Sobolevskii, Aleksei

Born Dec. 26, 1856 (Jan. 7, 1857), in Moscow; died there May 24, 1929. Russian scholar and philologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1900; corresponding member, 1893). Graduate of Moscow University (1878); professor at the universities of Kiev and St. Petersburg.

A scholar of the Russian language, Sobolevskii was a pioneer of the historical school of Russian language study. In his doctoral dissertation, Essays From the History of the Russian Language (1884), he established the linguistic features of the ancient Galician-Volynian and Pskov dialects and presented a study of the historical development of the ancient Kiev and Smolensk-Polotsk dialects. His Lectures on the History of the Russian Language (1888; 4th ed., 1907) contain phonetic and morphological descriptions of the Russian language in the various periods of its history.

Sobolevskii also studied the history of the lexicon of Old Russian (Materials and Studies in Slavic Philology and Archaeology, 1910) and the Old Russian written language. Essays in Russian Dialectology (1892) is his definitive study of Russian dialects, and includes a systematized description of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian languages. Sobolevskii published many works on toponymy (Names of Rivers and Lakes in the Russian North, 1927, and Russo-Scythian Studies, 1921-24), as well as on ethnography, the history of ancient Russian art and oral poetry (Great Britain Folk Songs, seven vols., 1895-1902), and paleography.