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this he was blackballed from all scholarly institutions in Moscow and
Leningrad and until his arrest "was essentially in exile in Central Asia,
where he accomplished fruitful work on the local languages."
Alexander
Khristoforovich
Vostokov
(born Alexander Woldemar
Osteneck;
Russian:
Алекса́ндр
Христофо́рович Восто́ков; 27 March
[O.S. March 16] 1781 – 20 February [O.S.
8 February] 1864) was one of the first
Russian philologists.
He was
born into a Baltic German
family in Arensburg, Governorate of
Livonia,
and studied at the Imperial
Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. As a
natural son of Baron von Osten-Sacken, he
received the name Osteneck, which he later chose to render into Russian
as Vostokov (Ost, the German word for "east," translates to vostok in
Russian).[1] He liked to experiment with language and, in one of his
poems, introduced the female name Svetlana, which would gain
popularity through Vasily Zhukovsky's eponymous ballad.
During his lifetime, Vostokov was known as a poet and translator,
but it is his innovative studies of versification and comparative Slavonic
grammars which proved most influential. In 1815, he joined the staff of
the Imperial Public Library, where he discovered the most ancient dated
book written in Slavonic vernacular, the so-called Ostromir Gospel. In
1841, Vostokov was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Vostokov's works on the Church
Slavonic language were
considered a high-water mark of Slavic studies until the appearance of
Izmail Sreznevsky's comprehensive lexicon in 1893–1903 and garnered
him the doctorates honoris causa from the Charles University and
University of Tübingen.