[KS] Congratulations to Adelaida Fedorovna Trotsevich on Her Ninetieth Birthday

Vladimir Tikhonov vladimir.tikhonov at ikos.uio.no
Wed Jan 8 05:38:58 EST 2020


Dear KS mailing list subscribers,

I would like to join Frank in extending my sincere congratulations to Adelaida Fedorovna Trotsevich on the occasion of her 90th birthday. I am very happy to count Adelaida Fedorovna among my teachers: in the early 1990s, she taught us, the St-Petersburg State University students, Korean literary history. Aside of her unforgettable classes, both me and a number of other students of Korea in the Soviet/Russian/Russophone cultural sphere were greatly influenced by her academic works, both books and articles. A rather comprehensive list of her scholarly works is available here - http://www.rauk.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1207:2011-04-02-193316&catid=126:2011-04-02%2019:33:16&lang=ko&Itemid=143 and I have to say that I grew up as a researcher reading Adelaida Fedorovna's books and articles and learning both the empirical knowledge of Korean literary history and her highly original methodology, greatly influenced by the worldwide structuralist trends and its Soviet out-branching, the Tartu-Moscow semiotics school. Many of her theoretical approaches and hypotheses are still in my head, and I enjoy referring to them while teaching my own students now. I tell them about Adelaida Fedorovna's reading of the Cloud Dream of Nine from a viewpoint emphasizing both the hidden Yijing (Book of Chnages) symbolism and Chan/Zen/Son aesthetics there, and I tell them about Adelaida Fedorovna's attempts to find the traces of the basic Indo-European myth (the fight of the Thunder God against the chthonic Serpent), as well as such universal mythological motifs as 'hero brought ashore by water' or Heaven vs. Earth opposition in the ancient Korean mythology, and it indeed provokes innovative thinking and further comparative-mythological quests! Structuralism is long outmoded in the Western academia, but it is hard to deny that the structuralist efforts to categorize the mythological motifs and trace their historical evolution "scientifized" the study of pre-modern narratives. In addition to this, both me and so many other Soviet/Russian-born Koreanists, or the Koreanists from elsewhere proficient in Russian are deeply grateful to Adelaida Fedorovna for her wonderful translations of Korean classics ranging from Ch'unhyang Story (the topic of her PhD, all the way back in 1962!) to the Cloud Dream of Nine and portions of Jehol Diary. It is really a shame that so few Koreanists outside of the former USSR/Eastern Bloc area read Russian, otherwise they could have enriched themselves a lot by immersing themselves in Adelaida Fedorovna's scholarship stretching across more than 70 years - her first-ever article appeared in print back in 1949, and she is still academically active. The people like her built the post-war Soviet/Russophone Korean studies. Out debt to them is enormous. 

Vladimir Tikhonov 

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Joseph Shulman <fshulman at umd.edu> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 7, 2020 4:00 AM
To: koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com
Subject: Congratulations to Adelaida Fedorovna Trotsevich on Her Ninetieth Birthday

Born on January 7, 1930, Dr. Adelaida Fedorovna Trotsevich has led a remarkable career in promoting a greater knowledge and appreciation of Korean literature in Russia through her studies, her many years of teaching, and her numerous publications.

At St. Petersburg State University (formerly Leningrad State University), Dr. Trotsevich earned both her Candidate of Philological Sciences degree (1962) with a 252 page dissertation entitled "'Istoriia o vernosti Chkhun Khian' i zhanr povesti v koreiskoi srednevekovoi literature" ["'History of the Loyalty of Ch'unhyang' and the Story as a Genre of Korean Literature"], written under the supervision of Aleksandr A. Kholodovich, and in 1983, the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences (equivalent to the Habilitation
degree) for which she completed a 470 page thesis on the Korean medieval novel ["Koreiskii srednevekovyi roman"]. She has taught and mentored an entire generation of Russian students and scholars of Korean literature as a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg State University. Among them are three scholars who wrote their dissertations for the degree of Candidate of Philological Sciences under her supervision: Inna Valeriantovna Tsoi, whose thesis
(2003) was on the stories of Kim Tong-in; Li San Yun, whose thesis
(2008) is entitled “Novels in the Writings by Modern Female Writers of the Republic of Korea (Pak Wan-seo, Sin Kyeong-suk and Eun Hui-gyeong)”; and Anastasiia Alexandrovna Gurieva, whose thesis (2012) is entitled "An Anthology of Korean Traditional Poetry 'Namhun Taepyeong-ga (Songs of the Great Calmness Under the South Wing)' (by a Xylograph from the Collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences)".

Dr. Trotsevich has published many monographs, editions of Korean texts, articles and translations from Korean into Russian including such works (accompanied by summaries in English) as "Koreiskaia srednevekovaia povest" ["The Korean Medieval Story"] (Moskva: Nauka, 1975. 264p.) and "Koreiskii srednevekovyi roman: "Oblachnyi son deviati" Kim Mandzhuna" ["The Korean Medieval Novel: Kuunmong by Kim Man-jung"] (Moskva: "Nauka", 1986. 198p.). She also interacted with scholars outside of Russia through her participation in a number of international conferences of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s.

For many years, Dr. Trotsevich was in charge of the Korean manuscripts at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (renamed in 1992 as the Russian Academy of Sciences, St.
Petersburg Branch). Among her latest accomplishments has been the preparation and publication with her former student Anastasia A.
Gurieva of a major, two-volume description of the manuscripts and block-prints of Korean traditional culture -- entitled "Opisanie pis’mennykh pamiatnikov koreiskoi traditsionnoi kultury" -- that are included in the collection of Chinese block-prints kept in the library of the Faculty for Oriental Studies of St. Pertersburg National University (published in St. Petersburg in 2007. 300p.) and those that are preserved in the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St.
Petersburg (2009. 424p.).

May I invite other scholars, researchers and students to join with me and her many Russian colleagues in extending congratulations via the Korean Studies list to Adelaida Fedorovna Trotsevich on this special occasion -- her 90th birthday -- and to express appreciation of her life-long contributions to the field of Korean Studies.

Frank Joseph Shulman

January 6, 2020

--
Frank Joseph Shulman
Bibliographer, Editor and Consultant for Reference Publications in Asian Studies Associate Editor, Bibliography of Asian Studies of the Association for Asian Studies
9225 Limestone Place
College Park, Maryland 20740-3943 (U.S.A.)
E-mail: fshulman at umd.edu


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