mind my visiting,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about your brother a lot. Johnson takes up a large part of my waking life. It’s rare to find such commonality of interest with anyone. Even among scholars. Last time I was at a conference, all anyone wanted to talk about was The Wire.’

‘I don’t know to which wire you are referring,’ she said. ‘But then I am a stranger in your country.’ She tucked her feet under herself as she sat. Bykov slouched in carrying two espressos on a tray and some Spanish biscuits. ‘You were impressed with his work?’

‘More than impressed. It’s extraordinary. I’m very curious to read some of his other writing. Does he only write in that style?’

‘Yes, only Johnson,’ she said. ‘It’s a form of savantism, as Hunter explained.’

‘How did it come about? I mean, his first language is Russian, right?’

She looked slightly uncomfortable at my questions.