He was the good acquaintance of mine. We had much in common of our interests. Always ready to help others, with profound knowledge of different subjects, he was often the soul of company.

He was well musically educated. When being in the vein he often improvised with friends -- professional musicians. One of his close friends, Leonid Lundstrom, was the nephew of famous Oleg Lundstrom. His next of kins were linked with music as well. You could sometimes meet him returning with his wife from a concert. He took part as a member of ensemble together with aforementioned friends in the Sovremennik's performance -- "Twelfth Night". Oleg Pavlovich Tabakov, being the director at that time, had valued that live music very much. Yuri also contributed to musical encyclopedia. He often worked for many hours in the Foreign Library to prepare his articles.

Besides, he made interesting publications in "fat" journals. Take for example his translation of Camus Nobel prize speech and immense introduction to it, published in the journal "Slovo".

Many years ago we studied in one student group in former Moscow Institute of Electronic Machine Building (MIEM), now Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics. He was always one of the best students on faculty of Applied Mathematics. Later afterwards he was among the chiefs in software and hardware company. One time I indeed had a chance to get software help from him and the result was superlative.

We couldn't but say about his chess interests. We went on semizonal finals and other chess tournaments together. He headed the MIEM team during public chess competition at my home.

He write many original sketches and plays for domestic theater. Yuri played them to friends with his own songs. And, of course, there was his wonderful lyrics...

He was devoted to soccer. He was a true fan of "Ararat" team. He knew much about the game and the players as real persons in life. He collected books about soccer and due to his excellent memory he was like live encyclopedia. He played soccer well for amateur, thus he was not only cabinet collector of football facts.