Deformed Virasoro algebras and w-algebras from elliptic algebras

When I think about Misha, and this has been happening rather frequently the se recent months! it is his enthusiasm and his communicative energy that fi rst come to mind. Something very important to Misha was friendship,. We sci entists have the priviledge to possess friends, real friends, among our col leagues, and Misha was a friend. Something else was fundamental for Misha, his family, i.e., his parents, his wife, and his daughter. As Professor Man in said, summarizing Misha's behavior very simply and elegantly, Misha was "a, good son: a good husband, a good father." Misha's parents died about th ree years ago, and I remember ho ci he was sad when I met him in Georgia in September 1996 and he informed me about his father's and mother's deaths a few months before. After that, he concentrated all his forces to protect h is wife and daughter: the two Svetlanas, as he used to say! He was so proud of his gifted daughter, a good musician, a good painter, and a brilliant s tudent. I wish to present them my most respectful thoughts. Misha was a great expert in integrable systems. He was deeply interested in developing models,which he did so nicely in the framework of Toda theories . I lear learned much from him about Toda theories and also continuous Lie algebras. Misha was highly convinced of the importance of symmetries and wa s especially interested in the use of infinite symmetries, the W-algebras a mong them. The landscape of continuous symmetries and particularly of infin ite-dimensional symmetries, is becoming richer and richer these Sears. I da re to think that Misha would have been interested in the modest seminar I n ow present.