Somehow Knorozov managed to retrieve from the burning library a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which were then known - the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices. The anecdote tells, when stationed in Berlin, Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze. In their retelling, the details of this episode have acquired a somewhat folkloric quality. It was here, sometime in the aftermath of the Battle of Berlin, that Knorozov is supposed to have by chance retrieved a book which would spark his later interest in and association with deciphering the Maya script.
At the closing stages of the war in May 1945, Knorozov and his unit supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin. From 1943 to 1945 he served his term in the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in the Red Army as an artillery spotter. The outbreak of World War II hostilities along the Eastern Front in mid-1941 interrupted Knorozov’s university studies. In 1940 at the age of 17, Knorozov left Kharkiv for Moscow where he commenced undergraduate studies in the newly created Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University’s faculty of History. At school, it soon became clear that Yuri was academically bright with an inquisitive temperament he was an accomplished violinist, wrote romantic poetry and could draw with accuracy and attention to detail. Yuri Knorozov was born in a village near Kharkiv in Ukraine, at that time the capital of the newly formed Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, into a family of Russian intellectuals. Yuri Knozorov, Epigraphic Atlas of Petén Phase 1 Youth and Education
“There are no indecipherable writings, any writing system produced by man can be read by man.” Knorozov is particularly renowned for the pivotal role his research played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica.
On November 19, 1922, Soviet linguist epigrapher and ethnographer Yuri Knorozov was born.
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