Dmitriy Likhachev

Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachyov was a Soviet and Russian philologist, cultural historian, art historian, Doctor of Philological Sciences, professor, Russian literary scholar, historian of culture, textual critic, publicist, and public figure.

He was born on November 28 (Old Style: November 15), 1906, in Saint Petersburg, into an engineer’s family. In 1923, he graduated from a labor school and entered Petrograd University in the Department of Linguistics and Literature of the Faculty of Social Sciences. In 1928, he graduated from Leningrad University, having defended two diplomas, in Romano-Germanic and Slavic-Russian philology.

From 1928 to 1932, he was repressed: for participating in a scholarly student circle, Likhachyov was arrested and imprisoned in the Solovki camp. In 1931–1932, he was at the construction site of the White Sea–Baltic Canal and was released as a “Stakhanovite of Belbaltlag with the right to reside throughout the territory of the USSR.”

From 1934 to 1938, he worked in the Leningrad branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences publishing house. He attracted attention while editing A. A. Shakhmatov’s book, “Survey of Russian Chronicle Codes,” and was invited to work in the Department of Old Russian Literature at the Leningrad Institute of Russian Literature (the Pushkin House), where he conducted scholarly work from 1938 and headed the section of Old Russian literature from 1954. In 1941, he defended his Candidate’s dissertation, “The Novgorod Chronicle Codes of the 12th Century.”

In besieged Leningrad during the fascist blockade, Likhachyov, in collaboration with the archaeologist M. A. Tianova, wrote the pamphlet “The Defense of Old Russian Cities,” which appeared in 1942 during the blockade.

In 1947, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Essays on the History of the Literary Forms of Chronicle Writing in the 11th–16th Centuries.” From 1946 to 1953, he was a professor at Leningrad State University. In 195