T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 www.brill.nl/tpao
T’OUNG PAO
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156853211X592543
Vasilii Mikhailovich Alekseev and Russian Sinology
Christoph Harbsmeier*
(University of Oslo)
Vasilii Mikhailovich Alekseev1
(1881-1951) is best known to readers
of French and English through his by now curiously outdated but
refreshingly thoughtful discussion of the underlying principles of Chinese
literature, La littérature chinoise: six conférences au Collège de France
et au Musée Guimet.2
e first few dozen pages of that book are among
the weakest that I have seen from Alekseev’s pen. Its merits lie in the
persistence with which he asks fundamental questions such as what
exactly should count as Chinese literature and why its global status is
what it is and should be what it should be. He asks squarely why Chinese
poetry, rich and abundant as it was, has never had much formative
impact on the West. But in this context he does not mention what he
could not know: that apparently more than a million copies of his own
* I would like to thank Michael Heim of the University of California, Los Angeles, for
his generous help with this article. I have written the present essay—originally designed
as a review article of the recently published Rabochaia bibliografiia kitaista. Kniga rukovodstvo
dlia izuchaiushchikh iazyk i kul’turu Kitaia (see below), but then much expanded—
on the basis of my personal collection of Alekseev’s books. I do not own, and have so far
had no access to, the following collections of essays: Literatura i kultura Kitaia. Sbornik
statei k 90-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia akademika V M. Alekseeva (Moscow: Nauka, 1972);
Traditsionnaia kul’tura Kitaia: Sbornik statei k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia akademika
V.M. Alekseeva (Moscow: Nauka, 1983); I.G. Bebikh and O.E. Sakoian, Vasilii Mikhijlovich
Alekseev (Moscow: Nauka, 1993).
1)
e Library of Congress transliteration system for Russian is used throughout. ere
is a disorientating number of transliterations of his surname, including “Alexejeff,” “Alekseev,”
“Alekseev,” “Aleksejev,” and “Alexeief.” He referred to himself in English as Basil M.
Alexeiev. His original Chinese name was Ā Hànlín , his Chinese colleagues tended
to call him Ā Lìkè , but the most current Chinese version is Ālièkèxièyèfū
.
2)
Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1937, 252 pages; reviewed by Henri Maspero in Journal Asiatique
231 (1939): 313-16.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 345
translations from the Liáozhāi zhìyì (Strange Stories from a
Chinese Studio) have been sold in Russia alone. His extraordinary
collection of New Year’s pictures was enthusiastically reviewed by Derk
Bodde.3
Finally, there is in English his charming study on the Gods of
Wealth which was reprinted many years after its original publication
in 1926.4
One vividly understands how, in Russia, there has developed something
of a scholarly personality cult around Alekseev, enthusiastically
continued by many who never met the man himself. Alekseev was a
unique master of Russian scholarly prose. Even as a foreign reader one
senses the extraordinary vivacity and verve of his diction even in the
most prosaic contexts. He was in fact so much of a scholarly artist that
one is tempted to forgive him where one feels he is excessive or goes
wrong. I count forty-three Russian articles on Alekseev’s work cited in
M.V. Alekseev, Trudy po kitaiskoi literature. Even in China he has
aroused considerable interest. Trudy po kitaiskoi literature lists twenty
Chinese articles on his work, mainly from the 1990s onwards.6
Notably,
Lıˇ Míngbīn has written a series of eleven articles on Alekseev’s
contributions to Chinese studies, and in 1981 Gē Baˇoquán
published Liáozhāi zhìyì zài Sūlián .7
Alekseev was a passionate phonetician and linguist by training. His
model was Henry Sweet and his Practical Study of Languages: Guide
for Teachers and Learners, and his colleague in the study of Chinese
linguistics in 1905-6 was a young student of Slavonic linguistics,
3)
V.M. Alekseev, Kitaiskaia narodnaia kartina: Dukhovnaia zhizn’ starogo Kitaia v narodnykh
izobrazheniiakh, ed. L.Z. Eidlin, compilation of materials by M.V. Bankovskaia,
foreword by B.L. Riftin and M.L. Rudova, commentary and bibliography by B.L. Riftin
(Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 260 pp., 105 illustrations (including 8 plates in color). See
Bodde’s review in e Journal of Asian Studies 27.2 (Feb. 1968): 339-47. Compare also
the English version of this: Maria Rudova, ed., Chinese Popular Prints (Leningrad: Aurora
Art Publishers, 1988), unpaginated, 178 illustrations; and also the even richer selection
in Redkie kitaiskie narodnye kartiny iz sovetskikh sobranii (Leningrad: Aurora Publishers,
1991), unpaginated, 206 annotated illustrations, all different from those in Chinese
Popular Prints.
4)
Basil M. Alexeiev, Chinese Gods of Wealth: A Lecture Delivered at the School of Oriental
Studies, University of London, on 26th March, 1926 (London, 1928, 44 pp.; rpt. Singapore:
Cybille Orient Gallery, 1983).
5)
Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2003, vol. 2, 458-61.
6)
Vol. 2, 460-61.
7)
In Wén shıˇ zhīshí 1981.4: 115-19.
346 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
Bernhard Karlgren, who was then beginning to take a serious interest
in matters Chinese. Alekseev always retained a deep admiration for
the young Swede.
Characteristically, Alekseev was not always polite, and he did not
mince words when it came to the description of his scholarly mission.
In his Rabochaia bibliografiia kitaista. Kniga rukovodstvo dlia izuchaiushchikh
iazyk i kul’turu Kitaia [A Working Bibliography for the Sinologist:
A Guide for Students of Chinese Language and Culture],8
he
refers to it (p. 7) as the likvidatsiia kitaevedskoi bezgramatnosti, i.e.,
“the liquidation of sinological illiteracy,” and goes on to stress the
crucial importance of a teoriia sinologicheskogo slovaria (“theory of a
sinological dictionary”). In fact, the details of the project are not complete
in the book, but an appendix (pp. 459-543) provides a detailed
survey of his dictionary plans. He focuses on the importance of a
system of “synonym associations”: “We wish to append a list of synonym
associations as, for example, in Roget’s esaurus.”
Keenly aware of the challenges such maximalism poses, he hastens
to add, “But this needs many years of work, and especially the specialized
work of a collective.” en he comes to his crucial point: “It is
clear to us that only this system is the true system of the language, and
that the alphabetic dictionary is no more than, as it were, an index to
it.”9
My own esaurus Linguae Sericae10
is based on precisely this point
of view and might properly have been dedicated to the memory of
Alekseev had I known about this programmatic appendix thirty years
ago.
As Riftin points out, the lofty ideals proposed and instantiated in
Alekseev’s program were never realized in the famous Russian dictionaries
compiled by V.M. Oshanin in Moscow. It is sobering to recall
that Oshanin’s four-volume Bol’shoi kitaisko-russkii slovar’ (Large Chinese-Russian
Dictionary)11
has not the remotest rival in a ChineseEnglish
or Chinese-German dictionary to this day and is surpassed in
Western Europe only by the six-volume French Le Grand Dictionnaire
8)
St. Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 2010. 70 copies printed.
9)
Nam iasno, chto tol’ko eta sistema i est’ nastoiashchaia sistema iazyka, a alfavitnyi slovar’
lish’ kak by ukazatel’ k nei (pp. 482f).
10)
http://tls.uni-hd.de.
