Afanasii Matveevich Selishchev

Born Jan. 11 (23), 1886, in the village of Volovo, in what is now Orel Oblast; died Dec. 6, 1942, in Moscow. Soviet linguist and Slavist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Selishchev graduated from the University of Kazan in 1911. He was a professor at the University of Irkutsk from 1918 to 1920 and at the University of Kazan in 1920 and 1921. In 1921 he became a professor at Moscow University. Among Selish-chev’s principal works were studies on the historical dialectology of Macedonian, including Studies on Macedonian Dialectology (1918) and Macedonian Codices of the 16th to 18th Centuries (1933). Major works on Russian dialectology included A Dialectological Study of Siberia (fasc. 1, 1921) and Russian Dialects of the Kazan Region (1927). Selishchev is also the author of works on Balkan linguistics. He wrote various studies on onomastics and the comparative historical grammar of the Slavic languages and a number of textbooks on Slavic linguistics, including An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Slavic Languages (fasc. 1, 1914), Slavic Linguistics (vol. 1, 1941), and The Old Slavic Language (parts 1–2, 1951–52).

Selishchev was a corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1931) and a member of many foreign learned societies.