2011-10-06 16:26:27  Georges Nivat, Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva and co–author of a monumental work entitled History of Russian Literature, is a renowned Slavist, literary historian and translator who describes himself as someone who, “lives life through the Russian language”. The scholar is sometimes musingly referred to as ‘The French Pillar of Russian Culture’ and his resarch covers a extremely broad range of topics – from Andrei Bely and Mark Kharitonov to his work on Soviet dissidents or the Russian landscape as myth.