Victor Markovich Zhivov

Many perceive this loss as personal, because Viktor Markovich was a beloved friend, attentive and generous for kindness and sympathy for us. In general, he is somehow not in a modern way-with curiosity and sympathy-he treated people, each person was interesting to him. After listening to how the interlocutor sharply responds about some kind of acquaintance, Zhivov usually began his remark with the words: “You know, I have a great relationship with him”-and told what this person is entertaining. Sometimes it was a question of some completely worthless character, but here Viktor Markovich said under the laughter of others: “You know, I have a great relationship with him,” and then explained why this person deserves condescension. This did not prevent him from being an irreconcilable opponent of Evil, to expose him on street demonstrations, on television and in print.

He was a real righteous man who knew how to, as if in some gambling game, deftly and fun beat the demon-guide sitting in each of us. I think that his classes of science were inspired

Not idle curiosity, but by searching for ways to defeat this inventive human enemy. This gave him that one not constrained by tradition and other people's views on the spiritual life of a person and the history of culture, which helps to see really important scientific problems and find their solutions.

Viktor Markovich left us a large, unusually rich and fascinating scientific heritage. He was interested in a wide variety of issues regarding the Russian language, ancient Russian writing, Russian literature of different eras, the history of Byzantine and Russian cultures, Russian church history. Mountains of scientific books are written on these topics. But the monographs and articles of Zhivov are strongly standing out on this landscape, rebuilding its perspective. For example, he put forward the original concept of the development of the Russian literary language, demonstrating how the dynamics of its development depends on the interaction of different written language registers, correlated with different communicative situations. This concept made it possible to remove those problems that remained unresolved in constructions based on the concepts of church-Slavic-Russian bilingualism or church-Slavic-Russian diglossia. Studying the history of the language of the Petrine era, the animal created a fundamentally new picture of the development of the literary language in the 18th century, showing how the Russian concepts of linguistic construction dialectically interacted with language practice. Thanks to the deep knowledge of the processes of the development of Russian society, V.M. Zhivov presented vivid works on Russian historical semantics, describing semantic shifts, which changed the significance of many elements of abstract vocabulary.

The works of Zhivov in the field of ancient Russian spelling are also caused by interest in the person of the past, his daily life and the conditions of his existence. Here, a subtle linguistic analysis allowed Viktor Markovich to reconstruct the spelling rules that were guided by the scribes, to find out the attitude of spelling to the live pronunciation of the scribes and in this way to get knowledge about the features of their language.

A cheerful worker, Zhivov managed in everything: gave lectures, wrote books, read a lot and was better than many in the scientific literature, regularly wrote many reviews of work sent to different scientific magazines. He published Tom Historical, Philosophical and Historical and Literary works of N.S. Trubetskoy, volume of historical linguistic works by N.N. Durnovo, volume of the early works of G.A. Gukovsky.

V.M. Zhivov was a wonderful storyteller and a born lecturer. He loved to speak to students, taught for many years at Moscow State University and then at the University of California at Berkeley. It was difficult not to love the professor who, with his knowledge of the theology of the Maximus Confessor and the iconoclastic disputes in the Byzantium of the VIII-IC centuries, was no more proud of than his inimitable ability to imitate a roosture scream. On the Internet you can find many video recordings of his scientific lectures and performances.

Already knowing about his deadly illness, a few days before the death, Viktor Markovich gave his last lecture in Berkeley.

He managed to finish one of his most important books - the monumental work “History of the Russian Literary Language”. Exegi Monumentum Aere Perennius ...

Alexander Moldovan, academician,
Director of the Institute of the Russian Language. V.V. Vinogradova