While working with the collections of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in February-March 2010, the author of these lines was lucky enough to find a letter from F. L. Shapiro1 addressed to V. A. Gordlevsky 2. The letter is dated June 13, 1954. In it, F. L. Shapiro informed Academician Gordlevsky that he had completed the manuscript of the essay "Course of the Hebrew Language". Accompanying the letter with part of the manuscript, Shapiro asked Gordlevsky to set up a meeting to discuss the essay. This document is interesting for two reasons. First, although it is not known how V. A. Gordlevsky responded to F. L. Shapiro's request, it is safe to say that the Soviet Hebraist and a prominent Russian Turkologist were in business relations. This thesis is also confirmed in Shapiro's letter to the head of the Science Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU V. A. Kirillin3 dated January 24, 1958. The document was published in the 17th volume of the collection "Jewish Samizdat" [Jewish Samizdat, vol. 17, 1979, pp. 55-56]. In the letter, Shapiro insisted that he had begun work on a practical Hebrew dictionary in 1953 at the suggestion of Academician Gordlevsky and Professor Huber.4 Based on the content of the letter published below, we can safely say that V. A. Gordlevsky was somewhat familiar with Shapiro's works. 1 Shapiro Felix Lvovich (Nathan-Feitel) (1879-1961)-Russian and Soviet Hebraist, teacher; compiler of the only Hebrew-Russian dictionary published in the USSR (1963) [Shapiro, 1963]. This edition immediately became a bibliographic rarity. The application for printing the dictionary was received by the publishing house from F. L. Shapiro back in 1957. It is interesting that the 1963 edition is printed from left to right, and not from right to left, like all Jewish books. L. Prestina, the daughter of Felix Lvovich, insists that this was the instruction given to the publishing house by the regulatory authorities [Prestina-Shapiro, 2005, p. 39]. In ... Read more