“Much he suffered in spirit upon the seas, striving to save
his own life and bring his faithful companions home.”
Homer, The Odyssey, Book I. Russian translation by V. V. Veresaev

Prologue

This summer, a new phenomenon emerged in the global cultural landscape: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which grossed more than $1.1 billion during its first month in theaters. Across all major digital platforms and social media, heated debates continue over whether the film is a genuine masterpiece or a complete failure by the celebrated director. There is little point in trying to settle the argument: both the film’s passionate admirers and its merciless critics have reasonable grounds for believing they are right. One can only speculate that its extraordinary box-office success owes something to the enormous swell of hype surrounding it.

But something else matters more. The film, and the controversy around it, has prompted hundreds of thousands of people, especially young people, to turn to the literary source itself: Homer’s Odyssey.

Homer’s Odyssey in the translation by classical scholar Emily Wilson recently rose to second place on the overall list of bestselling books in the United States.

The Russian figures are equally striking.

LitRes, the online service for e-books and audiobooks, recorded a sharp increase in interest in the epic between July 15 and August 3: revenue fr om the title across all formats rose by 1,003% compared with the same period in 2025.

The federal bookstore chain Chitai-Gorod also reported growing demand for Homer’s Odyssey between July 15 and August 3. Unit sales over that period increased 7.3-fold, or 630%, compared with the same dates in 2025. Meanwhile, the Ozon marketplace reported a 9.3-fold increase in sales of Homer’s Odyssey fr om July 15 to August 3 year on year.

So Homer’s Odyssey is an ancient story that, for some reason, modern people need again. But why?

My answer is this: it is the story of a person who must travel a long road in order to return home changed. It tells us that maturity is not automatically conferred by victory, a diploma, a job title, or age. It has to be earned through trials, mistakes, encounters, losses, temptations, fears, overcoming exhaustion, and the constant effort not to forget who you are and wh ere you are going.

In this sense, every person has an odyssey of their own. Fr om this point on, of course, my associations are not with the film but with Homer’s original epic.

A first-year student who was still a school student yesterday and enters a university classroom today has an odyssey of their own. So does a lecturer who faces students anew every September and realizes that another generation is now sitting before them. So does a researcher who spends years working toward a result while the rules, performance indicators, technologies, and sources of funding keep changing. And so does a university employee whose work often remains behind the scenes, yet without whom the university ship would never leave the harbor.

That is why, at the beginning of a new academic year, I would like to look at a person’s journey through university precisely as an odyssey. For Tomsk State University, this metaphor seems especially fitting. We are approaching our 150th anniversary. This means that our university, too, has traveled a very long way: fr om the Imperial University, the first university in Siberia, to a modern research university engaged in solving some of the country’s most complex challenges.

Yet any anniversary risks turning into little more than an elaborate commemorative spectacle, a collection of dates, memories, and ceremonial phrases. That is not the kind of anniversary I would want. A university must not turn into a monument to itself. One hundred and fifty years is not a point of rest but a point of departure on another voyage. And if we speak in Homer’s language, our Ithaca is not behind us. It is always ahead. Because a university returns home not when it remembers its past, but when it once again becomes itself under new circumstances.

When Victory Is Only the Beginning

For Odysseus, everything important begins after Troy. The great battle has been won, the city has fallen, and the hero is supposed to return home. Yet this is exactly when the hardest part begins. Victory proves not to be the end, but the beginning of a new journey. The same often happens to first-year students. Entering university can feel like the end of a long race through school. The Unified State Exam is over, the applications have been submitted, and the admission order has been issued. You can finally exhale. But in reality, you have not reached Ithaca. You have only sailed away from your Troy.

The first year is, in essence, a venture into open water. There is less external control and more personal responsibility. No one will check every day whether you have done your homework, managed your time properly, or understood the real meaning of the program you have chosen. A university gives a person greater freedom, but with it comes greater risk.

That is why it is so important, from the very beginning, not to confuse admission with achieving the goal. Admission is an act of trust that the university places in a student. In a sense, we are saying: you are now part of our great shared journey, but you will have to walk your own path.

Not alone, of course. There will always be lecturers, academic advisors, tutors, senior students, research supervisors, and university staff around you. But no one can live your university odyssey for you.

The Danger of the Comfortable Shore

In The Odyssey, there is the episode of the Lotus-Eaters. They do not seem to be Odysseus’s most terrifying enemies. They kill no one, take no prisoners, and wage no battles. They simply give Odysseus’s companions the lotus to taste, a treacherous plant that makes people forget why they were sailing, wh ere they were returning, and who was waiting for them. To me, this is one of the most strikingly modern episodes in Homer.

