Pokrovskii, Mikhail

Born Dec. 21, 1868 (Jan. 2, 1869), in Tula; died Aug. 10, 1942, in Kazan. Soviet Russian linguist and literary scholar. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1929.

In 1891, Pokrovskii graduated from Moscow University, where he studied with F. F. Fortunatov and V. F. Miller. He was a professor at Moscow University from 1894 to 1930. During the last years of his life, he taught at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History and directed the department of classical literatures at the M. Gorky Institute of World Literature.

Pokrovskii shared the views of the Moscow linguistic school. In his studies of Latin and Greek he sought to construct a semantic typology based on comparative historical lexicology and the semantics of the Indo-European languages. He contributed to the theory and practice of semantic research. Pokrovskii also studied the history of classical, Western European, and Russian literatures and wrote on Vergil, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, Homer, Shakespeare, Pushkin, and others. He was a specialist in comparative literature and the theory of literary translation. His works include Petronius and Russian Folklore (1930) and Pushkin and Antiquity (1939).