During 1992/93 he was a visiting professor and Fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in Upstate New York. During 1993 he also took a visiting professorship at the University of California at San Diego. While he studied and taught in Paris his wife had been able to visit him for the odd week, but New York and California were too far from Moscow for that to be practical, so she had accompanied him throughout his time in America. There were no possibilities for a free-spirited Russian language writer and performer of poetry to recreate her Moscow career on the American West Coast, and Anna Alchuk desperately missed her life in Moscow. Russians who had grown up before 1991 had learned to think of Moscow as an intellectually stifling environment for intellectuals such as the Ryklins, but by 1995 - and until around 2000 - there was a widespread perception that when it came to freedom of thought and expression, Russia was becoming more like the rest of Europe by the day. During the middle part of the decade the couple abandoned their life in America and returned home to Moscow. In 1994 Michail Ryklin accepted a visiting professorship at the Russian State University for the Humanities.