Evfimii Karskii

Born Dec. 20, 1860 (Jan. 1, 1861), in the village of Lasha, in present-day Grodno Raion, Grodno Oblast; died Apr. 29, 1931, in Leningrad. Soviet scholar in Slavic philology. Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1916).

Karskii served as a professor at the universities of Warsaw (from 1894) and St. Petersburg (from 1917). From 1905 through 1917 he edited Russkii filologicheskii vestnik (Russian Philological Journal), and beginning in 1920, Izvestiia otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Akademii nauk (Proceedings of the Division of Russian Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences). Karskii’s main research was devoted to the Byelorussian language (its history and modern dialects), Byelorussian literature (folk poetry, Old Byelorussian written language, and modern literature; the work Byelorussians, vols. 1–3, 1903–22), and Byelorussian paleography (Slavic Cyrillic Paleography, 1928). He published many ancient literary texts accompanied by paleographic and linguistic analyses, including Undol’skii’s Documents, the Laurentian Chronicle, and Russkaia Pravda.