Julian Shutsky

Julian Shutsky was a major figure in Soviet oriental studies and an anthroposophist. His father was a forestry scientist and his mother, who taught French and music, inspired in him a love of languages and music at an early age. In 1913, the family moved to Petrograd. There, Shutsky studied at the Duke of Oldenburg School until 1915, then spent a year at the Petrograd Polytechnic and entered Petrograd University, where he studied Chinese language and culture until his graduation in 1922.

In 1920, while still a student, Shutsky began working at the Museum of Asia of the Academy of Sciences and on graduation became a researcher in the Department of Chinese Philology of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Eastern and Western Languages and Literature. In 1924, he qualified to teach Chinese studies and went on to read courses at a number of Leningrad universities. From 1936 to 1937 he collaborated with the State Hermitage Museum.

Shutsky mastered several East Asian languages and wrote a number of books, but his most important work was the translation of the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching (Book of Changes) and a study of its origins and history. Published only in 1960, this text remains a unique source for readers wishing to understand the I Ching, which, as Shutsky admitted, “still poses almost insurmountable difficulties, so unusual and alien to us are the images used to convey its ideas.”¹ According to East Asia scholar Artem Kobzev, “Shutsky was a highly gifted individual with extraordinary talents both in sciences and arts.”² His interest in the East arose in parallel to his spiritual awakening, which was brought on by music, and in particular by Scriabin’s works, which he described as “a major interest of [his] youth”³ and believed to be an integral part of his inner life. “[Scriabin’s] search for the ideal world that existed above our reality was the first philosophical idea that would stay with me forever,” he wrote in 1935.

In 1922, while still at university, Shutsky developed an interest in anthroposophy, in which he found a universal explanation for the visible organization of the world, its invisible structure, and his personal development. To anthroposophy he devoted his work, his philosophical research, and his artistic practice. Around the same time he met poet  Elizaveta Dmitrieva (also known by the pseudonym Cherubina de Gabriak), who became his platonic lover and partner in anthroposophical work, to which they committed themselves with a sense of looming disaster. Dmitrieva was arrested for her involvement in anthroposophy and exiled to Tashkent, where she died in 1928, leaving Under the Pear Tree, her collection of poems written in the style of Shutsky’s translations of Chinese poetry.