This summer I'm going to learn a mini-course about soliton theory ("Soliton equations and symmetric functions" in LHSM (Russian summer school in mathematics).The web-page of this course is (warning: it's in Russian, so here's my translation of its program:

This program has intrigued me (despite my main interest is representation theory and related topics) and now I'm looking for a book in which the soliton theory will be outlined according to this program (i.e. using Hirota derivatives from very beginning), maybe even without any mentions of symmetric functions..




The Direct Method In Soliton Theory