- Izmail Sreznevsky
Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky (Russian: Измаил Иванович Срезневский;
13 June 1812 ,Yaroslavl -21 February 1880 ,St. Petersburg ) was a towering figure in the field of 19th-centurySlavic studies .His father,
Ivan Sreznevsky , was a prolific translator of Latin poetry who taught at theDemidov Lyceum inYaroslavl before moving to theKharkov University . It was in Kharkov that Sreznevsky graduated in philology (in 1829) and gained a professorship (in 1842). He was a notable figure in the Ukrainian literary revival and compiled several multivolume anthologies of local folklore, including "Zaporozhian Antiquities". [Orest Subtelny . "Ukraine: A History". University of Toronto Press, 2000. Pages 232-233.] In 1839-42 he undertook a tour through every major library of Central and Eastern Europe with a view toward consulting the oldest extant Slavonic manuscripts.In 1847 Sreznevsky moved to St. Petersburg, where he applied himself to the task of preparing a comprehensive dictionary of the
Old Russian language . This work spanned several decades and involved the study and publication of numerous obscure medieval texts and codices, includingCodex Zographensis (in 1856),Codex Marianus (in 1866), andKiev Fragments (in 1874). Sreznevsky's "pièce de résistance ", though incomplete, was published posthumously in three volumes (1893-1903) and was reprinted with an addendum in 1912, 1958, and 1988. It was superseded only with the publication of a 24-volume academic dictionary in 1975-99. ["The Encyclopaedia of The Lay of Igor's Campaign", vol. 1-5. St. Petersburg, 1995. Volume 5. Pages 46-47.]Sreznevsky was the founding father of the Russian Language Department of the
St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (of which he was elected a member in 1851) and the St. Petersburg academic school of Slavic studies. As early as 1849, he delivered a series of lectures on the history and evolution of theRussian language , the first such work of a scholarly type. His influential outline of Slavonicpalaeography was published in 1885. A long list of his students at theSt. Petersburg University includesAlexander Pypin ,Nikolai Chernyshevsky ,Nikolay Dobrolyubov , andVladimir Lamansky (who published his biography in 1890).Sons
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Vyacheslav Sreznevsky (1849-1937) was the founder and chairman of the St. Petersburg Society of Ice Skating Amateurs (1877-1923) and the first ever chairman of theRussian Olympic Committee (1911). He helped organize the firstWorld Figure Skating Championship (1896, St. Petersburg) and authored the first Russian reference book on photography (1883).
*Boris Sreznevsky (1857-1934) was a leading Russian/Ukrainian climatologist and meteorologist of his generation who taught at theYuryev University in 1894-1918 and was in charge of theKiev Meteorological Observatory in 1919-1934.
*Vsevolod Sreznevsky (1869-1936) was an authority on Slavonic palaeography who scoured Russia's northern regions in search of manuscripts and drew up a detailed account of the manuscripts held by theRussian Academy of Sciences Library (1910-30, vol. 1-3).References
External links
* [http://imwerden.de/cat/modules.php?name=books&pa=last_update&pagenum=2&order=p.title,%20p.original&sort=&cid=26&lettereng=&letter= Sreznevsky's Materials for the Dictionary of the Old Russian Language on the Basis of Written Records]
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