Vasilii Istrin

Born Jan. 29 (Feb. 10), 1865, in the village of Pekhra, Moscow District; died Apr. 19, 1937, in Leningrad. Soviet literary scholar; academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1907).

Istrin graduated in 1887 from Moscow University and was a privatdocent there from 1891 to 1897. From 1897 to 1907 he was a professor at the University of Novorossiia (Odessa). Istrin’s works include Studies in the Area of Old Russian Literature (1906) and Outline History of Old Russian Literature of the Pre-Muscovite Period (1922); he did painstaking philological work on the publication of old texts (for example, Books of the Life and Times of George the Monk: Chronicle of Georgii Amartol, vols. 1–3, 1920–30). Istrin also did research on Pushkin’s literary output and on the biographies of V.A. Zhukovskii and Gogol.