From the Memoirs about P. V. Palievskiy

Abstract

The author’s memoirs about meetings with P. V. Palievsky serve in the article as a material for reflection on the originality of the personality of an outstanding Russian scholar and his unique place in the scientific and social life of the USSR (Russia) of the 20th – early 21st centuries. The article testifies to numerous episodes related to work at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University at the turn of the 1960s–1970s of the legendary seminar of Palievsky and reflects from the point of view of a not indifferent eyewitness of the speeches of the scientist and thinker during the public discussion in 1977 in the Central House of Writers and at the International Congress of Slavists in 2003 in Ljubljana (Slovenia). The author notes that Palievsky’s thought and his peculiar ideology were based on Russian classical literature and the historical life of the Russian people, and traces how, in the conditions of the “break of times,” Palievsky invariably acted as a defender of centuriesold national values and meanings.