Serge Elisséeff

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Serge Elisséeff
Tokyo Imperial University
Scientific career
FieldsJapanese studies
InstitutionsPetrograd Imperial University
École pratique des hautes études
La Sorbonne
Harvard University
Doctoral studentsEdwin O. Reischauer
Other notable studentsJames Robert Hightower
Chinese name
Hanyu Pinyin
Yè Lǐsuī
Gwoyeu RomatzyhYeh Liisuei
Wade–GilesYeh4 Li3-sui1
Japanese nameKanji英利世夫

Serge Elisséeff (French pronunciation:

University of Berlin, then transferred to Tokyo Imperial University (today's University of Tokyo) in 1912,[2] becoming the first Westerner to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University in Japanese as well as its first Western graduate student.[3]

Elisséeff served in 1916 as Privat-Dozent at Petrograd Imperial University (modern

Harvard-Yenching Institute and founded the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
.

Fluent in eight languages, including

Asahi Shimbun
.

Life and career

Early life

Serge Elisséeff was born "Sergei Grigorievich Eliseyev" (

Eliseyev Emporium
in St. Petersburg.

Due to the great wealth of Elisséeff's family, his parents spared no expense in educating him and his brothers. When Elisséeff was six years old, he began regular lessons in German with his mother's private secretary.[5] His parents also had a custom of only speaking French at their dinner table in order to prevent their butlers and servants from eavesdropping on their conversations, a practice that was augmented by the boys' French private tutor.[5] In 1899, at age 10, Elisséeff began attending Larinsky College, a gymnasium in St. Petersburg, where he received a traditional education in the Latin and Greek Classics.[5] When he was 11, his parents added private English tutoring to his education, so that by his teenage years Elisséeff was already fluent in French, German, English, Latin, and Ancient Greek, in addition to his native Russian.[5]

As a youth, Elisséeff initially desired to pursue a career in oil painting, but was convinced by his

Sinologists in Europe at that time but only one expert Japanologist – the British scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain.[7] Oldenburg advised Elisséeff to enter the University of Berlin (modern Humboldt University of Berlin
) and begin studying Japanese and Chinese, and then to move to Japan for further study.

University study

Elisséeff began his university studies at the

University of Berlin in 1907, at age 18, in the Seminar für Orientalischen Sprachen (Seminar for Oriental Languages) led by German scholar Eduard Sachau.[8] He studied Japanese language and history, and also began studying Chinese under German sinologists Wilhelm Grube and Otto Franke.[8]

In 1908, after one year at Berlin, Elisséeff transferred to Tokyo Imperial University (modern

Bashō entitled "Bashō kenkyū no ippen 芭蕉研究の一片" ("An Aspect of Bashō Studies"), and graduated near the top of his class.[11] Elisséeff was allowed to stand with in the row of "A" students at their graduation ceremony, which was also the last public function attended by Emperor Meiji.[12]

Notwithstanding his excellent academic performance, Elisséeff was still racially discriminated against as a foreigner. On the official list of 1912 graduates, Elisséeff's name was printed at the very bottom of the paper, separated from the rest of the students by a wide space, which implied that he graduated last in his class when he had actually been one of the top students.[12] When Elisséeff confronted Haga Yaichi (芳賀失一; 1867–1927), the professor responsible for his low placement on the notice, Haga "simply explained to him that it was impossible to list a foreigner higher than any Japanese."[12] Elisséeff had to make a special request to receive an invitation to join the Alumni Society (Bungakushikai 文学士会) – normally automatically extended to all graduates – and his invitations to their meetings were commonly delivered the day after they had taken place, with the explanation that "the presence of a foreigner at these meetings would inhibit the discussion."[13]

In autumn 1912, Elisséeff returned to Tokyo Imperial as its first ever foreign graduate student.

shōgun of the Tokugawa shogunate.[14] Elisséeff's academic accomplishments as a foreigner made him "a kind of legend" in Japan and Japanese scholarship, and earned him connections with notable Japanese literary figures such as the renowned novelist Natsume Sōseki and author Kafū Nagai.[15]

University of St. Petersburg

While a graduate student at Tokyo, Elisséeff met the German economist

Tsar Nicholas II.[16]

Elisséeff was then appointed a privat-dozent in Japanese and an official interpreter for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was also elected an assistant professor at the private Institute of Art History, where he gave a course on the history of Chinese art that has been recognized as probably the first Chinese art history course in the West to be based primarily on original Chinese and Japanese texts and sources.

