Averintsev died

At seventeen, a person needs landmarks. In the second half of the 70s, it was difficult to find landmarks at the philological faculty, but they helped. And so I hold in my hands the library number of the unscientific magazine "Youth" (1969, # 1) with the "commendable word of philology", from the first page the soft young face is watching, and I am amazed to read that this young man received the Lenin Komsomol award for the study of Plutarch. What does the Lenin Komsomol have to do with it? And the "commendable word ...", rewritten almost as a whole, so since then it has remained for me the only intelligible justification for our strange, it is not necessary. Through it, philology was revealed as a “service of understanding”, philology, which “belongs to the whole human world”, in other words, philology with a human face, with its soft, enlightened, almost blessed face. This face seemed inappropriate, not compatible with the total landscape of the 60s, and our 70s, as incompatible as Plutarch with Komsomol.

The philological fashion, which seized and still has not released the best minds of my generation, called the other way. Averintsev did not call anywhere. But he was , and what he did was absolutely convincing and undoubtedly in moral terms.

"The everyday ability to understand people is a form of knowledge, quite foreign in relation to what is usually called scientific; the unsettledness of this element from F. gives the latter (like all the actual humanitarian types of analysis) is very universal and apparently archaic. Physianity. Exact methods (mathematical." The meaning of the word), strictly speaking, only in purely in a purely purely purely The peripheral regions of it do not affect its essence. That is, the right to admit his subjectivity, to cultivate subjectivity.

I brought this long quote from the encyclopedic article “Philology” (CLE. T. 7. M., 1972. Stlb. 975), so that the words of Averintsev say: the moral effort is not only accompanied by the study, but is reflected as the basis of the method.

In his student years, we reprinted the literature (Erica takes four copies ”) and Averintsev’s lecture on Pico Della Mirandol, I wrote behind him under a carbon copy. The character was absolutely unfamiliar to me, but from that lecture I was firmly remembered: when extreme opinions come across, truth not in the middle, but in another place. This was the main discovery - another measurement of thought, I don’t know, the fourth or fifth, but another - and “other” philology, unlike neither the Soviet literary criticism, or to the Moscow -Tartussian structural school. This philology was "in another place" and dealt with the truth. And the more specific the subject of the statement was ("to understand the meaning of the inscription over the conch of the central apse of Sofia Kyiv", 1972), the more tangible its spiritual meaning came.

Who could know that 15 years later, it would be so easy to talk with the celestial, and not because the distance was reduced - it could not be reduced - but because he was a normal person who was warmly discussing the policy, joking about the "hospital for morons" (Central Design Bureau), where he was almost hilarious - he was a normal, but a sick person, and all my life I would remember how I had a subcity of one report. Its to the attack of asthma.

And all my life I will remember how in Sheremetyevo he and his wife retired to the plane on the pipe - with one hand she rolled a chair where he was already sitting almost ethereal, the other carried a suitcase. Then, in 1992, he was given lives for a week, and we, looking in the back, only thought: would they have time? Then they managed, cured. And after 11 years, they did not have time in the May day in blessed Rome, they were late for 20 minutes.

While Averintsev was alive, one could say in the present tense: our great philology. Now you can’t say that.