Today, people are rarely driven off course by a direct prohibition or an open threat. Much more often, they are carried away by a kind of sweet oblivion: an endless social media feed, short videos, casual side jobs, late-night messaging, the habit of postponing what matters most, and the illusion that there is still plenty of time.

For a first-year student, university freedom can become a space for growth, or it can become a “field of lotuses.” Everything seems enjoyable: new friends, new routes, the city, events, the feeling of adulthood. Yet almost imperceptibly, the most important thing can disappear: the inner goal. A person continues going to university but no longer quite remembers or understands why.

This is why self-organization, something I speak about so often in this blog, is really the ability to remember your Ithaca. To understand why you came to university.

Not in the abstract sense of “getting a degree,” “becoming a professional,” or “finding a job,” but at a deeper level: what kind of person do you want to become? What kinds of complexity do you want to learn to live with? What challenge do you hope one day to take responsibility for?

A university cannot forbid a person fr om tasting the “lotuses” of the modern world. Nor would that be possible. But it can teach people to distinguish between what gives them energy and what quietly puts their will to sleep; between what expands life and what turns it into the endless scrolling of one day after another.

The Cyclops’ Cave

Polyphemus is a remarkably precise literary image of limited vision. When the world is reduced to a single point of view, any strength can become dangerous. There is a similar risk at university: the danger of “one-eyed,” or rather one-dimensional, specialization. A student is told: choose your field, go deep, become a professional, do not spread yourself too thin. And all of this is right. There can be no genuine profession without depth. You cannot become a strong chemist, biologist, philologist, programmer, lawyer, or psychologist without reaching the foundations of the disciplines that make up your chosen field.

This is wh ere the fundamental nature of knowledge, which I also speak about often, becomes so important. But specialization has its own trap. A person may begin to see the world through only one professional “eye.” To a programmer, it becomes code. To a biologist, a laboratory object. To an economist, a calculation. To a humanities scholar, a text and its interpretation.

At that point, professionalism ceases to be a source of strength and becomes a tunnel. This is precisely why we need the classical university. Its task is not to dilute professional expertise but to place it within a broader context. To show the future engineer the human being and society; to introduce the humanities student to technology, data, and artificial intelligence; to make the natural scientist think about the ethical and cultural consequences of scientific experiments and discoveries.

TSU has historically been strong precisely because of this multidimensionality. Natural sciences, physics and mathematics, engineering, IT, the social sciences and humanities, medicine, art, culture, and entrepreneurship all coexist here.

And the genuinely new usually emerges not inside one isolated “tower,” but at the points of transition between them. So I would say this to our students: become specialists, but do not become Cyclopes. The true professional of the future is someone who sees deeply into their own field without losing sight of the other dimensions of the world.

The Bag of Winds

Odysseus receives a magical bag fr om Aeolus, the master of the winds, in which the fierce winds have been confined. A favorable wind is invisible, yet it is precisely what moves the ship forward. As long as that wind keeps blowing and the others remain inside the bag, the voyage can continue. But when Odysseus’s crew, ignoring his warnings, opens Aeolus’s bag, the violent winds burst out and drive the ship away from its destination.

At TSU, too, there is an invisible wind that helps each of us reach our goal at one stage or another of the university journey. It is the work of people who rarely appear in university news: dean’s office staff, engineers, librarians, academic support specialists, IT professionals, residence hall staff, admissions officers, accountants, HR specialists, security staff, and administrative employees.

Together with the faculty, they make the enormously complex educational process possible and keep the university “ship” moving. When all systems work as they should, we tend to take it for granted, like a favorable wind.

The beginning of a new academic year is a good moment to say that the university team consists not only of those who give lectures and publish papers. It consists of everyone who makes movement itself possible. In this sense, invisible work is not secondary. It is simply the kind of work whose result is that other people are able to do their jobs normally.

Odysseus would never have reached Ithaca without the wind. A university cannot complete its journey without respect for those who keep that wind blowing.

The Encounter That Changes the Journey

Circe, the sorceress and goddess, is a complex figure. At first she is frightening, turning Odysseus’s companions into animals. But later she helps the hero understand the route ahead and changes him in the process.

Every person at university should experience an encounter like this. It does not have to be dramatic. Sometimes it is a lecturer who, for the first time, asks you a question that cannot be answered simply by retelling your notes or a textbook. Sometimes it is a research supervisor who refuses to accept a paper written with the help of artificial intelligence because they see more potential in you than you see in yourself. Or an academic advisor who helps you find your bearings during the first difficult months.

Mentorship is not only about kind and supportive encouragement. Sometimes a mentor can seem distinctly “uncomfortable” because they refuse to let a young person remain permanently inside their comfort zone. They demand precision, honesty, effort, and independence.

