Yevgeny Polivanov

Who was Yevgeny Polivanov?

Yevgeny Dmitrievich Polivanov was a Soviet linguist, orientalist and polyglot.

He wrote major works on the Japanese, Chinese, Uzbek, and Dungan languages and on theoretical linguistics and poetics. He participated in the development of writing systems for the peoples of the Soviet Union and also designed a cyrillization system for Japanese language, which was officially accepted in the Soviet Union and is still the standard in modern Russia. He also translated the Kyrgyz national Epic of Manas into Russian. Polivanov is credited as the scholar who initiated the comparative study of Japanese pitch accent across dialects.

During the Russian revolution of 1917, Polivanov was active first in the Menshevik Party, then he joined the Bolshevik Party . He worked in the Oriental section of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in 1917–1918 and in the Komintern in 1921.

In 1928–1929 he expressed disagreement with Nicholas Marr's Japhetic theory, which was promoted by the regime at the time. After this he was blackballed from all scholarly institutions in Moscow and Leningrad and until his arrest "was essentially in exile in Central Asia, where he accomplished fruitful work on the local languages."