Released to the public for the first time in in 1887, Esperanto had its specific origins in the fertile brain of a single individual, Zamenhof, and in the particular circum-stan-ces into which he was born and came of age. It is the story of these origins that Aleksander Korzhenkov's biography sets out to tell. -- That biography was originally published in Esperanto; the present version, in Ian Richmond's excellent translation, is an abridged version...