They bring you back to the question: do you really want to grow, or do you simply want to be praised? If a university is a home, mentors are the people who meet us at the threshold of genuine adulthood and help us avoid passing ourselves by.

A Conversation with Those Who Hold Knowledge

In fact, Odysseus’s entire journey is a journey toward a certain kind of knowledge. Knowledge he does not possess at the beginning, but which is vitally important to him. Along the way, he encounters not only his contemporaries but also those who are already gone.

For a university, this is an almost literal metaphor for the continuity of knowledge. A young researcher may feel that the future is made only from what is new: new technologies, platforms, models, and concepts. But the university teaches a different logic as well: to move forward, you must know how to speak with those who came before you.

The TSU Research Library is one of the main gateways into the university’s vast memory. What it preserves is not “the past,” but the experience of thought: mistakes, hypotheses, discoveries, arguments, and texts that have outlived their authors. Through them, a person comes to understand that they are not the first to search for an answer. Others before them have thought, argued, made mistakes, discovered, and defended their ideas.

The same is true of research schools. Like the philosophical schools of Antiquity, a university research school is a distinctive space in which difficult questions are formulated. Senior scholars pass on to younger ones not only knowledge, but rigor of thought, a taste for evidence, professional ethics, the ability to engage in dialogue in the spirit of Socratic maieutics, and an understanding that science does not start from a blank page every Monday morning.

In the age of artificial intelligence, this is especially important. A machine can instantly produce a briefing, generate a text, or suggest a hypothesis. But it cannot replace living continuity. It does not know what scientific conscience and responsibility mean. It does not feel the weight of tradition. It does not understand why some questions cannot be solved by speed alone.

Sirens with Algorithmic Voices

The Sirens, demonic creatures half woman and half bird, also promise Odysseus knowledge. Their song is so sweet and seductive that a person longs to leave the course and remain on their shore forever.

Odysseus survives not because he declares himself stronger than temptation. He simply creates a system of protection in advance: he orders his crew to seal their ears with wax and tie him to the mast.

It is an astonishingly apt metaphor for modern AI. Today, our “Sirens,” neural networks and algorithms, sing and speak not only in human voices. They offer us recommendation feeds, endless notifications, and countless ready-made answers and texts that can be produced in seconds. They tempt us not only with the elegance of their solutions and writing but also with a claim to omniscience.

All of this is convenient, fast, and entirely convincing. And all of it can quietly draw a person away from... their own thinking.

Artificial intelligence is not an enemy of the university, and we have already spoken about this many times. It is becoming a new form of reality and a new tool for science, education, and communication. A university that simply tries to ban AI would resemble a captain trying to ban the sea together with everything that lives in it, Sirens included.

But a university must teach people not to permanently outsource their own memory, attention, and capacity for critical thought to an algorithm. Yes, AI may suggest the right answer. But that does not remove your obligation to verify it, question it, and take responsibility for the result.

AI can be an extraordinarily powerful assistant, but it must not become a “Siren” that draws you away from your own path. In this sense, Odysseus’s mast is your conscience, discipline, critical thinking, and ability to read and understand long texts. Without these, the great goal of gaining genuine knowledge cannot be reached.

Two Sea Monsters in a Narrow Strait

“To be between Scylla and Charybdis” means finding yourself in a situation wh ere there is no easy choice. On one side is Scylla, with six heads snatching sailors fr om the deck. On the other is Charybdis, a monstrous force swallowing and spewing back the sea. You have to pass between them knowing that there is no completely safe route.

The modern student has a Scylla and Charybdis of their own: studying and working. On the one hand, there is the entirely understandable desire to enter the profession as early as possible, earn money, gain experience, and avoid becoming someone with “theory only.” On the other hand, there is the danger of moving too early into constant employment and never fully exploring the depths that a university education can offer.

Drown in practice without fundamentals, or remain trapped in fundamentals without application? Both are poor options. The first offers a quick start but often leads to an early ceiling. The second may produce an impressive academic trajectory but never connect with a real-world problem.

The new model of higher education is trying to navigate between these extremes. It should neither reduce the university to a set of applied skills nor preserve the old logic in which practical experience can simply be postponed until “later.” Students need depth and practice, fundamental thinking and work on real problems. They also need mentors from the university and partners from industry.

Passing between Scylla and Charybdis does not mean choosing “either-or.” However difficult it may be, it means holding on to “both-and.” Theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Freedom and responsibility.

The Island That Is Hard to Leave

For seven years, the nymph Calypso keeps Odysseus not through fear or terror, but by offering him the possibility of a calm and comfortable life. Her island is beautiful. He can stay there forever, forget the pain of the journey, stop struggling, and live in familiar comfort.

