The life of Simon Boyanus (1871–1952) was so different and fruitful that one could be confused about the number of authors hidden under his name. He has graduated from the St. Petersburg University (the Department of History and Philology), fi nished Drama Course, was an actor and a director, wrote articles on the history of medieval theater, worked at the History of Arts Institute. He was a student of phonetics at L. V. Shcherba`s course, and founded Institute of Phonetics and the Phonetic School with him. In 1920s he studied phonetics in London with D. Jones and L. E. Armstrong. He was a Germanic cycle courses lecturer at Leningrad State University and published his first textbook of English phonetics for Russian speakers in 1926. In 1928–1930 he was a co-author of the famous English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries with V. K. Mueller. In 1934 Boyanus emigrated to the UK where he published a textbook of Russian phonetics for British students, bringing together the achievements of Russian and British