Vladimir Nikolayevich Toporov (5 July 1928 - 5 December 2005) was a leading Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n philologist

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 associated with the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school

Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School

Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School is a scientific school of thought in the field of semiotics that was formed since 1964 and led by Juri Lotman. Among the other members of this school were Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky, Isaak...

. His wife was Tatyana Elizarenkova

Tatyana Elizarenkova

Tatyana Elizarenkova was a distinguished Soviet Russian Indologist and linguist, known for her study of the Vedas....

.

Toporov authored more than 1500 works, including Akhmatova and Dante (1972), Towards the Reconstruction of the Indo-European Rite (1982), Aeneas: a Man of Destiny (1993), Myth. Rite. Symbol. Image (1995), Holiness and Saints in the Russian Spiritual Culture (1998), and Petersburg Text of Russian Literature (2003). He translated the Dhammapada

Dhammapada

The Dhammapada is a versified Buddhist scripture traditionally ascribed to the Buddha himself. It is one of the best-known texts from the Theravada canon....

 into Russian and supervised the ongoing edition of the most complete vocabulary of the Prussian language to date (5 volumes).

Among Toporov's many honours were the USSR State Prize

USSR State Prize

The USSR State Prize was the Soviet Union's state honour. It was established on September 9, 1966. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the prize was followed up by the State Prize of the Russian Federation....

 (1990), which he turned down to voice his protest against the repressive policies of the Soviet administration in Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

; the first ever Solzhenitsyn Prize

Solzhenitsyn Prize

The Solzhenitsyn Prize is a a non-governmental Russian literary award established by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1997.The $25,000 prize is awarded for "works in which troubles of the Russian life are shown with rare moral purity and sense of tragedy, for consecutiveness and...

 (1998), and the Andrei Bely Prize

Andrei Bely Prize

The Andrei Bely Prize is the oldest independent literary prize awarded in Russia. It was established in 1978 by the staff of Hours, the largest samizdat literary journal in Leningrad, to recognize excellence in three categories: prose, poetry, and theory...

 for 2004. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....

and many other scholarly societies.

External links

Obituary by the Russian Ministry of Culture