INSTEAD OF EPILOGUE

On October 10, 2019, numerous colleagues, friends and relatives of Yury Alexandrovich Ivanov, all together and each in their own way, with a good memory and love, celebrate a significant date in his biography – the 90th anniversary of his birth. He passed away nine years ago in 2010 at the age of 81 and, as it is sometimes said, he took nothing away with him. Everything was left to the people – both his life attachments and the rejection of what this remarkable scientist and charming person’s soul was not in. And he didn’t like, for example, the sometimes fruitless vanity of numerous so-called scientific councils and commissions. Therefore, he rarely agreed to participate in them, not wanting to waste time on empty words. He was skeptical about the proposals of his colleagues about his potential membership in the Academy of Sciences, although he worked all his life at the Institute of Oceanology that belonged to the Academy. He considered this organization the Club of elite conversations, an ivory tower, where he – the man of an exceptionally real action – was never invited to join to. Being a real optimist and just a cheerful person with an open mind, Yuri Alexandrovich loved his family, work, reliable friends and appreciated simple human joys – fishing, mushroom picking up, sea voyages for fresh impressions and new scientific discoveries. He liked working at his home by nights, when the daily bustle calmed down and the noise of the big city subsided. For some time now, we, his peers, began to notice more and more clearly the accelerating inexorable run of time, in the stream of which events and affairs of bygone days gradually fade and disappear. Really, it was quite recently, just only twenty years ago, on the threshold of the new millennium, on October 10, 1999, we also warmly and cordially congratulated our dear birthday hero on his seventieth anniversary, after which more eleven fruitful years of life were presented to him by fate. There, in addition to memorable souvenirs and congratulatory addresses, an amateurish jocular acrostic was made in his honor on that momentous birthday, which we thought it would be appropriate to put here, in this afterword, to a special number of Oceanological Research journal dedicated to the memory of Yury Aleksandrovich Ivanov.