Vasiliy Mikhaylovich Alekseyev ' onMouseout='HidePop("190")' href="/topics/Saint_Petersburg">Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

—May 12, 1951, ibidem) was an eminent Soviet sinologist and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1902 he finished the Saint Petersburg University and became a professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

. First he worked in the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Bibliothèque nationale de France

The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...

, Museum für Völkerkunde, Musée Guimet etc.

In 1907, he travelled along with Édouard Chavannes

Édouard Chavannes

Édouard Chavannes was a French sinologist.He is best known for his translations from Sima Qian's Shiji , sections of the Hou Hanshu relating to the 'Western Regions', the Weilüe, his studies of Han dynasty stone carvings Édouard Chavannes (Chinese: ) (1865–1918) was a French sinologist.He is best...

 through several Chinese provinces, describing ancient sculptural monuments previously unknown to international scholarship, in particular the Song

Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...

 monuments of Henan

Henan

Henan , is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the central part of the country. Its one-character abbreviation is "豫" , named after Yuzhou , a Han Dynasty state that included parts of Henan...

 and Tang

Tang Dynasty

The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...

 monuments of Shaanxi

Shaanxi

' is a province in the central part of Mainland China, and it includes portions of the Loess Plateau on the middle reaches of the Yellow River in addition to the Qinling Mountains across the southern part of this province...

.

Alekseyev has translated the Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio or Liaozhai Zhiyi is a collection of nearly five hundred mostly supernatural tales written by Pu Songling in Classical Chinese during the early Qing Dynasty.Pu borrows from a folk tradition of oral storytelling to put to paper a series of captivating,...

. In 1958 he also published a collection Kitayskaya klassicheskaya proza (The Chinese Classical Prose).

Notable works

• Lisyi chary (The Fox Charms, 1922)
• Monakhi volshebniki (The Wizard Monks, 1923)
• Kitayskaya ieroglificheskaya pis'mennost' i ee latinizatsiya (The Chinese character script and its Romanization, 1932)
• Rasskazy o lyudyakh neobychainykh (Stories about extraordinary people, 1937)