Russian-Korean Materials

In the 1980s the UH Center for Korean Studies under then director Dae-Sook Suh acquired a number of microfilm abstracts of Russian kandidat and doctoral dissertations about Korea (both North and South). After the Library hired Kyungmi Chun as the Korean Bibliographer in 1992, a continued emphasis was placed on acquiring Russian language materials. This was due to the Korean Collections Consortium of North America designation. During the 1990s the Russian National Library in Moscow began sending us microfilms for every item listed in L. M. Volodina’s Bibliografiia Korei (Moskva: 1981. 166 p.) Monographs and journals are acquired as broadly as possible on Koreans in Russia and Russians in Korea.

Grigorii Vladimirovich Podstavin

Podstavin was born in 1875 in Rybinsk, Russia and died 23 March, 1924 in Harbin, China. Having entered St. Petersburg University’s oriental language department, Podstavin graduated in 1898 with a specialty in Mongolian philology. In 1899 he was invited by the prominent orientalist A.M. Pozdneev to go to Vladivostok to create a new oriental studies center — the Vostochnyi institut (Oriental Institute).

Podstavin became the Korean specialist, and he also taught courses on Mongolian. After arriving in Vladivostok, Pozdneev sent him to Korea for further studies. He hired Korean nationals to teach in the Institute. He was appointed a full professor in 1922.

From 1919 to 1920 he served as the Director of the Vostochnyi institut. As the revolution reached the Far Eastern parts of Russia, Podstavin was appointed in 1920 as the first Rector of the State Far Eastern University, and served also as a professor in the faculty of Korean philology until 1922. At the end of this year, he emigrated to Korea and then to Manchuria where he became the Director of the Horvat Gymnasium in Harbin. He was survived by five daughters. –Amir Khisamutdinov