11)
Moscow: Nauka, 1983.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 347
Ricci de la langue chinoise.12
Also for classical Chinese there is nothing
in German or English that can compare with Séraphin Couvreur’s
Dictionnaire classique de la langue chinoise.13
us in lexicography at
least French philology continues to play its (alas) sadly neglected traditional
leading role in the West.
Alekseev makes it amply clear that he was not alone in his project.
His colleague and friend Paul Pelliot, with whom he exchanged letters
from 1911 onwards, included it in his “Les tâches urgentes de la
sinologie.”14
It remains relevant to ask how well Sinology has done in
the pursuit of these “urgent tasks.”
One may disagree with him on occasion, but Alekseev was certainly
a man who had the courage of his scholarly convictions. He was a true
man of letters, one of the great intellectuals among Sinologists of the
last century. His highly personal aphorisms, to which I return below,
record the intellectual experience of being a Sinologist and a lively
intellectual.
In 1974, Hartmut Walravens devoted one of his invaluable bibliographic
essays to Alekseev.15
e complete bibliography of Alekseev’s
writings by itself makes up a precious volume of its own.16
Without
any doubt, Alekseev’s chef-d’oeuvre was his magisterial doctoral thesis
on Sīkōng Tú’s Èrshísì shī pıˇn , published in 1916.17
is book surely deserves to be added to the extensive bibliography
on the Èrshísì shī pıˇn in Stephen Owen’s useful Readings in Chinese
Literary ought.18
Alekseev’s thesis was celebrated by L.Z. Eidlin, as
translated by Francis Woodman Cleaves, in “e Academician V.M.
Alexeev as a Historian of Chinese Literature.”19
Eidlin may have been
12)
Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001.
13)
Ho-kien-fou: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1904, 1080 pp.
14)
Actes du XVIII Congrès International des Orientalistes, 7-12 Sept, 1931 (Leiden: Brill,
1932), 134-35.
15)
“V.M. Alexeev—Leben und Werk: Eine Bibliographie,” Oriens Extremus 21.1 (1974):
67-95. As will be seen, there have been significant additions to the publications by and
on Alekseev since then.
16)
I.G. Bebikh and O.E. Sakoian, Vasilii Mikhailovich Alekseev (Moscow: Nauka, 1991),
95 pp.
17)
Kitaiskaia poema o poete, Stansy Si Kong-tu, Petrograd 1916, 706 pages; re-edited with
admirable care by B.L. Riftin (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2008), 699 large pages.
18)
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Council on East Asian Studies, 1992, 299-358.
19)
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 10.1 (1947): 48-59.
348 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
excessive in praise of his own master, but it is difficult indeed to avoid
excessive praise when it comes to his work. It is as if, fifty years before
William Empson’s e Structure of Complex Words,20
Alekseev had desperately
tried to do for classical Chinese what Empson does so inimitably
well, for example, in the chapter entitled “Statements in Words”:
namely, to tease out the subtle statements that are so crucial in poetic
diction, be it in poetry or prose—or even conversation.21
Alekseev
writes: slovo nalivaetsia krov’iu dukhovnoi i zhivet kak propovednik, which
I must quote in the Russian because I have no way of conveying in
English the keyword dukhovnyi, in which there is much more soul than
meets the eye in its German near-equivalent geistig: “e word is filled
with spiritual blood and lives like a preacher.”22
One often feels that
Alekseev’s Russian deserves to be read with the kind of care he devoted
to Chinese.
Alekseev cultivated a general interest in classical Chinese prose, as
is evidenced in his two-volume anthology of translations from masterpieces
of Chinese prose and by three thick volumes of studies.23
It
is worth remembering that during the years 1941-44 much of this hard
work was done in exile under extremely difficult conditions in Borovoi
(northern Kazakhstan).
Alekseev also has a brief related work on calligraphy, Artist-kalligraf
i poet o tainakh v iskusstve pis’ma, which was reviewed by J.J.L. Duyven-
dak.24
His more general papers on sinological subjects are collected in
a very substantial separate volume, which occupies a unique place in
the history of Sinology because of its fascinating autobiographical sec-
tion.25
Since then, a considerable number of Alekseev’s books have
been published in Russian. Many of these are based on the extensive
20)
1951; rpt. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989.
21)
e singular importance of Empson for any serious student of Chinese literature was
brought home to me by David Hawkes.
22)
V.M. Alekseev, V starom Kitae (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1958), 199.
23)
V.M. Aleskseev, Shedevry kitaiskoi klassicheskou prozy v perevodakh akademika V.M.
Alekseeva (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2006), 470 + 502 pp.; V.M. Aleskseev, Trudy
po kitaiskoi literature, 2 vols. (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2002), 572 + 512 pp.; and
V.M. Aleskseev, Kitaiskaia literatura (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 595 pp.
24)
T’oung Pao 2nd ser. 38 (1948): 301-7.
25)
V.M. Alekseev, Nauka o vostoke (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 535 pp. e sinological
autobiographical notes with the crucial personal aphorisms are found on pp. 266-346.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 349
archives he left behind. I limit my comments to the volumes in my
own collection.
One of Alekseev’s great passions turns out to have been for the Qing
dynasty writer Puˇ Sōnglíng : he studied and taught the Strange
Stories from a Chinese Studio throughout his life and produced a splendid
annotated translation of a rich selection of them.26
Riftin has given
us a detailed analysis of Alekseev’s approach to the problems of translation
in his paper “Novelly Pu Songlinga (Liaozhaiia) v perevodakh
akademika V.M. Alekseeva.”27
Alekseev’s fascination for this important
collection of tales comes out nicely when he tells us in his travelogue:
“... and then comes Liaozhai and starts to tell us about the most intimate
and simple things in a language that would do honor to the most
distinguished writer of literary-caste Chinese literature (kastovoi kitaiskoi
literatury).”28
Alekseev died almost sixty years ago, but his translations and studies
continue to be published and republished in Russia, most importantly
through the relentless efforts of Boris Riftin, Academician and
Sinologist extraordinary from Moscow. e latest publication from
the extensive manuscript archives of Alekseev is his Working Bibliography
for the Sinologist: A Guide for Students of Chinese Language and
Culture, which I review in more detail below. is readable pedagogical
work provides a narrative and delightfully subjective, comprehensive
survey of the sinological literature of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. For once, we can look over the shoulders of a great
Sinologist surveying the literature on his subject. Herbert Franke’s
much shorter and much less personal survey Sinologie29
gives us another
fascinating vision of the field that may be usefully compared with
Alekseev’s, of which Franke would not have known at the time he wrote
his important work; however, Franke was highly aware of the productivity
and importance of Russian Sinology. ere is no comparable
survey of the field in English.
26)
Strannye istorii. Rasskazy o ljudjakh neobychainykh (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura,
2007), 399 pp.
27)
Vostochnaja klassika v russkikh perevodakh (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2008),
113-206.
28)
V.M. Alekseev, V starom Kitae (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1958), 300.
29)
Bern: A. Franke A.G. Verlag, 1953.
350 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
Alekseev’s travelogue of his expedition to China in the company of
Édouard Chavannes30
is of unique personal as well as scholarly interest.
He emerges as the open-minded ethnographer with a keen eye for all
manner of things, like New Year’s pictures and the paired inscriptions
known as duìlián on shops as well as in more dignified places.
