Alexander Hilferding

Who was Alexander Hilferding?

Alexander Hilferding was a Russian linguist and folklorist of German descent who collected some 318 bylinas in the Russian North. A native of Warsaw, he assisted Nikolay Milyutin in reforming the administration of Congress Poland. In the late 1850s, he was a Russian diplomatic agent in Bosnia; he published several books about the country and its folklore. Hilferding was elected into the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1856. He died of typhoid while collecting folk songs in Kargopol, in the north of European Russia, and was later reburied in the Novodevichy Cemetery, St. Petersburg. Hilferding's collection of Slavonic manuscripts is preserved in the Russian National Library.