When a modern artist-illustrator or a film director deals with a topic taken from classical antiquity, they aim to provide authenticity through costumes and decorations, but do not hesitate to plunge the action into the landscapes of modern Italy and Greece, with their palm trees and orange groves. Meanwhile, the landscape is a historical category: during the last couple of millennia the appearance of gardens, fields, and even wild forests of Greece and Rome have changed a lot. Victor Hehn (1813–1890) was the first who described these processes. Using the methods of linguistic analysis, he observed the adventures of dozens of plants and animals: from palm to rose, from camel to chicken. This lecture will be based on Hehn’s stormy life (which included prison, exile, long-term service in the Imperial Public Library, friendship with Stasov and hatred towards Dostoevsky), his unique philosophy of culture and the possibilities of his paleolinguistic method.

Lecturer: Vsevolod Zelchenko is a classical philologist and a Candidate of Philology. He is a researcher at Matenadaran and at the Bibliotheca Classica Petropolitana.