Author. He is considered a Russian scholar of the 20th century. Besides being an author, he was a scholar of Medieval studies, religious philosopher, linguist, Russian historian, and a political activist. He is the author of the fundamental works that are dedicated to stories in Russian literature, mainly Old Russian, as well as Russian culture. He authored magazine articles, essays, a 300-paged memoir and 40 textbooks, many of which have been translated into different languages. He wrote some of the best studies on such literary monuments of ancient Russian literature as "The Tale of Bygone Years," "The Talk of Igor's Regiment," "The Prayer of Daniel Zatochnik" and others. He translated these works into modern Russian. Born the son of an electrical engineer, his family were of modest means, but managed to attend the ballet every year. As a boy, he first-hand witnessed the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 and the war and hardship that followed. Beginning in 1923, his education consisted of studies in the Department of Linguistics and Literature at Leningrad State University. Concurrently, he attended classes in the Roman-Germanic and Slavic-Russian sections, undertaking two diplomas graduating in 1928. While in college, he had joined a couple of groups that later were under investigation by the Soviet Union. For not molding to the Soviet life style or being a "free-thinker," he was arrested and spent nine months in jail. Within weeks, for "counter-revolutionary activities," he was given a five-year sentence of exile within the country in the Soviet Union's first concentration camp, located on the Solovetsky Islands. He was imprisoned from November of 1928 to August of 1932. While at the camp, he wrote his first scientific article, "Card Games of Criminals." One night in 1929, he witnessed, as he was hiding to save his own life, 300 prisoners being executed and being buried in a mass grave. He performed hard manual labor under the poorest of conditions, thus this impacted his general health, such as bleeding gastric ulcers. He stated this confinement gave him more education than attending college. In 1936, all criminal records were removed from Likhacheva's legal records, at the request of Alexander Karpinsky, the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. With his criminal record, he could only be a lowly proofreader in the publishing house of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, but in 1938 he started his 60-year career at the Pushkin House, formally the Institute of Russian Literature. In 1935 he married and the couple had twin daughters. In June of 1941, he defended his thesis, "Novgorod chronicles of the XII century", receiving a degree in philology. World War II began with the more than two-year seize of Leningrad starting with the invasion of Nazi Forces on September 8, 1941. With resistance against the seize, he lost his father, yet his remaining family left Leningrad in 1942. He was later awarded the "For the Defense of Leningrad" medal for his part of defending the city from the invading Nazi Forces. After the war, in 1947, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on "Essays on the History of Literary forms of Chronicling of the XI-XVI Centuries." Starting from 1946, he held a position at Leningrad State University: first as an assistant professor, and from 1951 to 1953 as a professor. Politically, later in his life, he was a Soviet dissident, disagreeing with certain theologies of Communist and the Soviet life and as a well-recognize public figure, was willing to speak his beliefs. In 1980 he was one of the members of the Academy of Sciences, who refused to sign a letter requesting the expulsion of 1973 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Andrei Sakharov, from the Academy because of Sakharov's public disapproval of the deploying of Soviet troops to Afghanistan in 1979. Among his many honors, he was a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences as well as many foreign academies. In 1964 he was given an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in England and over his career, a dozen other leading universities awarded him one. He was awarded in 1986 the title Hero of Socialist Labor with the award of the Order of Lenin and the Hammer and Sickle gold medal. In 1998 he was the first recipient of the revived Russian Order of St. Andrew the First-Called. He was twice awarded the State Prize of the USSR for scientific publications, "The History of Culture of Ancient Russia" in 1952 and "Poetics of Literature of Ancient Russia" in 1969. He was the recipient of the State Prize of the Russian Federation for the series "Monuments of Literature of Ancient Russia" in 1993. From 1989 to 1991, he was elected people's deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from the Soviet Culture Foundation. In 2000, he was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for the development of the artistic direction of Russian television and the creation of the all-Russian state television channel "Kultura." He was founder of the magazine "Our Heritage" dedicated to Russian culture. Overcoming having to live for years in a war-torn country and suffering political imprisonment, he achieved an education and lived a worth-while life. He has been revered as "the last of old St Petersburgers," "a guardian of national culture," and "Russia's conscience." The year 2006 was declared the year of Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov in Russia and the D. S. Likhachov Prize was established.