[3] Despite his ability, the official antisemitism of the time meant he was only able to find employment as a physics teacher at an evening school for adults, a job with low prestige and salary.

[4] In the late 1950s, he participated in Lev Landau's famous weekly seminars in Moscow, where he met Isaak Pomeranchuk, whom he greatly admired and with whom he collaborated intensely.

This seminar became famous both within the Soviet Union and internationally, because of its open-ended discussions, where prominent Russian scientists often voiced vigorous objections and debated points with the speaker and with one another.

[7] Lenya died in a mountaineering accident shortly after he completed his PhD in theoretical physics,[8] a tragedy which weighed on Gribov heavily.

Gribov founded and led an influential school of theoretical elementary particle physics in Leningrad.

Gribov noted that this is crucial for gluon confinement, since a mass gap precisely means that the field fluctuations are of a bounded size.

This insight played a crucial role in Feynman's semi-quantitative explanation for the confinement phenomenon in 2+1 dimensional nonabelian gauge theory, a method which was recently extended by Karbali and Nair into a fully quantitative description of the 2+1 dimensional nonabelian gauge vacuum.

[13][14] In his last years, Gribov was attempting to construct a theory for quark confinement based on a rough analogy to the electromagnetic phenomenon of maximum nuclear charge.