Fyodor Shcherbatskoy
Russian academic and Indologist (1866–1942)
Fyodor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoy or Stcherbatsky (Russian: Фёдор Ипполи́тович Щербатско́й; 11 September (N.S.) 1866 – 18 March 1942), often referred to in the literature as F. Th. Stcherbatsky, was a Russian Indologist who, in large part, was responsible for laying the foundations in the Western world for the scholarly study of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. He was born in Kielce, Congress Poland, and died at the Borovoye Resort, in what is now northern Kazakhstan.
Stcherbatsky studied in the famous Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum (graduating in 1884), and later in the Historico-Philological Faculty of Saint Petersburg University (graduating in 1889), where Ivan Minayeff and Serge Oldenburg were his teachers. Subsequently, sent abroad, he studied Indian poetry with Georg Bühler in Vienna, and Buddhist philosophy with Hermann Jacobi in Bonn. In 1897, he and Oldenburg inaugurated Bibliotheca Buddhica, a library of rare Buddhist texts.
Returning from a trip to India and Mongolia, in 1903 Stcherbatsky published (in Russian) the first volume of Theory of Knowledge and Logic of the Doctrine of Later Buddhists (2 vols., St. Petersburg, 1903–1909). In 1928 he established the Institute of Buddhist Culture in Leningrad. His The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana (Leningrad, 1927), written in English, caused a sensation in the West.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1341741. VIAF identifies the subject as 76424222. The Library of Congress control number is n50022942. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1866, 1942, 1884 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fyodor Shcherbatskoy” 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.