That is precisely why this episode matters so much: not every danger looks like danger. Sometimes the hardest thing is leaving behind what you have grown used to. A university person also needs support, familiar surroundings, security, the opportunity to rest and recover, and the feeling of belonging. Without these, it is impossible to study, teach, or conduct research. But none of this should become a reason to stop developing.

If a student simply finds university comfortable but does not grow, then we are doing something wrong. If a lecturer works only within a familiar teaching method because “I have always done it this way and it has always worked,” then that lecturer has also found their own island of Calypso.

If a unit has learned to reproduce an old model perfectly but is afraid to build new trajectories for itself, then reproduction has become a form of stagnation. A new academic year always takes us away from such “islands.” New students arrive. Courses have to be updated. We have to answer questions for which we may not immediately have answers. Educational standards, technologies, partners, and national priorities change. This can be tiring and even irritating.

But it is precisely what prevents a university from becoming stagnant and compels it to keep moving forward.

Those Who Help Us Feel the Shore

The Phaeacians in The Odyssey are a remarkable people. They welcome Odysseus, listen to his story, give him gifts, and help him return home. They do not travel the journey for him, but they become the community without which his return would be impossible.

The university community works in much the same way. Lecturers, researchers, academic advisors, tutors, academic support specialists, and senior students welcome each year’s newcomers, those beginning their own odysseys: first-year students and new employees. They help them find their way through a new environment, become familiar with academic traditions, gain new knowledge and skills, make lifelong friends, and truly discover themselves.

The campus itself plays a major role in this. And not merely as a collection of buildings, classrooms, residence halls, and laboratories, but as the entire atmosphere of a university, telling a person: you are not a random visitor here. You belong to this place. You are one of us. Here you have your routes, spaces, people, rules, events, places wh ere ideas reach boiling point, and places wh ere people come together. This is precisely why new university spaces matter so much.

The new TSU building under construction at 49 Lenin Avenue stands on the site of the former university health center, which many Tomsk residents remember as part of their lives as students and faculty members. The new building should recall its predecessor without replicating it.

There is a very precise university logic in this: remember what came before without copying it; continue a tradition while building a new form with new content.

Returning Home

Odysseus returns to his native Ithaca as a different person fr om the one who sailed away from Troy. Ithaca has remained in the same place on the map, but he himself has changed. That, essentially, is the meaning of the journey: home can only truly be recognized by someone who has experienced the test of distance. If we think about it, every person lives through not one but several odysseys over the course of a lifetime, each time overcoming different obstacles and winning victories both great and small. First and foremost, victories over oneself.

In this sense, university is the first great Odyssey a young person has to complete. Perhaps it is even the most important one, because a person arrives here still very young and leaves genuinely adult, ready to take responsibility for their life and their choices.

And to some extent, HOW they complete this Odyssey will shape all the odysseys that follow: working in different teams, creating a family, relationships with friends, and becoming part of different communities. Graduates often leave Tomsk. They build careers, move between cities and countries, change professions, go through their own crises, and achieve their own victories.

And then, at some point, they realize that the university gave them more than a profession. It gave them a certain scale and language of thought, encounters and friendships with many different people, new values, and the ability to stay afloat in an extraordinarily complex world.

This is why a university anniversary is an occasion to bring together everyone who once passed through this home and carried part of it away with them. Alumni are not “former students.” They continue university traditions in other cities, organizations, laboratories, schools, companies, families, and public initiatives. Through them, the university expands beyond its own boundaries. And so the University itself changes as it lives through its own Odyssey.

In the broadest sense, the long journey of our university is the journey of a person shaped by the University, from Ithaca to... Ithaca. Because a university home is a strange thing. People come to it so that one day they can leave. But if the university was real, they do not leave it behind. They move forward carrying it with them.

Years later, they may return, physically, professionally, or inwardly, but as different people: fully accomplished, ready to teach the young and share their knowledge and experience. This is the meaning of our university Odyssey. 

Almost 150 years ago, Tomsk University was created as a bold project. Not only for Siberia, but for all of Russia and its future. Today, we once again live in a world wh ere the future demands boldness. Only now our sea is artificial intelligence, technological sovereignty, a new model of education, demographic challenges, competition for talent, a changing labor market, and cultural and value resilience. And what a turbulent sea it is!

But universities are not created for calm waters. They are created so that a person, a city, and a country have a ship, a crew, a memory, a map, a wind, and a reason to return to themselves renewed. Happy new academic year, our final year before the anniversary, dear colleagues, students, first-year students, alumni, and everyone who considers TSU their home! May each of us have an Ithaca of our own.

And may the journey toward it make us stronger, more honest, more responsible, and more mature.

Eduard Galazhinskiy
Rector of TSU