Alexander Moiseyevich Piatigorsky (; 30 January 192925 October 2009) was a Soviet dissident, Russian philosopher, scholar of Indian philosophy and culture, historian, philologist, semiotician, writer. Well-versed in the study of language, he knew Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali, Tibetan, German, Russian, French, Italian and English. In an obituary appearing in the English-language newspaper The Guardian, he was cited as "a man who was widely considered to be one of the more significant thinkers of the age and Russia's greatest philosopher." On Russian television stations he was mourned as "the greatest Russian philosopher." Early years Piatigorsky was born in Moscow. His father, Moshe, an engineer and lecturer at the Stalin metallurgical college was sent to a weapons production facility in the Urals (city of Nizhny Tagil) at the outbreak of World War II, where he took up a post as chief engineer in weapons production. Alexander worked in the plant during the war. Being a poor student of mathematics, chemistry and physics, Alexander was expelled from school twice, but at this time he learned Latin and some other languages out of sheer curiosity. He was a voracious reader, and read just about everything he could get his hands on. Studying and work in USSR At Moscow State University he studied philosophy, graduating in 1951. He moved to Stalingrad where he taught high-school history before returning to Moscow to join the Institute of Oriental Studies as "a specialist in Tamil languages and Hindu studies." He compiled the first Russian–Tamil dictionary in 1960. In 1963, influenced by Juri Lotman who was working in Tartu University, he was involved with Lotman, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov and others, in the establishment of Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. The School developed the theoretical foundations and nomenclature for a new approach in semiotics for the study of society, consciousness and culture. In 1964, Piatigorsky's friend, poet Joseph Brodsky, was handed down a five-year sentence of internal exile. The following year, in support of the writers Yuli Daniel and Andrey Sinyavsky, Piatigorsky with other Russian intellectuals: His investigations and theoretical observations of the role played by thinking and philosophy in ancient South Asian culture and society were viewed with suspicion by some as a subtly indirect way of attacking the Soviet system. Knowing themselves to be likely targets of KGB surveillance, he and his fellow Indologists would gather in a room of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies where they would enter