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The meeting marked 100 years since the birth of Dmitry Likhachev. Around 200 members of the country’s creative elite took part, including actors Oleg Basilashvili, Alexander Belinsky, Alexander Kalyagin and Alisa Freindlikh, writers Daniil Granin, Yakov Gordin and Yevgeny Grishkovets, and film director Alexander Sokurov.

Opening the meeting, Mr Putin recalled Dmitry Likhachev’s legacy, noting that the academician’s thinking and ideas could in many ways serve as the departure point for solutions in science and culture today, and for bringing about a broad revival of enlightenment traditions in general.

Mr Putin noted that Dmitry Likhachev wrote a lot about the spiritual education of the young generation and called on the country’s creative and scientific communities to pay this issue greater attention.

The President said that developing and preserving the Russian language is of great importance and again referred to the words of Dmitry Likhachev, who wrote that the Russian language embodies all the great diversity of the country’s culture.

The Derzhavin House complex where the meeting took place was opened in 2003 to coincide with the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg. Starting in 1790 and right up until his death, poet Gavriil Derzhavin’s estate was one of the city’s main cultural centres and a focal point for spiritual life in the capital at that time. Today’s Derzhavin House complex is devoted to Derzhavin’s life and work and to Russian eighteenth-century literature. The complex’s auditorium is used for holding various creative and official events.