Lev Gumilyov belonged to the rare category of genuine encyclopedists in modern science. The scale of his knowledge and thoughts did not fit into the narrow framework of Soviet history. He worked on the edge of several sciences - history, philosophy, geography, ethnography, psychology - and had extraordinary intuition and ability to integrate sciences. This allowed the scientist to create an original passionary theory of ethnogenesis, the relevance of which increases from year to year. At the same time, Gumilyov was not an armchair scientist - he was an excellent lecturer. Possessing a wide range of nuances of the Russian language and excellent knowledge of human nature, he could not only scientifically, but briefly, clearly and vividly present his theory to representatives of any social class and age. His scientific lectures and seminars were publicly available, extremely popular in the 1980s and were always held in crowded halls. A unique course of lectures by Lev Gumilyov, published on the basis of the scientist’s audio archive, for the first time becomes fully available to a wide range of readers.

"Historical time is like the sound of a string that has been plucked, and it slowly fades away. The development of an ethnos does not go forward, nor backward, nor in a circle, but staying in one place and constantly vibrating, like a string." Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov< /p>