On December 31, 2005, quite unexpectedly for everyone, the life of a wonderful man and scientist, head of the Department of Asian and African Literatures of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology, Professor Nikolai Ivanovich Nikulin ended. Nikolai Ivanovich was born on October 3, 1931 in Moscow in the family of a worker. In 1949, he entered the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies at the Chinese department and specialized in Xinjiang, studying the Uyghur language. But in his final year, he took up the extremely difficult Vietnamese language on his own and attended lectures by Academician A. A. Huber on the history of Southeast Asia at Moscow State University. Knowing that the Soviet embassy in Hanoi does not have a single person who knows the country's language, N. I. Nikulin offered his services to the Foreign Ministry and was sent to the embassy as an intern, but very soon received the position of vice-consul. Since then, Nikolai Ivanovich's whole life has been connected with Vietnam. As you know, Russian Orientalists did not come to the attention of Southeast Asia for a long time, and the languages and culture of this region were not studied. In the 1930s, the sinologist Yu. K. Shchutsky compiled a textbook of the Vietnamese language and wrote a pamphlet "The System of the Annam Language" (Leningrad, 1936), but after his arrest in 1937, teaching of the Vietnamese language ceased. The formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the establishment of relations with it required urgent training of experts in the Vietnamese language, history and culture of this country, and N. I. Nikulin took a very direct part in this work, working together with colleagues to compile the first "Vietnamese-Russian Dictionary", which was published in Moscow in 1961. Working in Vietnam, Nikulin improved in the language and became one of the best translators from Vietnamese. It was not for nothing that for many years he was assign ... Read more