VILEN Vladimirovich Sikorsky was called a professor long before he officially received the title.
It is so not only because of his "professorial appearance" but also his broad knowledge about the culture, literature and languages of Nusantara.
During his 65 years of creative activity that coincided with the formation of the Soviet Malay-Indonesian Studies, he was one of the prominent members, occupying a niche as the founder of research in modern Indonesian literature.
Being a gifted translator and one of the leading teachers of the Indonesian and Malay languages, he proved to be a talented organiser of the Nusantara Society, and beyond it.
Sikorsky was born on March 27 in 1932 in the famous city of Odessa. However, he did not consider himself a real Odessan because by the age of 1, he had moved to Moscow.
In 1951, he entered the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (MIV), the successor to Lazarev's Institute of Oriental Languages (founded in 1814). MIV was known in the student fraternity not only for its exotic languages but also exotic evenings with local fakir and "Indian" dancers.
His unit was called the Malay Department, and he believed that after graduation, he would liberate the Malays from the yoke of British imperialism. It turned out that all the subjects were related not to Malaya, but to a different and already independent country — Indonesia.
He was lucky because among his teachers were Lyudmila Mervart (1886-1965), a pioneer in Malay and Indonesian languages in the USSR, historian Alexander Guber (1902-1971), and botanist and anthropologist Mikhail Mestergazi (1884-1954).
From 1964 to 1966, he worked in Indonesia as the director of the House of Soviet Culture in Jakarta. During his stay, he collected valuable materials on Indonesian literature and made many friends among the writers.
In 1981, he became the head of the Department of Oriental Languages of Higher Courses of Foreign Languages at the Russian Foreign Ministry.
He has published more than 100 scientific papers in Russian, Indonesian, Malay and English. From the 1950s to the 1990s, he wrote numerous articles in Soviet reference books and encyclopaedias on Indonesian, Malay, Malaysian, Javanese and Sundanese literature, as well as biographies of writers.
Along with Boris Parnikel (1934-2004) and Natalia Aliyeva (1931-2015), he was one of the initiators of the 1967 seminar on "Malay-Indonesian Readings". This seminar, in January 1990, was transformed into the Nusantara Society.
It was quite natural that he took over as the head of the Nusantara Society after the withdrawal of the first president, B. Parnikel, in 2002.
Sikorsky has participated in many international fora, including six international seminars and conferences in Malaysia.
He is full of fresh ideas and creative energy.
In the framework of the Russian-Asean cooperation, a bibliographic collection titled "Letters of Credence of literature" on the translated works of Asian writers (into Russian and from Russian into the languages of Southeast Asia) is being prepared under his supervision.
The Nusantara Society solemnly celebrated the anniversary of its chairman by dedicating a March 24 meeting to this
event.
The participants shared memories of meetings with Sikorsky and opinions about his work, wished him good health, the implementation of all his creative ideas, great happiness and wellbeing.
The writer, writing from Russia, is a former lecturer of Universiti Malaya