Alexander Vostokov
Russian philologist (1781-1864)
Alexander Khristoforovich Vostokov (born Alexander Woldemar Osteneck; Russian: Алекса́ндр Христофо́рович Восто́ков; 27 March 1781 – 20 February 1864) was a Russian philologist and poet. He was among the first significant scholars of Russian verse and versification, as well as one of the founders of comparative Slavic linguistics in Russia.
Background
He was born into a Baltic German family on 27 March [O.S. 16 March] 1781, in Arensburg, then part of the 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). In his poem Svetlana and Mstislav (Russian: Светлана и Мстислав, written in 1802), he used the female name Svetlana, which would later gain popularity through Vasily Zhukovsky's eponymous ballad.
In 1815, he joined the staff of the Imperial Public Library, where he studied the oldest dated book of Kievan Rus', the Ostromir Gospels. In 1841, Vostokov was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. He died on 20 February [O.S. 8 February] 1864.
Poetry
Vostokov published his first poetical works in 1802. He experimented with a variety of verse forms, including imitation of ancient quantitative and Russian folk metres; these poems in new metres were published in two volumes in 1805–1806 and supplied with Vostokov's own philological commentary.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Vostokov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.