His candid and highly personal sinological aphorisms are without parallel
in the history of Sinology. e catholic range of his learned interests
is evident everywhere in this manuscript, but what makes him
unique is the persistent urbane thoughtfulness, the magisterial and at
the same time intensely engaging intellectual style that permeates his
writings.
Such, then, was the range and productivity of the man whose scholarly
autobiography we now have in the form of a systematic report and
subjective appreciation of everything he read on matters Chinese—his
Working Bibliography for the Sinologist. From end to end, the book is
a sheer delight for those Sinologists who retain an interest in the history
not only of China, but also of the decipherment of the main
features of traditional Chinese culture. ere will be those who find
the book outdated, since Alekseev does not go beyond the 1930s in
his treatment of the literature. It is a pleasure to report that on pp.
278-420, Riftin, the indefatigable grand old man of Russian Sinology,
shares his perceptions on the most important sinological literature the
beginning student needs to be aware of when entering this inexhaustible
field of study. As the editor of the Working Bibliography, he added
precious supplementary notes as well as a detailed bibliographic chapter
summarizing recent developments. is survey does not compete
in comprehensiveness with Endymion Wilkinson’s unsurpassed and
constantly revised magisterial editions of Chinese History: A Manual,
of which a mammoth digitized successor is rumored to be in the works.
Rather, and very much in the tradition of Alekseev, it presents an
intelligent, openly selective, and subjective assessment by a seasoned
philologist of the relative usefulness of the handbook literature sur-
30)
See V.M. Alekseev, V starom Kitae, translated by Boris Riftin as China im Jahre 1907:
Ein Reisetagebuch (Leipzig und Weimar: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1989), 431 pp. His
letters to Chavannes and Paul Pelliot have been published as V.M. Alekseev, Pis’ma k
Eduardu Shavannu i Poliu Pellio (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 1998),
230 pp., with a fine selection of photographs.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 351
veyed. Even within the areas focused on in Wilkinson, Riftin is naturally
both able and willing to add a number of useful Russian handbooks
overlooked by Wilkinson so far, and yet Riftin’s account of handbooks
in Russian is far from complete. For example, he fails to mention Boris
Stepanovich Isaenko’s pathbreaking concise Kratkii kitaisko-russkii
slovar31
which pioneers systematic attention to stress in an alphabetic
dictionary of Chinese.32
Riftin quotes (p. 283) some disheartening
statistics of the publication progress of handbooks in Chinese that go
a long way to explain the necessity of subjective selectiveness: 1900-
1949: 320 handbooks; 1949-1979: 890 handbooks;1979-1989: 3080
handbooks.
Contrast this with the over twenty thousand handbooks, including
those published inTaiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, listed in Zhōngguó
guˇjīn gōngjùshū dà cídiaˇn .33
ere is indeed
a superabundant, inflationary yearly increase in accessible information
about every aspect of Chinese culture, and yet there does not seem to
be any corresponding increase in the philosophical depth and aesthetic
subtlety of our understanding of Chinese culture and indeed of Chinese
texts.
It is for the neophyte, the diffident outsider who is hoping to become
a sensitive and subtle, aesthetically-minded interpreter of Chinese culture,
that Alekseev wrote his book. e first question he raises is that
of the perceived difficulty of the language. In his personal style that
makes one feel everywhere that one is literally “hearing the Master’s
voice” he writes: “I have often had to point out, and I have to point
out now to make it clear to my listeners (who to a greater or lesser
extent take an interest in my autobiography as a Sinologist) that if I
had employed as much time on the study of all the European languages
as I have on the study of Chinese in my life, then in each of these
European languages and in their entirety I would certainly have
obtained greater results than those I have achieved in the course of
time with the Chinese language” (p. 96, n. 5). Alekseev speaks from
31)
Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo innostrannykh i natsional’nykh slovarei, 1957.
32)
See also Aleksandr Varlamovich Kotov and Boris Stepanovich Isaenko, Russko-kitaiskii
slovar’ 26000 slov. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo innostrannykh i natsional’nykh
slovarei, 1953).
33)
Ed. Shèng Guăngzhì (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1990).
352 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
the heart when he reports how studying a Chinese text one spends
most of one’s time not finding characters in non-alphabetic dictionaries.
He diagnoses the frustrations of how “ignorance […] never reaches
knowledge but only mechanically transcribes vocabulary from the systematic
list in the dictionary into an anarchic notebook” (p. 96, n. 3).
To read Alekseev’s texts is to meet the man. And little could he have
imagined how the contemporary student, having acquired the computer
program Wénlín , would hold a cursor over any character in his
digitized texts to see instantaneously more than he ever wanted to
know about any character or expression. For Alekseev, the very difficulties
of the language should inspire the improvement of learning
methods as well as nauchnaia organisatsiia truda,34
“the scientific organization
of work” or study methods. He writes (p. 16): “It is to this
task of the scientific organization of the work of the Sinologist that
the present volume is dedicated, and I intend to summarize my nearly
forty years of experience as a Sinologist, giving direction to the neophyte
…” It is the intellectual discipline and systematic nature of the
sinological exercise, the sistema truda or “system of work” that is Alekseev’s
chief concern.
A preliminary difficulty, which Alekseev faces squarely, is the justified
student complaint that if one wants to study China one also needs
to study at least three European languages: French, English, and German,
in that order.35
Alekseev does point out that Russian itself is a
language like “Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Spanish, Greek, Italian,
etc.” (p. 38) which one may leave aside. But owing primarily indeed
to Alekseev himself and the remarkable linguist A.A. Dragunov, as well
as their many students, a case may be made for saying that in the
twenty-first century one disregards Chinese studies written in Russian
at one’s own peril. A detailed study of the early history of Chinese
studies in Russia was compiled by P.E. Skachkov, who died in the
He nowhere seems to specify that this is what he refers to by his abbreviation “NOT.”
Alekseev came to learn German relatively late. He felt “humiliated, incompetent, and
hopeless” (B48) because of his failure to understand German sufficiently well; see the
biography of Alekseev written by his daughter, N.V. Bon’kovskaia, largely based on his
diaries, and discussed in the second section of the present article: Alekseev i Kitai (Moscow:
Vostochnaia literatura RAN, 2010), 487 pp. (Here and in the following, I designate
references to this book in the format “Bnn,” hence “B48.”)
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 353
mid-sixties, and was published posthumously in revised form in 1977.36
is important work, of which a Chinese translation is about to appear,
deserves a substantial English-language supplement to bring the story
of Russian Sinology up to date. e task of compiling such a supplement
would be immense, but it is essential if Sinologists at large are
to be made aware of what they miss when they fail to take account of
Russian scholarship on Chinese culture. Chinese interest in Russian
Sinology is manifest in the 700-page tome, Éguó Hànxuéshıˇ
, edited by Yán Guódòng , which provides access to a
Chinese perspective on the sources of pre-1917 Russian Sinology.37
In blatant contravention of all current sinological “political correctness,”
Alekseev insists on a positively loaded definition of the term
“Sinologist” in the first place. He finds, of course, specialists: historians
(Chavannes, Pelliot, Maspero, Hirth), then what he calls drugie filologi
or “other philologists” (Demiéville, von Zach, Haenisch), as well as
sociologists (Granet), and linguists (Karlgren). But what makes them
Sinologists is their concern with Chinese primary sources as evidence,
and when dealing with such sources they all converge on one discipline:
philology. ey “are turned into philologists” (prevrashchaiutsia v
filologov, p. 22). It was obvious in Alekseev’s unimaginably distant
times that one cannot imagine such scholars bez tochnogo grammaticheskogo
analiza, “without a precise grasp of grammatical analysis”
(p. 22). Philological competence was, for Alekseev, a conditio sine qua
non of Sinology, and he routinely complained of regarding the technical
terminology of grammar “toward which our grammar books relate
with such nonchalance” (khalotno).38
e semantic shift in the word
“philologist” from this place of honor into an almost actionable professional
insult deserves a close study and certainly sums up important
developments in Chinese studies of the late twentieth century. e
demise of the term “Sinology” also deserves close historical attention.
