Alexander Andreevich Andrianov(25th october 1946 – 29th december 2023) was a remarkable personality in Russian physics during the last decades. A member of the prestigious school of theoretical physics in Saint Petersburg, he made relevant contributions to a number of topics along his life. His activity ran in parallel with profound changes in his home country and the international arena. He was very much involved in this series of conferences, being the host of the 2014 edition in Saint Petersburg. In this presentation made at the XVI Conference on Quark Confinement and Hadron Spectrum I will provide a vision -necessarily personal- of his life and his
activities and how these influenced many of us