Evgeny Spalvin

Yevgeny Spalvin (, Japanese: or ; 11 October 1872, Ādzele – 10 November 1933, Harbin) was an orientalist and the first professional japanologist in Russia.

He was born into the family of a Latvian teacher, began his studies at the Faculty of Law of Petersburg University, and graduated from its Faculty of Oriental Studies in the Chinese-Mongolian-Manchu track. He was sent to Tokyo in 1899–1900 to prepare for a professorship in the department of Japanese literature, and was subsequently sent to Japan on several further occasions (1903, 1906, 1907, 1909, and 1922). After the founding of the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok, he took up the post of professor of Japanese literature there (1900). Until 1920 he combined this post with that of head of the Oriental Institute's library. In 1902–1904, he also served as a censor of the Japanese press and literature and carried out assignments for military counterintelligence. He rose to the rank of Collegiate Councillor (1916, with seniority from 1900) and was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir, 4th class (1917). In 1922–1923, he served as acting rector of the Far Eastern State University. He was cultural secretary and translator for the Soviet plenipotentiary mission in Tokyo (1925–1931), and afterward an adviser to the administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Harbin. He died of cardiac arrest following emergency surgery.

He was the first professional practical japanologist in Russia. His main efforts were devoted to popularizing the language, to teaching, and to producing textbooks — work to which he dedicated 25 years of his life in total. Besides teaching, he devoted much time to organizational work, notably initiating and serving as chief editor of major orientalist projects — the journals Bulletin of the Oriental Institute and Contemporary Chronicle of the Far East. He is also the author of an original Cyrillic transcription of Japanese phonetics that was used at the Oriental Institute.

Despite years of dedicated teaching work, Spalvin, who was not a linguist, did not found a scholarly school and left behind no striking scholarly ideas. In the Soviet period his name was forgotten. The first publications about Spalvin appeared only in the 1980s, and scholarly interest in his life and work, in both Russia and Japan, revived only at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Biography

Family, childhood, and student years (1872–1898) Yevgeny Spalviņš was born on 11 October 1872 at the Adsel Castle estate (Governorate of Livonia), located roughly 150 km from Riga.

The father of the future japanologist was the Latvian Heinrihs Spalviņš (1841–1913), a writer and teacher and the author of one of the first grammars of the Latvian language (An Aid to the Study of Language and the Writing of Thoughts, published in 1879). At the age of 30 Heinrihs married the governess Elise Mekler; both were of the Lutheran faith. Their first-born was christened Eižens (the Latvian equivalent of Yevgeny); the family had six children in total — three sons and three daughters, the youngest of whom died at the age of four. In 1877 the family moved to Riga, where Heinrihs contributed to the Latvian- and German-language press (according to some accounts he owned and edited the newspaper Friend of the Latvian People) and also served as an official of the Mutual Fire Insurance Society; his salary and fees were the family's sole source of income. Heinrihs published prolifically in Latvian and German; the languages of everyday use in the Spalviņš household were German, French, and, presumably, Latvian, while at work the head of the family also had to master Russian.

All the Spalvin children (as they were known in Russian) received a good education. After finishing the Riga Cathedral School, Yevgeny received 135 rubles from his father and set off to enroll at Imperial Saint Petersburg University; in his autobiography he wrote that from then on he made his own way in life. He initially enrolled in the Faculty of Law, where he studied for three years. He had to support himself: the talented young man received a small private stipend and, over eight years, worked with Professor A. A. Isayev, translating his lectures and articles into German, and also worked with German journals and with the Social Democratic publishing house of in Stuttgart. The reasons for his transfer to the Faculty of Oriental Studies are unclear, but he obtained permission from the Ministry of National Education to transfer to the Chinese-Mongolian-Manchu track.

Already in his senior years at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Spalvin was engaged by the Ministry of Finance to work on the three-volume reference work Description of Korea. In his autobiography he later stated that a substantial portion of the linguistic and political sections was his own work. In the course of this work Spalvin had to devise a practical transcription of the Korean language (he later claimed that the Koreanist Podstavin borrowed his transcription, making only minor changes). In 1898 Yevgeny Spalvin graduated from the university with top marks in twelve subjects, including the languages Chinese, Mongolian, Kalmyk, Manchu, French and English, which earned him a first-class diploma (12 July). He had not studied Japanese, although he had gained some acquaintance with it through a course on the Japanese writing system taught by , and through the same instructor's course on Japanese grammar in his final year.

