Alexander Khristoforovich Vostokov ( - ) was one of the first Russia

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

n philologists.

He was born in Arensburg, Governorate of Livonia, and studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts

Imperial Academy of Arts

The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...

. As a natural son of Baron von Osten-Sacken, he received the name Osteneck, which he later chose to render into Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 as Vostokov (Ost, the German word for "east," translates to vostok in Russian). He liked to experiment with language and, in one of his poems, introduced the female name Svetlana

Svetlana

Svetlana is a common Slavic female name, deriving from the Russian word свет svet, which translates into English as "light", "shining", "pure", or "holy", depending upon context. The name was coined by Alexander Vostokov and popularized by Vasily Zhukovsky in his eponymous ballade, first published...

, which would gain popularity through Zhukovsky

Vasily Zhukovsky

Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century...

's eponymous ballad.

During his lifetime, Vostokov was known as a poet and translator, but it is his innovative studies of versification

Versification

Versification may be*the art of making verses, see poetry*the theory of the phonetic structure of verse, see meter *the rendition of a prose work into verse, especially of classical works during the Middle Ages, see medieval poetry...

 and comparative Slavonic grammars which proved most influential. In 1815, he joined the staff of the Imperial Public Library, where he discovered the most ancient dated book written in Slavonic vernacular, the so-called Ostromir Gospel

Ostromir Gospel

The Ostromir Gospels is the second oldest dated East Slavic book...

. In 1841, Vostokov was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....

.

Vostokov's works on the Church Slavonic language were considered a high watermark of Slavic studies until the appearance of Izmail Sreznevsky

Izmail Sreznevsky

Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky was a towering figure in 19th-century Slavic studies.His father, Ivan Sreznevsky, was a prolific translator of Latin poetry who taught at the Demidov Lyceum in Yaroslavl before moving to Kharkov University. It was in Kharkov that Sreznevsky graduated in philology and...

's comprehensive lexicon in 1893-1903 and garnered him the doctorates honoris causa from the Charles University and University of Tübingen.