“If I was given some kind of flight resource, then I exhausted it to the maximum extent, working at the Institute of Slavic Studies”. The memoirs of Yu. P. Gusev

Abstract

At the request of the editors of the Slavic World in the Third Millennium, Yury Pavlovich Gusev (born in 1939), Doctor of Philology, a well-known researcher and translator of Hungarian literature, speaks about his life and path in science. Yu.P. Gusev was born and raised in the Urals. After graduating from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, he worked for two years as a teacher of Russian language and literature in a Hungarian village in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, having perfectly mastered the Hungarian language. After post-graduate studies in the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of USSR, he became a member of that Institute and worked there until the early 1990s, rising from junior to leading researcher. A quarter of a century of his activity is associated with the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked in 1994–2019 as a leading researcher. Since the early 1970s, Yuri Pavlovich has been actively combining his research work with his work as a translator of Hungarian fiction, both classical and contemporary. For his merits in the field of translation and study of Hungarian literature Yu. P. Gusev was awarded prestigious state awards and prizes in Hungary. Yu. P. Gusev talks about his childhood during the war and in the first post-war years, his youth, studies at the Moscow University and his impressions of those times, his work at the Institute of World Literature and the Institute of Slavic Studies, his many trips to Hungary and communication with Hungarian colleagues. He also shares his opinion on the development of the Hungarian studies in Russia, the possibilities for further dialogue between the two cultures. The article was prepared with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 21-59-23002 "Soviet-Hungarian scientific relations in the field of the humanities: communication channels, intellectual presence, transfer of ideas (1945–1991)". Interviewed and prepared the text for publication by A.S. Stykalin.