Bolshevik Revolution had allowed the Bolsheviks to take over the banking system, in which the Elisséeff's family fortune was seized, and the manuscript of his nearly completed dissertation was confiscated from the diplomatic pouch in which he had mailed it home and burned.[18]

Harvard and later career

Elisséeff spent the years from 1917 to 1920 in St. Petersburg attempting to continue his work, but his family was frequently harassed and searched because of their affluent background, and Elisséeff was constantly pressured to make his teaching conform to Marxist ideology.[18] Several of his relatives starved to death, and Elisséeff's family survived the winters by burning their furniture collections for warmth. In the summer of 1920, Elisséeff and his wife decided to flee Russia. They hid themselves and their two small sons, all malnourished and weakened, under the deck boards of a fishing boat that smuggled them across the Gulf of Finland to freedom in Finland.[19] They stayed in Finland for a month, then moved to Stockholm for several months before, like many other White Russian émigrés, settling in Paris.[19]

From 1921 to 1929, Elisséeff was also the head interpreter at the Japanese Imperial Embassy in Paris, and formally obtained French citizenship in 1931.

In 1932, Elisséeff came to the United States to serve as a lecturer in Japanese and Chinese at

École Pratique des Hautes Études. He returned to the United States in 1934 when Harvard offered him a professorship in Far Eastern Languages.[4] Elisséeff was the first director of the Harvard–Yenching Institute (HYI), an independent, non-profit organization founded in 1928 to further the spread of knowledge and scholarship on East and Southeast Asia.[20] Under the auspices of the HYI, Elisséeff established the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1936. The journal publishes monograph-length scholarly articles focused on Asian humanities.[20]
His wide range of knowledge came to be reflected in the diverse character of the journal during the twenty-one years he served as its editor (1936–57). At some point in this tenure, he compared the effects of McCarthyism at Harvard to his experiences in Russia.[21]

Elisséeff resigned his position of director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1956, then the following year accepted emeritus status from Harvard and returned to Paris to his professorship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, then later retired. The prominent American Japanologist

Japan Foundation Award.[23]
His wife, Vera, died in 1971, and Elisséeff himself died in Paris in 1975, aged 86.


Personal life

Elisséeff and his wife, Vera Petrovna (née Eikhe) Elisséeff, were married in Russia on 22 November 1914 and had two sons: Nikita Elisséeff (1 August 1915 –25 November 1997), who became a scholar of the Middle East, and Vadime Elisséeff (4 May 1918 –29 January 2002), a noted historian and expert on East Asian art.

Honors

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Serge Elisséeff, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 100+ publications in 10 languages and 1,500+ library holdings.[25]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
  • La peinture contemporaine au Japon (1923)
  • Neuf nouvelles japonaises (1924)
  • Le théatre Japonais (kabuki) (1932), with
    Alexandre Iacovleff
  • Elementary Japanese for university students (1941)
  • Elementary Japanese for college students (1944)
  • Selected Japanese texts for university students (1944)
  • Japan : frühe buddhistische Malereien (1959)

References

Citations

  1. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "Elisséeff, Serge" in Japan Encyclopedia, p. 174, p. 174, at Google Books; n.b., Louis-Frédéric is pseudonym of Louis-Frédéric Nussbaum, see Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Authority File Archived 2012-05-24 at archive.today
    .
  2. ^ Zurndorfer, Harriet Thelma. (1995). China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works About China Past and Present, p. 31.
  3. ^ Baxter (1975), p. 12.
  4. ^ a b "Serge Elisseeff Chosen to be Harvard Professor," The Harvard Crimson. January 26, 1934.
  5. ^ a b c d Reischauer (1957), p. 4.
  6. ^ Reischauer (1957), p. 6.
  7. ^ a b Reischauer (1957), p. 7.
  8. ^ a b Reischauer (1957), p. 8.
  9. ^ Reischauer (1957), pp. 8–11.
  10. ^ Reischauer (1957), pp. 11–12.
  11. ^ Reischauer (1957), pp. 14–15.
  12. ^ a b c Reischauer (1957), p. 15.
  13. ^ Reischauer (1957), pp. 15–16.
  14. ^ a b Reischauer (1957), p. 16.
  15. ^ Baxter (1975), pp. 12–13.
  16. ^ a b Reischauer (1957), p. 17.
  17. ^ Reischauer (1957), p. 19.
  18. ^ a b Reischauer (1957), p. 20.
  19. ^ a b Reischauer (1957), p. 21.
  20. ^ a b HYI history web page Archived 2008-02-11 at the Wayback Machine
  21. New York Review of Books
    . Vol. 24, No. 12. July 14, 1977.
  22. ^ Reischauer (1957), pp. 3–4.
  23. ^ Baxter (1975), p. 13.
  24. ^ Japan Foundation Award, 1973 Archived 2008-03-11 at the Wayback Machine
  25. ^ WorldCat Identities: Elisséeff, Serge 1889-1975

Works cited

  • Baxter, Glen W. (1975). "Serge Elisséeff: 1889–1975". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 35: 12–13.
    JSTOR 2718789
    .
  • OCLC 58053128
  • JSTOR 2718519
    .
  • Rogala, Joseph. (2001). A Collector's Guide to Books on Japan in English: A Select List of Over 2500 Titles. London:Routledge.
  • West, Philip. (1976). Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916-1952. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Zurndorfer, Harriet Thelma. (1995). China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works About China Past and Present. Leiden:
    ISBN 978-0-8248-2212-5
    (paper)

External links
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