I think Alex is mistaken here. James learned Russian in the 1970s, originally to be able to read and review the works of Solzhenitsyn as soon as they came out, rather than wait for a translation to appear. I am fairly sure that this is mentioned in some of the reviews he wrote for the London Review of Books in the 1980s. His abilities here have been criticised - see the debate about his review of Voznesensky in the New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7631 He has also, according to a 2001 interview http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s351989.htm learned to speak Japanese. According to another article http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/06/25/FFXM9WS4DOC.html "Clive James is a polyglot. He speaks, with varying degrees of fluency, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Japanese." I don't know how good he is in any of these languages, but he clearly has enough Russian to be able to read and review literary works in the original. (Which is more than I can....)