I was still at school when I first read Dostoevsky’s novels, and it got me interested in studying Russian. On the first language course in what was then Leningrad, I encountered Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, at once a real and fictional city, both beautiful and daunting, dark and deceptive. This combination…

My research work on Russian modernism and postmodernism had a lot to do with the many taboos and prohibitions of the Soviet era, what you could and couldn’t say or study. In that tangle I got to know some superb Russian academics, young and not so young, many of whom…

I held my first course in the University in autumn 1970. They were practicum type courses, in the general literature subject world literature was dealt with in its “entirety”. The students wrote short essays, and then these formed the basis of a discussion led by the teacher. It was a…

In international matters my biggest contribution has been to lead research projects. I have been involved in organising at least twenty international symposia. The ones I remember most fondly were the so-called Tartu seminars, starting in 1987. The Nordic graduate school in Russian literature was extremely active for several years…

Pekka Pesonen, Professor of Russian Literature, retired at the beginning of 2011. On December 13, 2010 he delivered his farwewll lecture “Mistä ihmiset elävät? – Venäläisen kirjallisuuden kysymykset ja vastaukset” (’What men live by - Russian literature’s questions and answers’):