Lately I have been thinking about some wonderful teachers I was blessed with at university. Three, in particular, shaped my life. Had I not encountered them, I doubt that I myself would have become an author of fiction, a translator and a teacher.

Yet I wonder if most of us realize, when we are being taught by truly inspiring people , that they are giving us the greatest good fortune of our youth?

My first such inspiration came from Vladimir Markov, my Russian professor at UCLA in the early 1960s. My understanding of his greatness came much later, yet his passion for the Russian language infected me from the beginning. I didn't realize until two decades later that I had been taught Russian conversation by the world's leading expert on Russian Futurism.