[KS] 90th Birthday of Prof. Lev Rafailovich Kontsevich

[Vladimir Tikhonov]

Dear colleagues,
I am writing this announcement to inform you that today is a special day for the Russian/Russophone Korean Studies. On this day, September 3, 1930, Lev Rafailovich Kontsevich was born. Originally a denizen of Moscow and currently a resident of San Francisco,  Prof. Kontsevich is one of the longest-living veterans of Soviet Korean Studies, and indeed one of the people who laid the foundations for Korea research in Soviet Union and subsequently post-Soviet states. The system of Cyrillic transcription of Korean currently in use in most post-Soviet state was, for example, worked out by Prof. Kontsevich on the basis of the earlier phonological research by Alexander Kholodovich. It is popularly known as 'Kholodovich-Kontsevich system' - basically the Soviet equivalent of McCune-Reischauer system in the Anglophone world. 
Born in 1930 in Tambov were his father worked as airplane engine designer, Prof. Kontsevich was educated at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (currently the Institute of Asian and African Studies affiliated with Moscow State University). Concurrently with his research as a PhD student he worked as a translator for the special 'Korean' groups at the Higher Party School where the cadres from Democratic People's Republic of Korea were being schooled in ideology and other related subjects. This and other engagement with Soviet-North Korean relationship allowed Prof. Kontsevich to be acquainted with some of the leaders of North Korean academia, including the famed Marxist historian Paek Namun (I still remember the history Prof. Kontsevich once told me, about a Leningrad-Moscow train being delayed for some minutes because Comrade Paek was arriving late to the station....). Later Prof. Kontsevich was in charge of the premier academic publication of the Soviet 'Oriental Studies', the journal which was at these years named <The Peoples of Asia and Africa>. It was the post-Stalinist age, and a number of interesting discussions was taking place on the pages of that journal, including one about the Marxian 'Asian Mode of Production.' (AMP). AMP as a theory is long dead, but the discussion was an important one since it helped to turn the attention of Soviet researchers, still shackled by the pseudo-Marxist 'slave owning to feudalism to capitalism' scheme, to the importance of state redistribution in many non-European pre-modern bureaucratic states. In 1973 Prof. Kontsevich defended his PhD thesis on the promulgation of Korean alphabet, which was published in book form in 1979. An extremely well-annotated translation of 訓民正音 解例本, with extensive foreword on the process of Korean alphabet creation, this book was a milestone in the history of the Soviet Korean Studies. Prof. Kontsevich belonged to the generation of multi-disciplinary scholars. Among his ca. 300 works (including 18 books), one finds research on Korean history, mythology (Tan'gun myth), onomastics, phonology, alphabet, and grammar, as well as edited collections of Korean poetry (both sijo and the poetry in classical Chinese) and classical prose. I am afraid that the erudition and comprehensiveness on this scale are almost gone now, in the age of extreme compartmentalization of research...Prof. Kontsevich remained productive until very recently: his last published monograph, a reference book on Korean toponyms, dates by 2018. 
On behalf of all my colleagues from the Russophone Korean Studies world, I sincerely wish Lev Rafailovich good health, longevity and perhaps even continuous engagement with Korea research!
For everybody's reference, the bibliography of Prof. Kontsevich's academic writings is available here: http://www.rauk.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1141:2011-04-02-193316&catid=126:2011-04-02%2019:33:16&lang=ko&Itemid=143
Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja), Oslo, September 3, 2020.