Yura, let us think together!

 

The fate of a great scholar begins with a sheet of paper, a pencil in a child’s hand, and an adult man who sat down beside him in time and said: “Let us think together?!”

 

Once our grandmother told a story about her aunt, who, together with her family, lived through the Siege of Leningrad. Before the war, family jewels remained in the family. Among them there was a completely extraordinary thing – a golden doll, made of real gold. During the war, the aunt was forced to bury the family valuables in the ground. Together with them, the golden doll was also buried. According to grandmother’s stories, already after the war, during one of the meetings with employees of the institute, when scholars were collecting materials about the language, traditions, and culture of indigenous peoples, the aunt told one of the young researchers the story about the golden doll. Nearby was a still very young scholar. He heard this story. Hungry, frozen, living in the most difficult postwar conditions, he did not ask a single question. Not a single one at all. He could have asked where the jewels had been buried. When did this happen? Could they now be found? He could have asked dozens of questions. But he asked nothing. He knew that there are things that are not his business. When grandmother told us this story, she pronounced a phrase that we remembered for our whole life. “Se om juuri tozi inteligentne inimene. Inteligentne inimene om se, ken tedab, kus om hänen oma tehtäv, da kus se ei ole enämb hänen tehtäv.” This means: “This is precisely a man of true cultured intelligence. A man of cultured intelligence is a man who knows where his business is, and where it is no longer his business.” This is one of the most exact definitions of cultured intelligence that we have ever had to hear. These words were said about a man who, alone, deciphered the writing system of the ancient Maya civilization.

 

So we first learned about Yuri Knorozov, and then about his dream as well – thanks to the drawing that he made at the age of three. For a long time, this childhood dream did not leave us in peace. We returned to it again and again. We searched for the correct construction of the interpretation of the dream. It seemed to us that the solution was very near. That a little more, and the interpretation would become obvious. But each time something was missing.

 

Much later, after our emigration to the USA, that which we had to do happened. When our airplane was making a transatlantic flight, we did not think that the distance which appears between man and the place of his birth would one day become the most important part of the interpretation of the dream. We knew that we were leaving forever. But now we realize: we moved not simply from one country to another. We crossed our inner boundary, having acquired freedom – this was necessary both for us and for the dream itself. Yura’s dream was waiting for us, waiting for our act, and did not give us peace. Not a tourist journey to the USA, but precisely emigration to the USA was the main condition for it to become possible, decades later, finally to read Yuri Knorozov’s dream.

 

It turns out that, imperceptibly and very similarly, begins the story of those who once opened the map of the world, read books, saw photographs from other countries, and imagined that the world was great. This united all those who were born on the territory called the USSR, and in their experience there was one single arrangement of the world, where honest relations between people, a sincere desire to build relations in service to one another, loving one another and bearing responsibility for one’s words and acts, may be needed neither by the country nor by society.

 

When the first several years of relocation were behind us, when we had settled in, learned to live anew, and became capable of comprehending ourselves on a new, beautiful land, we returned to the childhood drawing of the boy Yura, because it became obvious: we had irrevocably changed in content and were fully ready to decipher the dream of the one who deciphered the writing system of the ancient Maya civilization.

 

On November 19, 1922, a wonderful, talented boy was born. Then the boy grew up. Then there was the war, the Siege of Leningrad, and then decades of scholarly work. In addition, for almost 40 years the scholar was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union. And precisely this man, having never once been to Mexico, having never once seen with his own eyes the ancient Maya cities, was able to decipher their writing system. And he did this alone.

 

Together with the young scholar, after the Second World War, quite a few Veps lived in Leningrad. They communicated much with ethnographers, became interlocutors of researchers, shared words of their language, songs, customs, family stories, and their own conceptions of the world. For scholars, these were priceless materials of field work. For the Veps themselves, this meant much more. This was a possibility to preserve the living memory of their people and the hope that the history of the Veps would not disappear. This hope was especially strong because the Veps had already lived through several waves of forced evictions to Siberia. Only those who found themselves in besieged Leningrad and physically could not be taken away remained within the limits of Leningrad. After the war, they hoped that together with destroyed Leningrad, historical justice would also be restored: that the authorities would recognize the pain caused to them, that respect for their language, culture, and right to choose the path of pure conscience and human dignity would return. And in this there was a symbolic parallel: just as postwar Leningrad, by the hands of young scholars, had to be literally raised from ruins, so the Veps helped scholars raise from ruins their own history.

 

Leningrad itself was in the most difficult condition. Institutes had been ruined, archives had partially perished, collections had been lost. Every card, every field diary, every photograph, every record had to be searched for, checked, and restored anew. Precisely for this reason, employees of scholarly institutions interacted so actively with the indigenous peoples living at that time on the territory of the Soviet Union. The scholars comprehended: if the living memory is not preserved now, tomorrow it may no longer remain. They did not yet know that their works would again be destroyed and devalued, that the meaning would be forcibly substituted by the authorities and confusion would be created between the concepts of “nationality” and “belonging to an indigenous people.” Into passports, in the fields “nationality,” would be entered the alien word “Russian,” thereby erasing the truth that the Veps are an indigenous people, who cannot have a nationality.