Alekseev insists that for all specialists, basic philological training is not
only necessary but vo mnogikh punktakh odinakova, “the same on many
points.”
Ocherki istorii russkogo kitaevedeniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 505 pp. It deals with
Russian Sinology up to the Revolution.
Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2007.
See N.V. Bon’kovskaia, Alekseev i Kitai B49.
354 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
Unfashionably to our modern specialist and professionalist ears,
Alekseev also insists that this philological commonality means that
specialists in Chinese sociology, linguistics, history, economics, literature,
and so on should “have much more in common with each other
than a Greek historian has with an Indian historian, a philologist of
Arabic, or a sociologist of Japan.” Note that Alekseev assumed that it
was quite impossible to be a specialist in all the sub-disciplines of
Sinology—and difficult enough to be a specialist in any of them. His
thought was that there was an important common philological and
cultural core that ought to bring scholars of matters Chinese together,
and that made them into Sinologists. He recognized degrees, though,
of being a Sinologist. He imagined a sliding scale in which the geologist
was at the bottom while the specialist in Chinese cultural history
was at the top. In the tradition of Henri Maspero, Alekseev feels very
strongly that Japanese, German, English, French, and Russian Sinology
are but one subject, and that all Sinologists must obviously be familiar
with the Chinese language. Sinological research must be solidly based
on what has been achieved by Russian, French, German, and Japanese
scholars. He acknowledges that one cannot demand of Sinologists
everywhere a reading ability of, say, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch,
or even Latin, although he himself found the knowledge of Latin
crucial for his purposes (p. 23).
Next, Alekseev takes up the question of the intended readership of
ancient Chinese literature, and finds that this readership is very much
like that of the Jews, the Arabs, the Greeks, the Indians, and the
Romans: it is a readership of the highly educated (often in preparation
for public service) and of those who not only consume literature but
are typically ready to produce it. One is acculturated into this community
through the crucial feature of podrazhanie or “imitation.” In
a footnote, Alekseev goes quite far in his characterization of ancient
literary culture: “From ancient times, imitation lies at the root of all
Chinese culture, and if in this world there is history of literature defined
by the misanthropic theoreticians as a history of imitation, then it is
indeed Chinese literary history” (p. 102, n. 35). Alekseev points out
the highly limited circle of competent readership of classical Chinese
texts in China and the extraordinary number of manifest and undeniable
mistakes in the translations of the great masters of Sinology like
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 355
Alfred Forke, Georg von der Gabelentz, Herbert Giles, Otto Franke,
Gustave Schlegel, V.P. Vasil’ev, Bernhard Karlgren’s teacher of Chinese
A.I. Ivanov, and notably V.M. Alekseev himself (p. 33).39
In a singularly
useful footnote he lists some of the more remarkable critical articles
by the remarkable and indomitable Erwin von Zach which spelled out
in almost obsessive detail the mistakes of academically more successful
contemporaries (p. 108, n. 80).40
An instructive modern illustration
of this is one of the great Chinese philologists of the twentieth century,
D.C. Lau, whose translation of the Mencius was so pervasively and
convincingly corrected by David Nivison that Lau published a second
edition taking full account of the serious mistakes pointed out to him.
e instructive message of this episode is that a striking number of
things that Lau got substantially and even grammatically wrong had
been much more adequately rendered a century ago by James Legge.41
It would be easy but tedious to illustrate the decline in the quality
of translation from the time of Legge and Couvreur until today. Whatever
the truth may be, the cantankerous, myopic pedantry of such
detailed criticisms of translations, irritating as it often is, is also healthy
and instructive, especially when the criticism is directed against oneself
and toward those in scholarly authority (p. 108, n. 81). Alekseev was
theoretically and practically obsessed with the theory of translation
and the problems of translatability. He was not merely a true master
See also p. 146 where Alekseev obliquely refers to criticisms of his doctoral thesis, and
especially n. 41 on that page. e re-edition of his thesis in 2007 conveniently incorporates
these corrections. Absent in the list of those who fall prey to mistakes, interestingly, are
the philological Pelliot (1878–1945) and Henri Maspero (1882-1945), the linguist and
historian of China, son of Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), murdered by the
Nazis at Buchenwald.
See also the highly instructive re-editions edited by Hartmut Walravens: Erwin Ritter
von Zach (1872-1942)—Gesammelte Rezensionen. Chinesische Geschichte, Religion und
Philosophie in der Kritik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), and Erwin Ritter von Zach
(1872-1942), Gesammelte Rezensionen. Chinesische Sprache und Literatur in der Kritik
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). Of special interest is Martin Gimm, “Eine Nachlese
kritisch-polemischer Beiträge und Briefe von Erwin Ritter von Zach,” Nachrichten der
Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 130 (1981): 16-61, as well as the instructive
chapter on von Zach in Bernhard Führer, Vergessen und verloren: Die Geschichte der
österreichischen Chinastudien (Bochum: Projekt Verlag, 2001).
Who is known to have been careful in listening to advice from the learned Wang Tao.
See David Nivison, “On Translating Mencius,” Philosophy East and West 30 (1980): 93-
122, and D.C. Lau, Mencius, vol.1 (Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong Press,
1984), 1.
356 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
of the practice of Russian prose translation. Interpretive and hermeneutic
precision was in his view at the very heart of any understanding
in any area of Chinese culture. His 1916 doctoral dissertation on the
Èrshísì shī pıˇn, mentioned above, was one gigantic exercise in this area,
and he recognized (p. 34) Pelliot’s profusely annotated translation of
the Lıˇ huò lùn as a model of the precision he had been aiming
at.42
One may deplore the obsessively myopic philological xùngù
perspective that Alekseev commends, but there can be no doubt that
basing his work on such philological pedantry, Alekseev pursued
extremely ambitious comparatist, literary, philosophical, and artistic
ends. In the end he was more of a philosopher and a “culturologist”
than a mere Sinologist. His pioneering comparative study of Horace’s
Ars poetica43
and Lù Jí’s Wénfù 44
stands unsurpassed. In his
seriousness and rare honesty, even in matters embarrassing and humiliating
for his trade of Chinese philology, Alekseev was a true intellectual,
not a mere professional.
Alekseev concludes his methodological introduction with a devastatingly
relevant but intemperate remark directed towards those happy
students of Chinese culture for whom the Chinese are primarily informants,
sources of information, and who are interested only in those
Chinese po svoemu razvitiiu ne vyshe, i.e., “who in their development
have reached no higher” than the researchers themselves. For them,
Alekseev suggests, there is indeed no need for philology or for books
like the one he is writing. In philology, they have use for nikakikh knig
krome uchebnikov tipa Berlitza, “no books other than Berlitz-style textbooks.”
