Even today, when more than twenty years have elapsed since the death of Vladimir Ivanovich Picheta, his image rises before my eyes as that of a living man. On the threshold of my own fiftieth birthday, I still sense a direct connection with my wise old teacher. As I recall the meetings of his graduate seminar (1943-1947), I return again to those thoughts and feelings that excited a scholar making his first steps in Slavic studies two decades ago. The years have not erased from memory that special excitement, that mood of acute intellectual elan and tense anticipation of a broad-gauge, meaningful conversation which my comrades and I would bring to the meetings he conducted (at the Slavic Sector of the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of History, and at the chairs of Western and Southern Slavs at Moscow University's Department of History) and, above all, to the graduate student seminars that met in his home.