On the Jubilee (80 years) of the Patriarch of St. Petersburg Indology

The article is dedicated to the outstanding Indologist, researcher and translator of the Mahabharata Yaroslav Vasilkov, who turns 80 on December 12, 2023. Yaroslav Vladimirovich Vasilkov is rightfully considered the head of the modern St. Petersburg Indological school. He enjoys well-deserved respect from fellow orientalists, ethnographers, folklorists, and philologists. The article provides an overview of the scientific activities of our Jubilee, examines his achievements as a translator and researcher of the Mahabharata, a biographer of the first Russian Indianist Gerasim Lebedev, a specialist in Indian folklore, as well as activities in organizing international scientific conferences. Yaroslav Vassilkov was born on 12th of December 1943. He graduated from Faculty of Oriental studies of St. Petersburg (Leningrad) State University and started to work as Indologist at Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies (now St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences). In 1993 he became head of South and South-East Asia department there. Since 2005 Yaroslav Vassilkov is leading research fellow of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Here he studied the Mahabharata as an epic and a source of folklore themes and ethnographic data. Dr. Vassilkov also contributed much to the research on life and academic activity of Gerasim Lebedev, the first Russian Indologist and a founder of the Bengali National Theater. He also wrote extensively on biographies of Yuri Roerich, Rahul Sankrityayan and other scholars

Buddhism · EPIC · Ethnography · Folklore · Oriental studies · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Soviet and Russian History