Today what Alekseev called “the Berlitz style” has basically
become the immensely popular, predominant mode of instruction on
the Chinese language throughout Western universities. Sinology may
be falling into disrepute in many quarters, but the conditions for the
serious humanistic research that Alekseev was advocating have certainly
never been remotely as good as they are today. It seems to me that from
1906 onwards Basil M. Alexeiev has shown us a Way.
See Pelliot, “Meou-tseu ou les doutes levés,” T’oung Pao, 2nd ser. 19 (1920): 355-433.
Ad Pisones.
Kitaiskaia literatura, 249-72.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 357
Portrait of the Philologist as a Young Man
We know of Alekseev’s youthful diaries chiefly because after his death
in 1951 his wife, N.M. Alekseeva, made the crucial contribution of
typing out his notes, many of which would have been hard to decipher
for anyone else. Alekseev knew he was hyperarticulate in writing, and
one of his recurrent Latin phrases was currente calamo, “with a racing
quill” (B48). He asks himself: “Why is it that I constantly declaim
things? Why does it come so naturally to me to make beautiful
speeches?” (B58) e diaries are a rich source for the intellectual biography
of Alekseev written by his daughter, N.V. Ban’kovskaia, and
published in 2010 under the title Alekseev i Kitai.45
ey are a unique
contribution to the history of Sinology in the West, equalled in importance
only by N.G.D. Malmqvist’s Bernhard Karlgren: ett forskarporträtt,
which is soon to be published in revised form.46
Alekseev i Kitai is profusely illustrated with quotations from just
those hyperarticulate diaries that Alekseev wrote all his life “currente
calamo.” e first part covers his formative years at St. Petersburg’s
Kronstadt Gymnasium and in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris,
Berlin, and Peking. I can best pay tribute to this biography by summarizing
some of its contents for the benefit of those who do not read
Russian; and I must admit that the language of the book is often
sophisticated and highly demanding for the likes of me. One perennial
problem is connected with the concept of nauka, or Wissenschaft in
German, for which there is no adequate term in English. It is as if a
frighteningly inadequate dualism between the humanities and the
natural sciences were programmed into the modern English language,
where for Alekseev the very essence of the humanities lies in the fact
that it must be pursued very much in a “scientific” (nauchnyi) spirit,
even when, as in mathematics, the concrete “scientific” methods may
differ from those current in the natural sciences.
Alekseev was one of eleven children of an unmarried but “stable”
couple in St. Petersburg. Only two of these children grew into adulthood.
Alekseev’s father came to see his main purpose of life in the
See note 35 above.
In English, as Bernhard Karlgren: Portrait of a Scholar (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh Univ.
Press, 2010).
358 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
education of his son, but he died when Vasilii (“Vasia”) was only eleven.
Vasilii remembered his childhood as full of penury, tears, and regrets.
e single joy he recorded was the evenings when he was able to listen
to peasants’ tales and songs. To the end of his life he envied those who
grew up in an intellectually inspiring environment. Such was not his
case. He always suffered from a sense of humiliation, self-contempt,
and a fear of authorities: “My whole life has taught me only to prick
up my ears like a wolf cub in a cage.” He claimed, “I am self-educated
(Ia vospityval sebia sam),” yet his teachers were many: of Russian, French,
English, German, and above all Chinese. His teacher of Greek at the
Kronstadt Gymnasium, N.P. Nikol’skii, left an indelible impression
on him. A few years later in Paris he summarized his childhood and
youth as follows: “I grew out of nothing, out of a chaos of primers. I
was carried away by things, like a barbarian, discovering Americas
everywhere, and noticing this fact myself, suffering from it” (B62).
At the university, he studied Chinese and Mongolian. But as he
wrote in 1946 to his best friend and fellow student Eidlin, he finished
his hard work on Chinese with a sense of tragedy. Like many of us
today, he complained of “grammar without rules and without clear
thoughts, translations in the form of nonsensical curiosities, which
plunged one into confused consternation (izumlenie)” (B18). Whereas
he had greatly enjoyed the company at the Kronstadt Gymnasium,
students of Chinese had all come to be seen in his eyes as careerist
would-be conquistadores in Manchuria who regarded philology as just
a necessary evil on the way to a diploma. But for some reason (pochemuto)
the young Alekseev felt differently. In times to come, he would rate
his students by this “something,” which he came to think of as ser’eznost’
nauchnogo entuziazma, “the seriousness of scientific enthusiasm,” and
which he thought impossible to fake. What he demanded of any serious
student was the obsessive “extreme and at times belligerent perfectionism
(krainii podchas voinstvennyi maksimalizm)” which his own
daughter so vividly ascribes to him (B22), and which was intimately
linked with what Alekseev himself diagnosed as an intemperate impatience
and an almost morbid dissatisfaction with himself. “Everything
in me is incoherent (neskladno) … ere is such a complete chaos in
me that I do not know how to evaluate such a life … Life! How much
enormity (skol’ko gromadnosti) there is in the word!” (B27). “e ques-
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 359
tion about life (for me at least) has been posed but not resolved … To
live thinking about life was boring. And so I sought refuge in scientific
inquiry. As far as my abilities allowed me, I found refuge there, but,
alas, not in my student days, only later … Successful thirst (zhadnost’)
for knowledge and enthusiasm—that is the panacea!” he was to tell
his students at a later stage (B29). As early as during his Paris days he
reflected: “It will be necessary to devise an understanding of cognition
(znanie poznaniia)” (B62), and by cognition he meant precise, welldefined
knowledge grounded in observation. is is what at times he
felt he found in Paris: “I am having a wonderful time here in Paris: I
work, and I live a spiritual life … God, how happy I am when I have
a good conscience … I feel full of the meaning of life” (B61). “Let me
be unhappy elsewhere but happy in scientific study (v nauke)!” was his
desperate cry, and yet: “Outside the living air of love (bez atmosfery
ljubvi) there is no life, only a vegetating existence (prozjabanie).”
From his early days onwards, Alekseev remained what one might
call a philosopher of life, but very much a philosopher inspired by
literary models: “We were all characters out of Chekhov’s stories …
‘How should one live?’ we asked like Katia in ‘A Boring Story,’ of
professors who were unable to give an answer” (B27). In this connection
his daughter muses: “Perhaps being an intellectual begins at the
moment when in a person the wall that divides reality from literature
is broken down” (B28). What Alekseev read entered the flux of his life.
e London friend who in 1904 or 1905 called him, unforgettably,
“impressionable” (B60), had it right. At times he thought he had an
answer: “I want to give myself completely over to my favorite dream—
free and strong scientific reflection (mysl’ ).” But one is not surprised
to learn from his diaries that at times he found even conversation with
his scientific idol, the great Chavannes, distinctly less exciting than a
trifling chat (erundovuiu boltovniu) with a perky lady (B59).
Alekseev always retained an almost disconcerting passion for ruthless
psychological self-analysis, especially an analysis of the contradictions
in himself: “Everything in me is incoherent,” he concludes
somberly, “aimlessness, ambition, fierce cynicism, and untrammelled
(rasukhabistyi) sentimentalism. Everything in me is in such chaos that
I truly do not know how to evaluate my life … Strange. I begin my
personal development with analysis!” (B60). Intellectual work is where
360 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
he finds solace: “Leisure is nothing for me, that is clear. I love work; I
love to make an effort. It is curious how the absence of leisure time
and gloom (toska) pleases me!” he notes in his diaries (B33). And this
work (rabota) has almost sacral dimensions for him: “ere is an evil
spirit in me which leads me away from work, from the ideal of my soul
… ere is a dark force in me which struggles against my bringing out
the holiest of holies of my thought (sviataia sviatykh moei mysli) … It
is fine to jump now from subject to subject without depth of sense!
