Name Nikolai Konrad | ||
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Education Saint Petersburg State University | ||
Nikolai Iosifovich Konrad (Николай Иосифович Конрад, 1 March 1891 - 30 September 1970) was a Russian philologist and historian, described in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia as "the founder of the Soviet school of Japanese scholars".
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Life
Konrad studied at the Oriental Faculty of St Petersburg University, attending lectures by Lev Shternberg at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. After graduation he travelled to Japan and Korea, studying the languages and undertaking ethnographic study. World War I prevented his return to Russia until 1917.
Konrad then taught at Leningrad University, and became professor of Japanese language and literature there from 1922 to 1939. He knew Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s, and Bakhtin later cited Konrad, Dmitry Likhachev and Juri Lotman as the three most important Russian literary theorists.
After his fellow scholar Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky and his wife were arrested on charges of spying, Konrad found their two-year-old daughter left in their apartment; he brought the girl up as his own after her parents' execution. In 1941 he became professor at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies.