Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky (Russian:Измаил Иванович Срезневский; 13 June 1812,Yaroslavl – 21 February 1880,St. Petersburg) was aRussianphilologist,Slavist,historian,paleographer,folklorist andwriter.
His father,Ivan Sreznevsky, was a prolific translator ofLatinpoetry who taught at theDemidov Lyceum inYaroslavl before moving toKharkov University. It was in Kharkov that Sreznevsky graduated inphilology (in 1829) and gained a professorship (in 1842). He was a notable figure in the Ukrainian literary revival and compiled several multi-volume anthologies of local folklore, includingZaporozhian Antiquities.[1] In 1839–1842 he undertook a tour through every major library of Central and Eastern Europe with a view toward consulting the oldest extant Slavic manuscripts.
In 1847 Sreznevsky moved to St. Petersburg, where he applied himself to the task of preparing a comprehensive dictionary of theOld Russian language. This work spanned several decades and involved the study and publication of numerous obscure medieval texts and codices, includingCodex Zographensis (in 1856),Codex Marianus (in 1866), andKiev Fragments (in 1874). Sreznevsky'spièce de résistance,The Materials for a Dictionary of the Old Russian Language, though incomplete, was published posthumously in three volumes (1893–1903) and was reprinted with an addendum in 1912, 1958, and 1988. It was superseded only with the publication of a 24-volume academic dictionary in 1975–1999.[2]
Sreznevsky was the founding father of the Russian Language Department of theSt. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (of which he was elected a member in 1851) and the St. Petersburg academic school of Slavic studies. As early as 1849, he delivered a series of lectures on the history and evolution of theRussian language, the first such work of a scholarly type. His influential outline of Slavonicpalaeography was published in 1885. A long list of his students atSt. Petersburg University includesAlexander Pypin,Nikolai Chernyshevsky,Nikolay Dobrolyubov, andVladimir Lamansky (who published his biography in 1890).