But when life poses for me the demand for serious summaries (ser’eznye
itogi) of the efforts of my youth—what will I say?” (B63). ose
moments of “serious summaries (of results obtained)” were the allimportant
moments of truth in his life—to the end of his life. Moral
and intellectual seriousness is what sums up the core of the man in
many ways.
From the summer of the year 1901, in his diaries, “his thoughts
begin to be analyzed fearlessly” and he reflects: “Oh, if only I could
work on my selected learned cornfield, not worrying about distractions
from need and life in a rigid frame, a square and grey frame!” (B27)
Sinological work became for him an escape from the square, grey,
indigent, narrow social frame into the larger world of international
scholarship, and he became a passionate aficionado of the philological
work of James Legge.
Alekseev inimitably describes his favorite teacher of Chinese, Peshchurov,
as follows: “He was a man of considerable culture, but the
Chinese language he separated from this culture.”47
More precisely, he
found that his teacher suffered from doslovchina chudovishchnaia or
“monstrous literalness.” Yet this very Peshchurov it was who a few years
later passed all his books on to the young Alekseev—whom, on the
other hand, he strongly advised to leave the field of Sinology and aim
for a more remunerative bureaucratic career. Even the great V.P. Vasil’ev,
whose negativism about China Alekseev was exposed to in his last two
years at the Academy, receives a lively description culminating in Vasilev’s
considered opinion that the only thing that was seriously important
and worthwhile in Chinese literature were the translations from
the Sanskrit of texts that had since been lost in India (B20).
To him language was rules, experience, and mot-à-mot translation.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 361
Alekseev speaks of the “the poisons of supercilious judgment (otravy
vysokomernogo suzhdeniia)” when one judges the foreign and the strange
“from above,” as it were. His mission was to live down this tempting
cultural superciliousness by two methods: historical philology on the
one hand and contemporary ethnographic curiosity on the other. At
times he succumbed to this poisonous temptation in himself too, as
he knew all too well, and perhaps we may be excused for thinking it
was a usefully poisonous temptation to have to grapple with. At one
point he finds himself echoing, in his supremely observant desperation,
Vasil’ev’s cynical spirit: “e Chinese bearer of a living tradition, in
whom the essence of Confucianism is found, does not understand
things but regurgitates what he has learnt” (B94). Alekseev never tries
to hide the essential contradictions among his perceptions. He was
indeed an impressionable soul, as a female friend put it, and on an
intellectual level as well.
Alekseev’s scholarly father figure, the formidable Buddhologist S.F.
Ol’denburg, whose credo was idti, kuda ne zovut, “to go where one is
not told to go,” went one day to young Alekseev’s reading desk and
said, “Alekseev, I’d like to see you!” Ol’denburg often saved the young
man from intellectual despair by providing “an antidote to the cold
stereotype of the Department (protivoiadie ot fakul’tetskogo kholodnogo
stereotipa)” and allowing the young philologist to “sob in the sleeve”
of the grand old man (B25). ere is no question that Alekseev was a
difficult and complicated student to teach. He complained bitterly
that in the Department chtenie bylo uchenicheskim, passivnym, “e
reading [offered by his teachers] was student-like, passive” (B23). In
any case, looking back on his philological experience, he concluded,
“I left the department as an ill-educated person” (B53).
Alekseev felt impelled at every juncture to produce summaries (itogi)
of what was achieved. Regarding the St. Petersburg school of Sinology:
“e leadership of Vasil’ev [and his chrestomathy] and the classical
dictionary by Palladii in insipid hands—this is what has ruined Russian
Sinology” (B67). e cure for Sinology, to Alekseev’s mind, was to
“draw it into the scheme of a general global culture (obshchaia mirovaia
kul’tura)” (B31). But when he visited “Europe” he found, to his surprise,
that he himself was regarded very much as an exotic object of
study from the Orient. “ey look upon me as an interesting wild
362 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
creature (dikovinka) and do not even hide it … In the West, Russia is
included in Oriental Studies” (B37). is was a real eye-opener for the
philologist as a young man.
Nonetheless, in London and Oxford, Alekseev managed to trade
lessons in Greek and Latin for lessons in English (B49). He became a
truly avid advanced learner of idiomatic English.48
Overwhelmed by
the wealth of material in the libraries in Britain, he was all the more
impressed by the intellectually arid, pedestrian, and lamely practical
spirit of sinological enquiry in that country. It was in Oxford that he
began to appreciate for the first time the intellectual advantages of the
orientalist education he had enjoyed in St. Petersburg. In Cambridge,
Herbert Giles appears to have treated Alekseev, like any of his other
students, with dismissive lack of interest. He would set aside but a
well-defined half-hour for the young Russian. Alekseev notes: “I did,
in fact, most of the talking myself” (B37), but Giles did dispense the
wisdom of his anti-intellectualism in matters sinological and particularly
in matters linguistic (“Disregard grammar!”). Alekseev, in return,
noted with pleasure that Giles’s history of Chinese literature was not
only later but also much inferior to Vasil’ev’s, of which Giles had evidently
never heard. If Alekseev came away from England impressed
by the wealth of orientalist materials collected by the English colonialists
and the admirable working conditions in the libraries, he was
astonished to register the almost total lack of intellectual excitement
left behind by the sinological tradition of the great James Legge. He
found the English uncommunicative: “Such is the people: cold like a
dog’s snout (kholodny kak sobach’i nos)” (B36). e difference between
Russian and English young ladies gave him food for thought: “English
girls are not coquettish … It is as if they were saying, ‘I am only for
the one I shall choose. For the others, I am no more than a human
being.’ I thought a lot about why it is that with us nearly every woman
seems to say, ‘Try your luck. You can, you know!—Well, or you may
not—da ne sumeesh’—poshel proch’.’” However this may be, looking
back at things in 1948, Alekseev drew a gloomy conclusion: “London,
Oxford, Cambridge—these were unnecessary places to visit.” e most
As well as a professor of English, as time went by and his merits came to be recognized
in St. Petersburg.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 363
useful thing the English did for him was to provide helpful letters of
introduction to the great intellectuals in Paris, like the extraordinarily
generous Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935) and Édouard Chavannes: these
men and many of their colleagues fascinated Alekseev not only with
their spirit of intellectual enquiry but also with their intellectual charm.
e impish, thoughtful smile of Chavannes remained with him and
inspired him for the rest of his life, as in “Chavannes said with that
smile: ‘Ce qui est beau en vous, c’est l’enthousiasme,’ to which I replied:
‘C’est idiot, cet enthousiasme!’” (B47) But with Chavannes everything
was put forward with a smile and only to open up broad perspectives
for the listeners (B39).
Alekseev’s private teacher of French, Desmaison, was interesting to
him for entirely different reasons: “Desmaison is a dirty ragamuffin.
He oozes wine. But clever he is! It’s a pleasure talking with him although
I still don’t get a lot of what he says” (B50). Clever he certainly was
since he prepared Alekseev exceedingly well for attendance at a number
of performances at the Comédie Française: “Read Ruy Blas with
Desmaison the whole night. Ready to hear it tomorrow!” (B51) Desmaison
proved excellent company, not least because he showed a serious
interest in Russian language and literature. A sound sense for the
subtleties of the Chekhov style always remained a gateway to Alekseev’s
heart.