 

Something similar happened to millions of descendants of the Maya people. After the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, a terrible cultural rupture occurred. Spanish missionaries destroyed almost all the Maya codices. After this, professional scribes disappeared, and the writing became unreadable. Millions of people lived with temples, with monuments, but no one could read a single line. And in the 1950s, a young scholar did what absolutely the whole world considered impossible. And when it became clear that he had indeed done this, the entire civilized scholarly world stood on its ears. But the world of the USSR did not, and here is how it did not do this:

 

– The great scholar Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov suffered a stroke with subsequent pneumonia. For three days he lay in a hospital, shabby corridor. Alone. A man whom the whole civilized world knew, a man who was applauded in Mexico and in other countries, who had made one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century, lay alone in a corridor and died in complete loneliness;

 

– When Yuri Valentinovich died, professors from Mexico sent money for his funeral. Mexican scholars collected the funds that were allocated for a modest funeral. In addition, no one organized a worthy farewell for the great scholar;

 

– After the death of Yuri Knorozov, something began that is difficult to call otherwise than madness. People who called themselves his graduate students began to drag away the scholar’s archive and at the same time elevate their own names at the expense of his achievements. The situation reached absurdity – on the eve of the funeral, Knorozov’s personal belongings and his Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest award for foreign scholars, with which the Government of Mexico had awarded Yuri Valentinovich, were taken out of his house. As a result, on the day of the funeral, the scholar’s daughter, together with the militsiya, tried to catch up with the people who were taking away the valuable things. While Yuri Knorozov’s coffin was being lowered into the earth, she was running, literally, through the fields, trying to return her father’s legacy, and therefore did not arrive in time for the very moment of burial;

 

– In the early 1960s, the first electronic computing machines appeared in the famous Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Scholars were learning to use computing technology for processing an enormous mass of information. Yuri Valentinovich, on full trust, sent part of his developments to colleagues. After receiving these materials, scholars from Novosibirsk presented the matter as if the application of computing technology had made the main discovery and had deciphered the Maya writing system. There even appeared a book, whose authors were Yuri Kosarev and Eduard Evreinov. The book was called this: “The Application of Electronic Computing Machines in the Study of Maya Writing. Volume 1.” Then Volume 2 appeared, then Volume 3.

 

But there were also people who truly loved Yuri Knorozov:

 

– For the first time, Yuri Valentinovich came to the land of the Maya in 1990, when he was 68 years old. Yuri Valentinovich was flying to hot Guatemala. He was dressed in an extremely heavy winter coat and in an old fur hat that Anna Akhmatova had gifted him several decades earlier. When the airplane landed, the great scholar, of course, was helped to change into comfortable clothes; he was received as a state guest, and not simply as a scholar, but as a man to whom the country itself was indebted. The President of Guatemala personally invited Yuri Knorozov, and this was decades before Yuri Valentinovich himself flew there;

 

– Since Yuri for many years was not permitted to travel abroad, foreign colleagues-researchers came to him in Leningrad, seeking any possibility for a meeting with Yuri Valentinovich. And the purpose of their visit was only one thing – to thank, to embrace, and to look into his eyes. One of such people was a wonderful woman, Maria Teresa Franco. She is the head of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico. She specially flew to Leningrad and waited outside for a meeting with Yuri Knorozov. And then she did everything possible so that the arrival of the great scholar in Mexico would nevertheless take place. No less significant an act was committed by the talented director, the remarkable, beautiful woman Tiahoga Ruge. She made an entire film about Yuri Valentinovich. In the director’s head there was no question of where to get money for the filming. She did this with her own funds, having first organized the arrival of Yuri Valentinovich, despite his grave condition after the first stroke. In addition, Tiahoga Ruge and a group of scholars, having pooled their money, made the great scholar a gift: they organized for him a trip to the southwest of the USA, to the Santa Fe area, to the place of Mesa Verde, where the search for the legendary “Valley of the Seven Caves,” Chicomoztoc, was taking place. This expedition took place in May 1997. The route passed from Santa Fe through Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde. The purpose was to check Yuri Valentinovich’s hypothesis that the mythical “Valley of the Seven Caves” could have a real localization in the Mesa Verde area. When he arrived at this place and saw this miracle, he pronounced: “Yes, this is it – the ‘Valley of the Seven Caves!’” Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was truly happy; he found his refuge two years before his death. And by the will of Fate, eight years after the death of the great scholar, the safest place for Yuri Knorozov’s legacy turned out to be precisely the United States of America – the country to which his family transferred the archive in order to save it. The USA was the safest place for everything that the genius had done.

 

Little Yura’s dream did not simply wait for us. It led us. Decades later, we reached the place in which alone it was possible to see the boy’s dream correctly. First, our real American geographical coordinate had to arise, from which the interpretation of the dream became possible. We were able to do this and, standing on the territory of the beautiful country of the USA, in the beloved state of Oregon, which had become our home, we made our interpretation:

 

Before us is a little boy. He woke up after another dream, took a pencil, and drew what he had seen. On the sheet of paper two drawings are depicted and written additions are made. The sheet of paper is divided by a line into two halves. On the left side of the sheet a drawing is made, and beneath it is written: “A grass snake. Lives everywhere. Eats grass.” On the right side of the sheet a drawing is made, and beneath it is written: “Polenka. Polenki eat hay. They are similar to branches. They live in such places where there are more branches.”