Vasilii Mikhailovich Alekseev

Born Jan. 2 (14), 1881, in St. Petersburg; died May 12, 1951, in Leningrad. Soviet philologist and sinologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929); corresponding member (1923). Graduated from the department of orientol-ogy of the University of St. Petersburg in 1902. Professor at the University of Petrograd since 1918.

In 1916, Alekseev defended his master’s dissertation, “A Chinese Poem About a Poet: The Stanzas of Syk’ung T’u, Translation and Research.” He wrote on the culture of China, translating and commenting on works of classical literature: Liao Chai’s Foxes’ Witchcraft (1922), The Magician Monks (1923), Strange Stories (1928), Tales About Extraordinary People (1937), and the collection Chinese Classical Prose (1958; second edition, 1959). He also wrote comparative studies on aesthetics and poetics (for example, The Roman Horatio and the Chinese Lu Zi on the Poet’s Craft), critical and bibliographical essays on Chinese literature, and articles on the Chinese theater and folklore. In his works on Chinese literature, Alekseev used his own translations, which are accurate and highly artistic.