After the war, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (https://reveal.world/story/yurij-knorozov-byl-uveren-chto-on-genij-i-byl-absolyutno-prav) began working at the Leningrad Museum of Ethnography, located in the Kunstkamera building. In a tiny room with a large window, a service room of the Kunstkamera, lives a sullen-looking young man. Broad shoulders, sharp cheekbones, piercing gaze — he looks more like a gangster from a Hollywood movie than a scientist. His clothing consists only of an overcoat and a gymnastyorka (military-style shirt), leftovers from the Great Patriotic War. The room is unusual: all the walls are painted with Maya hieroglyphs, and on one of them is a large drawing of a shark. The occupant, young scientist Yuri Knorozov, created this exotic atmosphere with his own hands. Knorozov drinks a lot and works at the Kunstkamera: he leads tours for children, sorts collections, helps in the archive. He enjoys chatting with his neighbor Lev Gumilyov, who lives literally just through the wall from him. All the rest of Knorozov’s time is devoted to his main task — deciphering the Maya script. He spends days on end with books in his Leningrad office, nearly ten thousand kilometers from the Yucatan Peninsula, once the center of this ancient civilization. Unlike Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, Knorozov did not have texts translated into modern Maya languages. The leading specialists in Maya culture considered deciphering this script a utopian endeavor. But he deciphered it. It was not unusual for employees to live at museums. By solving the staff’s everyday problems, they also, apparently, strengthened their connection to the workplace, making them beings of the highest museum order.

Yuri Valentinovich attributed his success in deciphering, to some extent, to a blow he received in childhood. While playing croquet, one of his brothers hit him in the forehead with a ball. The injury threatened to cause blindness, but — it was avoided. Whatever the connection — temporal or causal — between the blow to the forehead and his gift for deciphering, Knorozov recommended “future decipherers get hit on the head.” The only uncertainty for him was exactly how this should be done.

Yuri Valentinovich intended to defend his decipherment of the Maya script as a candidate dissertation. Going into the defense, he had no idea how it would end. The problem was that, according to Engels’ conviction, in a pre-class society (which he considered the Maya civilization), phonetic writing did not exist. The existence of Maya writing contradicted the German’s assumptions, which could have been an insurmountable obstacle both for the defense and for the script itself.

However, everything turned out for the best. Ignoring Engels’ portrait, Yuri Valentinovich hung tables in the conference hall. The candidate’s report lasted exactly three minutes. After a pause, a lady from the Academic Council asked the researcher what one of the signs on the table meant. “I have no idea,” Yuri Valentinovich replied. The Academic Council decided to award the defended dissertation a doctoral degree. Engels’ face twisted in a spasm.

Soon after his triumphant defense, Knorozov began working at the Kunstkamera. Life at the Kunstkamera was not so gloomy. It had its colors, and Yuri Valentinovich’s role in this was far from the least. His presence turned routine things into unforgettable events. For example, after one of the Moscow conferences, Kunstkamera employees were traveling to Leningrad station. They decided to take a taxi. After getting into the car, the colleagues noticed Yuri Valentinovich was missing. Since he had caught the taxi with the others, everyone jumped out and rushed to look for him. The specialist in Maya culture, who a minute ago had been standing by the taxi, seemed to have vanished into thin air. After a thorough search, the inevitable decision was made to go to the station. At the station, Yuri Valentinovich got out of the car with everyone else. He had traveled there in the trunk.

Another story was connected to Knorozov’s dislike of communicating with journalists. It is worth noting that interviewers constantly wanted to talk to the decipherer of mysterious scripts. Once, the director of the Kunstkamera managed to persuade him to give an interview to a newspaper. For the meeting with the journalist, Yuri Valentinovich was provided a respectable room — the office of the famous ethnographer Dmitry Alekseevich Olderogge. Entering the office first, Knorozov locked the door behind him.

The journalist smiled awkwardly. The director, indulgent to the quirks of genius, lightly knocked on the door. Then more firmly. Yuri Valentinovich was asked to open the door and was even mildly scolded. They asked him at least to respond, but silence was their answer. When a spare key was brought and the door unlocked, it turned out that no one was in the room. The sash of the open window, as novelists of past years would say, creaked resignedly in the wind. Olderogge’s office was on the mezzanine, which, in fact, determined Yuri Valentinovich’s train of thought. Interestingly, the police entered Olderogge’s office along with the management. Seeing a man jump out of the Kunstkamera window, a passerby showed vigilance.

Yuri Valentinovich remembered the names of all the cats he had ever met. Visiting homes with cats, he never forgot to bring a bottle of valerian. Not encouraging excessive drinking habits in cats, he nevertheless treated their weaknesses with understanding. Perhaps it reminded him of some of his own problems. Cats filled his entire life and helped express both positive emotions (in moments of joy, he sometimes meowed) and negative ones: he called the first president of Russia — presumably implying the country’s transformation into a wonderland — Cat Basilio. Yuri Valentinovich himself had a cat named Asya and her son Fat Cat. The work on the origin of speech, which Asya helped him write, the researcher planned to publish under two names — his and Asya’s. It was a real blow to Knorozov when Asya’s name was removed from the publication.

Knorozov worked at the Kunstkamera until the end of his life. After 1989, the way to the West opened for him; however, the scientist did not leave forever — he visited Mexico and Guatemala, where he was received with all kinds of honors. “In my heart, I will always remain a Mexican,” Knorozov said when he was awarded the silver Order of the Aztec Eagle.

Sources:

E.G. Vodolazkina, "Kunstkamera in Faces"

https://diletant.media/articles/45309034/