If you feel at a loss for words after the events of the past week, you’re in good company. Dictators have a way of making language feel useless. Put another way, a tyrant is “the incarnate negation of a poet.”

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That’s how polyglot writer Vladimir Nabokov characterized the fictional ruler in the short story “Tyrants Destroyed,” where he also manages to find his tongue for some delightful Nabokovian insults for the big guy:

“Limited, coarse, little-educated.”

“A pigheaded, brutal, and gloomy vulgarian full of morbid ambition.”

Born in Czarist Russia, Nabokov fled to Germany to escape the Bolsheviks, and th

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