Eugenio Bulygin (1931–2021): The Wonderful Russian

• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Author: J. J. Moreso
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12325

© (2021) John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 34 No. 3 September (282–285)

Eugenio Bulygin (1931– 2021):

The Wonderful Russian

J. J. MORESO*

On May 11, 2021, in Buenos Aires Eugenio Bulygin died— a victim of the COVID

pandemic— shortly before his ninetieth birthday. Indeed, he was born on July 25,

1931, in Kharkov, Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union. During his first years

the world he was living in was chaotic. He was born in a family of educated profes-

sionals who had to flee both from the Stalinist terror and from the German occupa-

tion, to end up in Linz, Austria, after the Second World War. In 1949, under UN

auspices, his parents decided to emigrate to Argentina. Eugenio obviously spoke

Russian; he had learnt German in Austria and had rudiments of French and English,

but not of Spanish. I remember that he once told me that in Buenos Aires he used to

spend time at a chess club where the language was less important, and that is how he

became acquainted with Spanish.1

From 1953 to 1958 he studied at the law school of the University of Buenos Aires.

During these years, he started to get involved with the legal philosophy group di-

rected by Prof. Ambrosio Gioja, a very talented scholar, albeit with a limited written

production. In this group there were some very gifted legal philosophers, such as

Genaro Carrió, who later would become a close friend of Eugenio, and also president

of the Argentinian Supreme Court, following the end of the military dictatorship.

Most importantly, however, that is where Bulygin met Carlos Alchourrón, who

would also become a personal friend, a coauthor of many publications, and his gate-

way to analytic philosophy.2 In 1963, Bulygin earned his Ph.D. at the University of

Buenos Aires and, in the following years in the 1960s, he was awarded several fellow-

ships for research stays at German universities (Cologne and Bonn) and at the

University of Oxford. During these stays, Bulygin formed deep academic contacts

1 A good biographical sketch can be found in Bulygin and Litschewski Paulson 2015.

2 Genaro Carrió would sometimes, in jest, write epitaphs for his friends. It seems that he did the

same for Alchourrón and Bulygin: “De la tierra de Chejov y de Kosygin, / a la tierra de Gardel

y de Perón, / sabios dioses trajeron a Bulygin, / como es lógico, a brazos de Alchourrón.” That

is to say: “From the homeland of Chekhov and Kosygin, / to the homeland of Gardel and Perón,

wise gods brought Bulygin, / as is logical, into the arms of Alchourrón.” This anecdote, like so

many others, was told to me by another close friend of Bulygin, his brother- in- law, Prof. Ernesto

Garzón Valdés. In fact, when I was rector of Pompeu Fabra University, in October 2011, Ernesto

and Eugenio were distinguished as honorary doctors at my university.

* The title of this short essay was inadvertently provided to me by Ronald Dworkin, who at a

dinner in Barcelona in 2011 exclaimed to me, “Ah, Eugenio Bulygin, the wonderful Russian.”