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 new form of teaching; we had insisted on it in the then council representing the department and had got our way.

I was given a few of these courses to run. And so began my teaching in the University. Since it was common practice to criticise the teachers, I felt it quite a challenge to be one such teacher, and me with a half-finished Bachelor’s degree. How to make proper contact with the students was the first thing to learn. This may have been taught but each encounter was always new nonetheless, and challenging. Various teaching situations, meeting students, have been the best experience of all in the University. They even beat those eureka moments you get from research work.

For the last two decades my work in the University was dominated by work with postdocs. Thanks to the international dimension of the projects, those writing their doctorates have come from Finland, but also Russia, Estonia and the United States. My own, lively young international research community was at its best the leader’s pride and joy.

Popularising my field of research has always been a priority. When I retired before Christmas in 2010, I also organised for the general public a lecture series ‘My Russian classics’, in which I called upon my colleagues from various areas to speak – postgrad students of mine who had already graduated and a few non-academic friends. The series was brought to a conclusion with my own valedictory lecture. There was a demand to continue with the lectures and since then I have been involved in arranging several series on Russian literature.

The most remarkably popular event came in the autumn of 2012 with the set of dialogues – ‘Twelve chairs’. I discussed with twelve Finnish authors their choice of Russian works of literature or topics. By the end of the series, there was as many as 600 people in the audience: full house. For all that my most cherished memories are still of the first term’s teaching and this farewell series forty years later. It’s a great pleasure to be continuing in various ways as professor emeritus.

Additional information about the pictures

Picture 10

On a chilly spring excursion with students to the sea fortress in the mid-1990s. The trip was organised by students’ ‘Uudemman venäläisen kirjallisuuden klubi’ – the ‘more contemporary Russian literature club’. The members of this club have later become Russianists working in various fields, many of those in the photograph researchers, doctors and professors.

Picture 11

Peeter Torop from the University of Tartu, at his karonka party in 1995. Pekka Pesone is administering the gift – a gentle beating with a Finnish sauna vasta, or  ‘switch’. “Torop was a student of Juri Lotman’s whom I got to know in 1987. Between 1990-96 he was a visiting lecturer in Russian literature at our department. He defended his doctoral thesis in Helsinki with the world-famous Russian cultural scholar and semiotician Boris Uspenski acting as opponent. Nowadays Torop is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Tartu.