Pavel Ilyin: Two Lives, One World

The book “Pavel Ilyin: Two Lives, One World” is a collection of selected works by my late husband Pavel Ilyin (1936–2015). Only those texts that Pavel merited as his achievement were included in this book. The reader is going to find a variety of pieces from different times as well as different genres — his research to toponymy of the USSR and the Russian Empire, that is, the study of place names that embraced history, geography, linguistics, and architecture among other fields of study; in Part II of the book, one can find Pavel’s chapter, “Cultural Geography of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth, Early Twentieth Centuries” from the book “Moscow at the Turn of the 20th Century: Glance into the Past from Afar.” In Part III you can find the description of some episodes of the series of children’s broadcasts at the national radio network that featured a ship’s boy named Zakhar Zagadkin, or Zakhar the Riddleman. It contained geographic riddles for young listeners to solve and send back the answers. The broadcast grew to become very popular with the audience: the authors would get back over a thousand replies at a time. In Part IV you can read Pavel’s essay on three most popular American songs, “This Land is My Land”, “America the Beautiful”, and “God Bless America”, where he told his readers about the authors of their music and lyrics, and most importantly, he translated the songs into Russian, and his own recollections of this work in progress. Part V contains personal recollections of Pavel by his friends, colleagues, and family members. Some very interesting and rare photo material, maps and also the list of published Pavel's works are presented in Appendix.