Vasiliy Mikhaylovich Alekseyev (, , in

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

– May 12, 1951, in

Leningrad Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

(''ibidem'')) was an eminent

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

sinologist Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilizatio ...

and a member of the

Soviet Academy of Sciences The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991. It united the country's leading scientists and was subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (un ...

. In 1902 he graduated from the

Saint Petersburg University Saint Petersburg State University (SPBGU; ) is a public research university in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Russia. Founded in 1724 by a decree of Peter the Great, the university from the be ...

and became a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

. He also worked in the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

Bibliothèque nationale de France The (; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites, ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository of all that is published in France. Some of its extensive collections, including bo ...

, Museum für Völkerkunde,

Musée Guimet The Guimet Museum (full name in ; ''MNAAG''; ) is a Parisian art museum with one of the largest collections of Asian art outside of Asia that includes items from Cambodia, Thailand, Viet Nam, Tibet, India, and Nepal, among other countries. Foun ...

etc.

Life

In 1907, he travelled along with

Édouard Chavannes Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes (5 October 1865 – 29 January 1918) was a French sinologist and expert on Chinese history and religion, and is best known for his translations of major segments of Sima Qian's ''Records of the Grand Historian'' ...

through several Chinese provinces, describing ancient sculptural monuments previously unknown to international scholarship, in particular the

Song A song is a musical composition performed by the human voice. The voice often carries the melody (a series of distinct and fixed pitches) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs have a structure, such as the common ABA form, and are usu ...

monuments of

Henan Henan; alternatively Honan is a province in Central China. Henan is home to many heritage sites, including Yinxu, the ruins of the final capital of the Shang dynasty () and the Shaolin Temple. Four of the historical capitals of China, Lu ...

and Tang monuments of

Shaanxi Shaanxi is a Provinces of China, province in north Northwestern China. It borders the province-level divisions of Inner Mongolia to the north; Shanxi and Henan to the east; Hubei, Chongqing, and Sichuan to the south; and Gansu and Ningxia to t ...

. ln addition to his Professorship, Alexeev became the Curator and Senior Researcher at the

Asiatic Museum The Asiatic Museum (Азиатский музей) in Saint Petersburg was one of the first museums of Asian art in Europe. Its existence spanned 112 years from 1818 to 1930 when it was incorporated into the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of th ...

. In that role, he contributed a paper on Chinese folklore to a 1918 Museum symposium, published by its parent group, the Russian Academy of Sciences. Alexeev's situation at this time, though perilous like everybody else's, had great potential, which he quickly proceeded to realize. His position at the museum gave him a realia basis: he had custody of artifacts for the study of Chinese popular tradition, including a large trove of Dunhwang documents brought back from a Russian expedition of 1914–1915. In 1919, Alexeev became associate editor, and chief of the Eastern division, of the newly founded Publishing House for World Literature. This provided a publishing outlet. Under his direction, the museum's Sinological library was expanded, catalogued, and systematically employed in research, by a team of young persons Alexeev gradually gathered around him, among them the brilliant Shchutsky.

Work

Alekseyev has produced an acclaimed translation of the ''

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio ''Liaozhai zhiyi'', sometimes shortened to ''Liaozhai'', known in English as ''Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio'', ''Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio'', ''Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio'', or literally ''Strange Tales from a Studio o ...

''. The first volume was published in 1922 under the title ''Fox's Wiles''. According to Tatyana Tolstaya, "academician Alekseyev has found a special way of selecting and connecting Russian words which creates a distinctive brand of the Russian language, the one with a unique crystal grid, so to speak. The substance has not changed but has obtained new properties. While reading his texts, you get an illusion of reading a text in Chinese". Alekseyev's translations from the

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

era were collected as ''The Chinese Classical Prose''
Китайская классическая проза
in 1958.

Notable works

*''Lisyi chary'' (''Fox's Wiles'', 1922) *''Monakhi volshebniki'' (''The Wizard Monks'', 1923) *''Kitayskaya ieroglificheskaya pis'mennost' i ee latinizatsiya'' (''The Chinese Character Script and Its Romanization'', 1932) *''Rasskazy o lyudyakh neobychainykh'' (''Stories About Extraordinary People'', 1937)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Alekseyev, Vasiliy 1881 births 1951 deaths Soviet philologists Russian sinologists Writers from Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg State University alumni Corresponding Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1917–1925) Full Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Chinese–Russian translators Soviet literary historians Soviet male writers 20th-century Russian male writers Soviet translators