Arkady Davidowitz

Arkady Davidowitz (born Adolf Filippovich Freudberg, 12 June 1930, Voronezh) is a writer and aphorist, author of over 50,000 published aphorisms.

Davidowitz was born to a family of doctors – his father, Filipp Abramovich, was a venereologist, and mother, Raisa Solomonovna, a paediatrician. So by the aphorist's own admission, he was treated "first by Mum, then by Dad".

During the Soviet period, Davidowitz was published in the Krokodil magazine under the pseudonyms of Julius Caesar, Ernest Hemingway, Honoré de Balzac, and "French writer A. David" in the Smiles of All Sizes section, and his work included in many collections of aphorisms. Davidowitz financed the publication of his collection The Laws of Existence, Including Non-Existence in over twenty volumes.

In 1976, with friend and artist Valentina Zolotykh, the author founded in Voronezh a unique museum of aphoristics.

After the 2010 publication of the collection The End of the World Will End Well, Davidowitz began to be "recognised as an unrecognised genius" by an ever-widening group of people, which by summer 2012 had become a fan club. In October 2012, the club, under the aegis of, and with intellectual and material support from the Khovansky Foundation, launched a new educational project named The Aphorism as a Capital-Letter Word, promoting education through the learning of Davidowitz's aphorisms. On 21 March 2013, the project was officially affiliated to the Voronezh branch if the Moscow Institute of Humanities and Economics.

Davidowitz is a regular contributor to the Russian Humanist Society's Common Sense magazine.

Davidowitz's recent work has made him the most successful aphorist by quantity of aphorisms created. His most recent collections include An Anthology of Wisdom, An Anthology of Thought in Aphorisms, Russian Wisdom: from Vladimir Monomakh to the present day, The New Book of Aphorisms, and The Big Book of Aphorisms. By quantity of citations, Davidowitz by far surpasses authors such as Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, Arthur Schopenhauer, and many others. In the words of Russian society commentator Andrey Bilzho, "Davidowitz knows something about life which you, dear reader, and I do not."

The Davidowitz fan club's most ambitious project, Davidowitz's Decalingua, was officially launched on 29 May 2015, aiming to translate Davidowitz's latest collection, Je Suis Davidowitz, into ten world languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Farsi, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, Georgian, Polish and Hungarian. The idea of publishing the collection in ten languages was inspired by ten strings on Psaltery of King David and also by the Rosetta Stone, the discovery of which allowed for the restoration and interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system. By juxtaposing Davidowitz's aphorisms in ten different languages, of different language groups and families, is possible to rediscover ancient, but anthropologically universal, modes of thinking. The collection was translated into English by students of the University of Bath (U.K.) on exchange at Voronezh State University: Pascal Cisse, Katie Taylor and Radha Patel.

• Stanislaw Jerzy Lec