It is with mixed feelings that I am writing these few words that preface the book dedicated to the memory of Professor Nikolai N. Seleznyov by his colleagues. As a mere layman in the field of knowledge that Nikolai studied, I can hardly give an expert appraisal of his scholarly achievements, which appears to be necessary in a text like this. On the other hand, there was no one—outside his family circle—who would fill the role of his close friend and confidant better than I did in the last three or four years: he shared freely his thoughts on very diverse subjects with me; we discussed his plans, both scholarly and personal; we addressed various topics ranging from science to affairs of the heart. His mother’s health featured prominently in our conversations—she suffered from a chronic disease of the blood necessitating a taxing chemotherapy course several times a year. As I had, in my time, got sick with leukemia and got over it, Nikolai regarded me as an expert. I appreciated his frankness very much, for Nikolai was not normally prone to bare his soul before people; besides, there was quite a “generation gap” between us—I was more than twenty years his senior.
In retrospect, when Nikolai first appeared in our Institute, it was by no means easy, and nothing promised that he would ever be on friendly terms with his colleagues or with me personally. He had been recommended for the position by our research fellow, a brilliant classical philologist. She had been a member of the Scholarly Council that was to pass (or not to pass) Nikolai’s PhD thesis, and was greatly impressed by the level of his scholarly expertise. It must be noted, however, that she was known as a very biased person—too lavish with her praise and too harsh in her criticism.
Besides, some of my coworkers were alarmed by the fact that the thesis in question had been prepared under the aegis of one of the Orthodox universities, the bodies having strong ties with religious ideology and the top hierarchs of the Church. So, they had formed in advance Nikolai’s vivid picture as a fanatical believer incessantly crossing himself and bowing down in worship. To make things worse, he specialized in Syriac Christianity, which is especially prominent in this respect.
Soon enough these grave misgivings proved totally biased and wrong, and Nikolai became an organic part of the Institute community with unbelievable ease. He became one of the most actively involved participants of the Seminar during whose sessions we discussed diverse theoretical bases of Asian cultures, while he repeatedly evinced profound knowledge of diverse problems, ranging from religious to linguistic ones. He delivered lectures only before small audiences: his impaired hearing—a condition that had been progressing since his childhood—prevented him from lecturing in large lecture halls. Two PhD theses have been written and defended under his guidance.
He applied himself to his favorite studies with untiring persistence. His works were being constantly published. They include more than twenty articles and the monograph Pax Christiana et Pax Islamica (N.N. Seleznyov, Pax Christiana et Pax Islamica: On the History of Interconfessional Relations in the Medieval Near East, Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, Moscow, 2014, 263 pp. [Orientalia and Classica Series, Issue XLV]) published as part of the series of proceedings of our Institute.
Having defended cum laude his Doctoral Thesis in May 2020, Nikolai Seleznyov rounded off, in a manner of speaking, an important stage in his scholarly career—his work on the cultural interaction between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. He then moved on to a new subject, viz. Buddhist motifs and the Buddha’s image in Islamic texts. His new work, a report titled “Islamobuddhica, or What was the ‘Nome’ Mentioned by Kamalashri?,” was ready by December of the same year and delivered at a session of his favorite “Cultures of the East” seminar.
An outstanding researcher, Nikolai N. Seleznyov, never refused to devote some of his time to important organizational matters of the Institute. As soon as our Institute for Oriental and Classical studies became a department of the HSE University, he set about creating and improving our Institute’s website, demonstrating enthusiasm and considerable knowledge of IT in the process and applying his fine artistic taste, computer savviness, and intimate understanding of the Institute’s goals, both scholarly and academic. Our website is, to this day, way better than the sites of other departments, schools, and institutes of the HSE university—all due to his efforts.
It seems that there is not a single person at our Institute that has not been helped by Nikolai in some way—be it by scholarly advice or by pointing out a useful book, article, or report, or by a precise appraisal of a Russian or foreign publication, or by a profound observation regarding publication strategy or the layout of an important presentation. But that was not the reason—or, more precisely, not the only reason—why he was universally admired. People loved him because it was absolutely impossible not to: Nikolai’s person simply radiated charisma, human dignity, and an aura of a scholar.
In May 2021, when the Covid-19 epidemic was at its worst, Nikolai had to rush his mother to hospital for an urgent procedure of chemotherapy at which they both contracted the dreaded disease, dying nearly on the same day. Luckily, neither had time to learn about the death of the other.
When he died, Nikolai was literally five days short of his 50-year anniversary; he passed away at the high point of his personal and scholarly career, when he had every right to expect so much of the future.
Our hearts and minds still cannot come to terms with that irreparable loss.
Ilya S. Smirnov († 9.02.2026)