Alekseev was an ambitious and avid learner of languages. He came
to know French remarkably well. But as is so characteristic of him, he
attacked himself on this account in his diaries when he felt humiliated
by a friend’s superior command of the language: “Whence this vanity
(tshcheslavie)?” (B52) He always remained overambitiously “perfectionist,”
maximalist, and knew it. Yet even with Chavannes the smile disappeared
when it came to the close philological reading of texts, “which
Chavannes never lost a chance to adduce” in support of anything he
was saying. By the end of his stay, Alekseev no longer referred to Chavannes
by name, but simply as le maître (B65). In his later letters he
ventures to address the great intellectual as his teacher and friend
(uchitel’ i drug) .
But for all Chavannes’s charm, Alekseev was unable to resist the
temptation to study a wide range of subjects with other scholars in
Paris. He was attracted by linguists like the comparative philologist
364 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
Antoine Meillet. “Spent a wonderful hour with Meillet: he understood
that I am committed to the spirit of his thought. I was very glad …
e languages of the East have long been waiting for … the methodology
applied by this outstanding linguist to the languages of the IndoEuropean
family” (B64). He wished he could open up Chinese
philology the way Meillet had opened up Latin philology to a well
defined and scientifically disciplined comparative perspective.49
Alekseev
was also fond of the “admirably logical” Victor Henry, who said
farewell to him with these words: “You are young, decisive, and full of
working energy (trudoliubivyi). We shall remain friends. Try to think
of me from time to time.” Alekseev was deeply moved: “I am taken
with him, the attention he pays to me, and by his warm-heartedness
(serdechnost’)” (B65). It was in Paris that he made these kinds of friends
of the spirit (dukhovye).
Even when he did not know the authors, Alekseev was transfixed by
books with titles like Vie des mots, but he was confirmed in his view
that “from general comparative grammar it is impossible to hope for
practical usefulness other than that of being enlightening and serving
Allgemeinbildung” (B44). e function of the academic discipline of
Sinology had to become educational, enlightening, aesthetic, and even
“spiritual” (dukhovnyi), not just cerebrally “scientific” (nauchnyi). In
short: from an early age, he belonged to a dying breed of old-fashioned
humanists. But Alekseev sometimes complained of the disorientating
intellectual overstimulation and dissipation in Paris, the absence of
systematic and scientific “well-defined and clear perspectives … What
is all this incomprehensible galimatias good for that I’m brooding
over?” (B41) Such was the complexity of his life.
e friendship he developed with Chavannes was of a completely
different order. He writes in his diary: “My mistake was an eager chasing
after things and dissipation of interests.” He should have sat at the
feet of Chavannes. He should have tried to become like Chavannes.
He should have become a historian. “To the depth of my soul I find
Chavannes’ openness of mind sympathetic, one senses a fresh head
working consistently … What would have become of me if I had not
One finds oneself somberly reflecting that he might find himself still waiting today,
considering current methodologies in East Asian historical linguistics.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 365
heard those lectures by Chavannes at the Collège?” (B42) Alekseev
became convinced that as a young Sinologist one should not choose a
particular subject, but rather go where one can find a guide, a scholarly
methodologist with whom to study the right way of doing things: he
thought that what he should have done was “to work out in himself
the historian, and not the philologist” (B43).
In 1905 he made the passing acquaintance of a certain Paul Pelliot.
e early relations between these two scholars deserve close attention:
February 17, 1905: “Met Pelliot at the École. He invited me to take breakfast
with him. Tries to practice his Russian on me. Gets on my nerves.”
February 21, 1905: “Breakfast with Pelliot. e conversation somehow did not
touch on any scientific topics.”
March 9, 1905: “Trying to read Yìzhōushū at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
In walks Pelliot. Skipped and skipped and walked off. V. thinks he is one of those
fumistes.”
April 2, 1906: “Pelliot makes himself important with his knowledge, but actually
the fellow works [too] fast.”
April 21, 1906: “At home with Chavannes. Pelliot, talkative as ever. But what
cleverness, in fact! I droop and give up (niknu i pasuiu).”
April 25, 1906: “Having read a brochure by Pelliot I was shocked! Here is a product
of intellectual breeding! And look at me! Hurried race after worthless crumbs
of scholarship (nichtozhnye krokhi nauki). I’m ashamed of myself!”
June 1, 1906: “Touch upon Pelliot in conversation with Chavannes. I am aware
I’m sous son coup. Comforting thought: live up to him … But actually he is just
clever, nothing more. No more than four years difference in age. Let us see what
happens.”
Pelliot was in fact more than clever: he was fierce and in more ways
than one. He once challenged a man to a duel because he had dared
criticize the scholarship of Chavannes. e Chavannes personality cult
was rife in Parisian sinological circles and has been slow to die out even
now. Fortunately, Alekseev never made in Pelliot’s presence any of the
severely critical remarks about Chavannes that fill his diaries. e
intrepid Pelliot frightened even the young Karlgren, a formidable person
in his own right, who once commented, “Pelliot was a d’Artagnan!”
Whatever the truth of that opinion, Alekseev’s letters to Pelliot from
1911 onwards often have something flattering and formal about
them, especially at the outset. Alekseev always thought of Pelliot as an
366 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
inordinately ambitious and vain man, as well as an enthusiastic socializer
whose notorious breakfasts often attracted a disconcertingly large
number of visitors.
On his short visit to Berlin, Alekseev found little of that “lively
physiognomy” of Paris that he had grown so fond of. e women he
found “in good order, but neither elegant nor beautiful, though polite”
(B65). What charmed and relieved Alekseev the most in Berlin was
the high level of French spoken by everyone. Müller, head of the Ethnographic
Museum, lived up to every preconception Alekseev might
have harbored about the Germans: “His learning was shocking (nachitannost’
ego pugaet).” e contrast with Herbert Giles in Cambridge
could not have been greater: “We talked for three and a half hours. I
came away with more profit than half a year of bookish study would
have given me” (B66). Professors Forke, Grube, and Sachau all put on
a fine show of congenial fluent French at the famous Seminar of Oriental
Languages in Berlin. But the student clientele, Alekseev found,
was of the same mercantile and desperately uninteresting kind he had
seen in England, with only one decisive difference: they did seem to
learn Chinese at an extraordinary speed in Berlin, mainly, he thought,
because efficient use was made of very well-paid Chinese visiting language
teachers.
In Peking Alekseev found little distraction and worked so hard that
he did not even find time to write the letters with which he used to
entertain his friends from England and France: “Sometimes I regret
that I waste my youth in slavery. But then: who does not regret his
past?” (B68) Convinced that the spoken language of Peking must be
accessible to non-“hieroglyphic” transcription, he produced vast
amounts of “fine” phonetic transcriptions of the Peking dialect, much
in the spirit of his Paris masters of phonetics. He insisted on investigating
in this way what he called “the phonetic laws of the Peking dialect
of the northern Chinese language” (B68), and for the methodology of
these matters his guide remained his Paris teacher, J.-P. Rousselot.50
According to his daughter, Alekseev became the first linguist anywhere
in the world to apply strictly experimental methods to the study of
Chinese tones (B46). He also became deeply interested in lexicographic
Principes de la phonétique expérimentale, 2 vols. (Paris-Leipzig: Welter: 1897 and 1908).
