COLLECTION OF MEMOIRS ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT AND NOT ONLY ABOUT IT Wherever fate throws us And happiness wherever it might lead, All the same we: the whole world is a foreign land for us; Fatherland to us Tsarskoe Selo. A. S. Pushkin. October 19th I read this book and envied its authors madly - and there are more than forty of them. They wrote about the place that became for them what Tsarskoe Selo was for the young Pushkin and his lyceum friends. However, this place is not in St. Petersburg, but in Moscow, and was called not a lyceum, but the Institute of Oriental Languages (IVYA at Moscow State University), and later - the Institute of Asian and African Countries (ISAA) of Moscow State University. And there was also a time difference-they were separated from Pushkin's Tsarskoye Selo by half a century, or even more. Everything else was exactly the same: the intoxicating spirit of youth, plans and dreams for the future, of course, happy and unique, the desire to serve their Fatherland and bring freedom to the rest of the world, especially Africa, to which they decided to devote their lives. The next, fifth issue of the almanac "Under the sky of my Africa" (Moscow, ISAA MSU, 2010) is entirely devoted to African studies and Africanists who studied at different times in the IVYA/ISAA. They are graduates of a unique university, which gave them a unique profession-Africanist, and wrote this book-from the first to the last, 278 pages. To be absolutely precise, the almanac is dedicated not to the scientific and educational community-ISAA, which even at one time they did not dare to call a faculty - they immediately called it an institute within the Moscow State University-but only to one of its departments - the Department of African Studies, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in September 2010. And all the authors of essays, notes, memoirs, essays included in the book, without exception, are graduates of this department. The ... Read more