Explanatory dictionaries, entirely composed of aphorisms, appeared a long time ago. The most famous is Leonard Louis Levinson's Dictionary of Unreliable Definitions (1966); it was he who served as the closest model for the “Aphoristikon.” “Aphoristikon,” however, is by no means a translation of Levinson’s dictionary. The list of sources I used includes several hundred titles; the most important of them are listed at the end of the book. Like Levinson and his successors, I sometimes allowed myself to slightly modify the original aphorism so that the key word came first. Most of the foreign aphorisms included in the book were translated specifically for this edition, mainly from English and Polish, to a lesser extent. from French and German.

Konstantin Dushenko