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 367
theory, French literature, general phonology, religious studies, and
many other subjects.
Alekseev’s omnivorous work-alcoholism flourished in Peking as never
before. “One of his teachers said, ‘To work with somebody who works
and for somebody who works is pleasant.’” (B69) But Alekseev was
found wanting when it came to learning the classics by heart: “Liu tells
me that my most serious fault is that I do not remember the classics”
(B94). What he worked for was to become a good professor of Chinese,
and he came to think that he got it all wrong: “What I should have
done was to concentrate on scientific investigation, because one is a
scholar first and only then eo ipso a professor. But I thought otherwise”
(B69).
In 1906 Alekseev immersed himself in a study that would remain
one of his preoccupations to the end of his life: new-year’s pictures
(niánhua ), of which he came to make what perhaps is still the
most remarkable collection in the world.51
His was a courageous, revolutionary
interest, for even in St. Petersburg his Chinese teacher commented
as follows on these pictures: “All this is what uncultured,
stupid people indulge in (sebe pozvoliaiut). I won’t even look at them
in a university!” (B71) It was a profound pleasure for the young Alekseev
to find his learned teachers in Peking also unable to explain these
pictures, which he would get semi-literate old men in the neighborhood
to expound so beautifully and richly.
Popular art was one thing. Popular tales and hawker’s cries were
another. Alekseev recorded both on a grand scale. He proudly considered
himself a kitaist-etnograf (B84). But in spirit he went beyond
conventional ethnography. He aspired to become a cultural sleuth, an
anthropological Sherlock Holmes deducing the secrets of Chinese culture
from seemingly informal and disinterested conversations with a
wide range of witnesses for that culture. At one point he says, “Sherlock
Holmes would have made an excellent Sinologist” (B86).
All this went very well, but: “I am alone here and lonely with my
lively interest for this country. Everything else, everyone else … Dear
me, what a public!” (B73) is changed when Chavannes arrived in
Peking, and when, on May 16, 1907, Alekseev was able to join the
Unless the Hanshan bookshop in London is collecting more as I write this.
368 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
great scholar at a major exhibition. Chavannes had come to China
with a purpose: he was looking for archaeological evidence on the Han
dynasty. e young Alekseev was most embarrassed to see how his
distinguished teacher failed to make any sense in conversation with
his Chinese hosts—until for some reason the subject of Sīmaˇ Qiān
came up. As a rule, the young Alekseev had to do the talking, and for
once his comments were not in his usual self-destructive mode: “He
should have understood that without me his listeners would have been
bored to tears.” ere is, after all, more between Heaven and Earth
than Han epigraphy and Sīmaˇ Qiān, and the young Alekseev was
interested in that other part.
In his diaries of the time he asks a pertinent question: “Will China
simply become a part of Europe and America where they just happen
to speak and write Chinese, or will the country be able to preserve its
personality (svoe litso)?” Alekseev gradually came to discuss such questions
extensively with the Chinese (B78). He found no sympathy for
his occasional displays of national sentimentalism, which he eventually
learnt to keep to himself: “I told Chavannes a lot about Russian lit-
erature.52
Only in Russia can they write like this. I was proud of my
wonderful language and happy that in my country something improbably
big was growing in the minds of its best sons … Soon a revaluation
of all values would come. e thunder of the storm was audible,
the storm of a new life! Chavannes was quite indifferent to such themes:
history, in his opinion, is made by extraordinary personalities. With
Chavannes one must talk solely about China. ere he was simply
extraordinary. Our conversations about literally all questions regarding
the study of China comprised the charm of this journey. We philosophized
gently. In moments like these Chavannes was inimitable (nezamenim).
I can forgive him everything just for his having given me the
chance to spend time in his room” (B79). “e link between a teacher
and his disciple can be more lively and more self-sacrificingly deep
than that between a father and a son. I forgive Chavannes many things
with pleasure, both in relation to myself and also in general—and I
am so happy with the triumphant feeling of my own humility” (B80).
e recurrent reference to forgiveness makes it plain that Chavannes
In particular, it seems, about Leonid Andreev.
C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370 369
with his aristocratic ways and “pedantic haste”53
toward his long-dead
inscriptions posed something of an emotional challenge to the young
Alekseev. Chavannes appreciated the razgovorchivost’ or “chattiness” of
his young disciple all the more because he felt he was naturally incapable
of it (B82), and this chattiness it was that ultimately led Alekseev
to appreciate Chinese culture and Chinese ways of life so naturally, so
deeply, so personally. It was this trait that added a dimension of almost
physical responsiveness to his otherwise immoderately ambitious and
often very abstract philological pursuits. Like very few others after him
he seemed to be indeed “on speaking terms” with traditional China.
By contrast, it would appear that Alekseev was not on speaking terms
with Marxists or Marxism: “I’m sorry to say that I am not a Marxist.
In the problems that I am concerned with it is difficult (for me, at
least) to solve them convincingly in the manner of Marxism” (B14).
In 1950 he added: “I’m writing nothing: I’m scared. And thus I spent
the entire year.” But in fact at the time there was something else that
occupied his mind and what was left of his failing energy: the compilation
of what was to become the Bol’shoi kitaisko-russkii slovar’ (Large
Chinese-Russian Dictionary) of 1983, mentioned above. In his introduction
to the dictionary, the editor, I.M Oshanin, only barely referred
to what in fact was Alekseev’s quite crucial role in the project which
preoccupied him for much of his later life. No account of Alekseev
would do justice to his methodological approach if it did not focus on
the central matter of lexicography which was his abiding preoccupation.
It had taken on a life of its own.
Indeed, for all its shortcomings, in the matter of phonetic description
which was so close to Alekseev’s heart from his early days in Paris
onwards, this dictionary came to go well beyond all dictionaries published
in China and all dictionaries published in the West. In fact, it
also went beyond Alekseev’s own phonetic transcriptions: e Large
Chinese-Russian Dictionary indicates the stress contours in Chinese
words. N.A. Speshnev,54
a student of a student of Alekseev’s, is the hero
of the story of the study of Chinese word stress in Russia. In his FonIn
the diaries Chavannes is referred to as a pedantichnyi toropiag.
Born in China in 1931.
370 C. Harbsmeier / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 344-370
etika kitaiskogo iazyka,55
Vvedenie v kitaiskii iazyk,56
and in Kitaiskaia
filologiia. Izbrannye stat’i,57
Speshnev lays out some of his principles
concerning the phenomenon of word stress in Chinese. In phonetics,
Speshnev carried on where Alekseev had left off. Yet closest of all Russian
Sinologists to Alekseev, when it comes to developing the line of
becoming a kitaist etnograf, systematically concerned not with any
Mandarin langue but with local Northern and Southern Chinese parole,
is the indefatigable academician and folklorist Boris Riftin.58
Riftin
was never really taught by Alekseev. It appears he met the man no more
than once or twice. Yet it is abundantly clear everywhere in Riftin’s
vast sinological enterprises that he drew much of his spiritual and
scientific nourishment from this extraordinarily inspiring philologistethnographer
Alekseev.
Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1980.
St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo KARO, 2006.
St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2006.
Riftin’s Chinese article (under his Chinese name, Lıˇ Fúqīng ), “Commemorating
the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of the Russian Sinologist Vasilii Alekseev,” Hànxué
yánjiū tōngxùn 79 (2001): 63-69, has been useful to me in writing the
present article.