Vyacheslav Ivanov was educated at Moscow University (in the departments of Romance and Germanic philology and Sanskrit and Indo-European Studies) and received his Ph.D. in Hittite and Indo-European in 1955. He taught comparative and general linguistics at Moscow University, until 1958, when he was dismissed because of his friendship with Boris Pasternak. Although unable to travel abroad for political reasons, he was still able to continue his research work in the Institutes of the Academy of Sciences. In 1988 he was invited to return to Moscow University to become Chair of the new Department of the Theory and History of World Culture and Director of its affiliated Research Institute. Since 1988, Professor Ivanov began teaching regularly in American universities—first at Yale University, then at Stanford University, and finally at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently a professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Indo-European Studies Program. He has authored more than fifteen books and 1000 journal articles. Since 1992, he has been editor-in-chief of a new journal in Slavic studies: Elementa. Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics, which continues the tradition of the Moscow-Tartu school of Semiotics, which he and friends co-founded.