Vladimir Shishmarev

Born Mar. 13 (25), 1875, in St. Petersburg; died Nov. 21, 1957, in Leningrad. Soviet philologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1946).

Shishmarev graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1897. He pursued graduate study in Romance philology in France and Italy from 1899 to 1903. He became a professor at Petrograd (later Leningrad) University in 1918. Shishmarev organized the First Workers’ and Peasants’ University in Kostroma and served as the dean of its faculty of humanities in 1918 and 1919. He was the director of the Institute of World Literature from 1944 to 1947 and engaged in scholarly work at the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1950 to 1957.

Shishmarev, whose principal works dealt with Romance philology, studied the poetry of the later Middle Ages in France, notably in Guillaume de Machaut: Lyric Poetry (vols. 1–2,1909; Prix Saintour of the Académie Franchise, 1909) and Lyric Poetry and Lyric Poets of the Later Middle Ages: Essays in the History of the Poetry of France and Provence (1911). He also studied the French and Italian Renaissance and conducted research on the paleography, textual criticism, and theory and history of music.

In the 1930’s, Shishmarev investigated general problems of philology and linguistics in such works as The Historical Morphology of the French Language (1952), Readings in the History of the French Language: Ninth to 15th Centuries (1955), and Dictionary of Old French: For Use with “Readings in the History of the French Language” (1955, with M. A. Borodina and M. V. Gordina). Shishmarev was awarded the Order of Lenin and three other orders.