Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev, who has died aged 92, was a distinguished scholar and a splendid representative of Russian intellectual traditions. Since 1986 he had also become widely known within the country for his pronouncements on moral, social and cultural issues and his political efforts to defend Russian culture.
If this suggests a stern, humourless moralist, a minute in his presence would have dispelled that impression. Likhachev possessed an old-world courtesy and charm. Fame did not swamp a gentle sense of humour, which could be directed at himself. He was also a devoted family man with time for others. Those who were interested in Russian culture were touched by his interest not only in their work but in their opinions and personal lives.
When, in his final years, he had become the one person to whom Russians turned to help save cultural treasures of all kinds, his phone would ring constantly. Invariably he listened courteously, took notes when he felt he could help, and only unplugged the phone with a regretful shrug when conversation had become truly impossible. He believed in the intelligentsia's traditional roles of promoting culture and offering moral leadership, but he also declared that a true member of the intelligentsia was one who could empathise with the suffering of others.
Likhachev's happy childhood, divided between St Petersburg and the summer resort of Kuokkala, popular with the less affluent among the local literary and artistic intelligentsia, gave him the inner strength to survive future tribulations while imbuing him with a love of culture, a strong historical sense and Christian principles. These underpinned both his liberal nationalism and his conception of his beloved St Petersburg as a combination of beauty (the neo-classical buildings set beside water) and tragedy (repression, violence, and the blockade of 1941-43). The city was always his residence of choice.
Between 1923 and 1928 Likhachev was a student of languages and literatures at what was then Leningrad University, opting to take double courses in west European and in native Russian and Slav cultures. As a citizen of the most cosmopolitan city of Russia, looking westwards was natural, but a school trip in 1921 to the far north of Russia - with its ancient ways, wooden churches and superb icons - led to an abiding fascination with the distinctively Russian facets of culture.
Before his interest in medieval Russian literature could take tangible form, Likhachev was returned to the north. In early 1928 he had read a semi-jocular paper on the advantages of the pre-revolutionary system of orthography to a student discussion group. As repression intensified, all members of such groups were arrested. Sentenced to five years penal servitude, he was dispatched to the former island monastery of Solovki in the White Sea - a beautiful but cruel and bleak place.
Apart from the brutality of the camp regime, which Likhachev viewed as a microcosm of Stalinist Russia - in 1929 its population was larger than that of Belgium - he narrowly escaped execution in a wave of reprisals. Work in the criminological unit allowed him some sense of achievement; he was involved in setting up special camps for juvenile offenders. Prison also engendered his first article - in the journal Solovki Islands, which, amazingly, was available on subscription all over the USSR. In it various political prisoners discussed the local flora and fauna, the criminal inmates included. Likhachev's own article was on their slang.
After a period between 1931-32 working on the construction of the Belo-Mor Canal, he was allowed to return to Leningrad. Despite his past, and his chronic stomach ulcers, he managed to find editorial work, meet his wife, Zinaida Aleksandrovna, and expand his reading. In 1938 he was taken on by the Early Russian literature section at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Russian Literature (known usually as Pushkin House), which became his academic home.
Likhachev's training as an editor, and his interest in history, led him towards a textological study of the old Russian chronicles, and he defended his candidate thesis in 1941, the year the war and the siege of Leningrad began. Prevented by ill-health from enlisting, he was assigned a role in civil defence.
The 900-day siege, in which his father and baby daughter died, remained a key memory. Throughout it he was struck by the parallels between the fortitude and suffering of the inhabitants, and that of their counterparts in the medieval Russian chronicles, where stark monumental style is interwoven with lyrical motifs of lamentation for death and destruction. His ideas resulted in a short work, The Defence Of Old Russian Towns (1942).
After the war, despite the hostile intellectual climate, Likhachev began teaching at his old university. He was promoted to a chair in 1951 and then appointed in 1954 to the post he held up till his death, as head of the early Russian literature section of Pushkin House.
Although his historical and textological expertise resulted in a number of important monographs - The Russian Chronicles And Their Cultural And Literary Significance (1947); Textology (1962) - his best contributions to the study of early Russian literature stemmed from a desire to elucidate its characteristic qualities, and the literary system that underlay its distinctive styles - Man In The Literature Of Old Russia (1958), and The Poetics Of Early Russian Literature (1967).
In occupying himself increasingly with the larger questions of the nature of early Russian literature, Likhachev ran against the tide of Soviet academia, where it was safer to become an expert on one or two things and leave the big - and therefore politically much more dangerous - questions alone. Likhachev was no rebel, but he was steadfast in his efforts to weaken the limitations on what could be studied and said.
This policy brought both rewards and problems. He became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1953, but enemies within Pushkin House prevented him from becoming a full member until 1970. In the late 1960s he feared that the KGB intended to arrange a fatal accident.
Western scholars, who have not had to work within these restrictions, have often criticised Likhachev's brand of liberal nationalism, though most recognise his remarkable achievements. His growing international reputation eventually forced the Soviet government into granting him permission to travel abroad. Of the multitudinous honours accorded by foreign academies and universities, the first honorary doctorate he received from a western university - from Oxford in 1967 - gave him particular pleasure.
Despite his own academic specialism, Likhachev never lost interest in the modern and European sides of Russian culture. He valued both its native and western sources, urging his postgraduate students not to restrict their knowledge solely to their specialist field. He himself wrote on modern Russian literature and culture, as well as topics such as 18th-century gardens. And, as he became more well-known, he turned to writing about the environment, disarmament, the value of culture, patriotism, respect for others, the need for honesty and sincerity. In a country where moral certainties have been swept away, millions of Russians looked to him for sanity and wisdom. His sad, calm voice conveyed a lifetime of experience and cogitation.
Likhachev believed that if one part of his role was to defend Russian culture - such as protesting at plans to redevelop the most famous street in Leningrad, the Nevsky Prospect, in the 1970s - another was the popularisation of early Russian art, architecture and literature, which being largely ecclesiastical, was officially disdained in the Soviet period. While not advertising his own Christian beliefs, he sought in books, articles and interviews to make others appreciate medieval Russian Orthodox culture.
With the arrival of glasnost, Likhachev stepped onto the national stage. He was the natural choice as head of the Soviet Culture Foundation, and Raisa Gorbachev's own participation in the organisation brought him close to government for the first time. He addressed the central committee of the Communist party - something akin to a miracle in his view - and was elected a people's deputy in 1989. Such was his fame that visiting dignitaries - from President Reagan to Prince Charles - almost inevitably met him.
Likhachev's single-mindedness about the preservation of Russian culture and associated moral values was not always comfortable for the less conformist of his disciples, nor for all members of his family, but few denied his contribution. In his own view he was privileged to have lived through such momentous times in the history of his country. Rather, his country was privileged to have had him as one of its citizens, something it recognised in the last years of his life.
He is survived by his wife, a daughter, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev, Russian scholar, born November 28, 1906; died September 30, 1999