First trip to Japan and the Oriental Institute (1899–1900) The student Spalvin was, by decree of the curator of the Saint Petersburg Educational District, retained to prepare for a professorship in the recently established department of Japanese literature, with a stipend of 600 rubles a year. To improve his practical command of the language, he was sent on a two-year assignment to Japan, dated from 1 January 1899. The Ministry of National Education allocated 2,000 rubles a year for the student's support; an additional 750 rubles from the university budget was envisaged, but in the end Spalvin never received this portion of the stipend. The instructions for the assignment set a demanding task: "…to study the Japanese language and literature comprehensively in the centres of learning of Japan itself, under the guidance of local scholars, and equally to become directly acquainted with the spirit of the country and its customs."

Spalvin went on a Russian Volunteer Fleet steamer from Odessa to Nagasaki. Along the way he studied English with naval officers who had been posted to the Far East. He reported to the dean, Rosen, that he had arrived in Tokyo on 18 (30) March 1899. Within a week he had begun studying Japanese. Even earlier, upon first arriving in Nagasaki, he had already realized how insufficient his training in Petersburg had been: while touring the city, the young scholar got lost, and all his attempts to communicate with the Japanese came to nothing — the need to learn the language was more than obvious. The young japanologist's first teacher was Ōbuchi Norimoto, a doctor and lawyer who before the revolution had been a vassal of the last shōgun; his fee was 20 rubles a month for daily two-hour lessons.

There were a lot of difficulties with communication and daily life accommodation: rental houses came completely unfurnished, and the 2,000-ruble annual sum covered only the barest necessities. Spalvin asked for the university stipend needed to buy books and to travel around the country, but never received it. His situation eased somewhat only in 1900: an urgent teaching vacancy arose at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, and the Japanese Ministry of Education invited Spalvin to take temporary work there. This allowed the scholar to hire a second language tutor, who lived in Spalvin's house and conversed with him around the clock. This tutor was Kiyotsugu Maeda, a student in the German department of the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. The teaching programme for the language and related courses was approved on 23 August. In the list of teaching materials he prepared 48 titles of literature and 17 Japanese newspapers and periodicals were listed. The Institute's Conference supported Spalvin's proposal to acquire for the library the complete holdings of the English, German, and French societies in Tokyo. Drawing on his own experience of learning Japanese, Spalvin sharply reduced the theoretical portion of his course in favour of more practical sessions. After only four or five lessons, students would begin reading conversational phrases arranged by grammatical principle, and by the third month they moved on to reading substantial texts in mixed kana-kanji script.

In 1901, Spalvin produced his first substantial textbooks, including grammars and readers for junior and senior courses. The materials for practical exercises included samples of business documents as well as philosophical and literary texts, including works by Fukuzawa Yukichi, Tsubouchi Shōyō, and others. By 1911, the number of language classes had been increased to ten hours a week. In 1903 Spalvin's textbooks were also adopted by the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Saint Petersburg.

In 1901, the Oriental Institute's students were sent on placement to Japan for the first time. Almost immediately the Japanese authorities accused the Russian japanologists of espionage: in June 1902, an incident occurred in which P. G. Vaskevich was detained. Nonetheless, his report on his journey from Tsuruga to Niigata was awarded a gold medal. Spalvin greatly hoped to keep Vaskevich at the Institute, but he was drawn to practical work instead. For his part, Spalvin had, as early as 1901, approached the Japanese government on the Institute's behalf with a proposal to exchange scholarly literature, and received responses from 15 Japanese institutions and libraries. However, it never proved possible to organize regular publication by the Vladivostok orientalists in Japanese periodicals. From November 1902 Spalvin served as an official of the internal foreign censorship department; even earlier, he had worked on translating the coded messages of Japanese spies caught near the Slavyanka tract.

In April–August 1903, Spalvin was again sent to Japan. This time he visited Kyoto and Tokyo.

In 1904, by order No. 56 of 3 April from the head of the Amur region administration, Spalvin was appointed acting director of the Institute and served in that post from 15 April to 5 December 1904, that is, until the arrival in Vladivostok of the new director, Dmitry Pozdneev, with whom he had a sharp conflict. During the war the Institute was evacuated to Verkhneudinsk, which brought on a crisis: 59 of the Institute's 61 students were expelled (for various reasons, including military service), and the directorate lost contact with the teaching staff, since Russia's educational institutions were closed amid the military and revolutionary events of February 1904.

During the scholar's third trip to Japan (June–October 1906), the newspaper Osaka Asahi ran a six-part exposé, A Spy's Diary (25 September – 8 October), openly claiming that Kiyotsugu Maeda was a Russian spy and Spalvin his handler. Spalvin later gave the following account of why A Spy's Diary stopped after its sixth instalment:The rector of Kyoto Imperial University at the time, Professor , was a true friend and a brave man. After the war there were many people who felt ill will toward Russia, and stones were often thrown at me — one of the major Osaka newspapers even ran an article about me under the headline A Spy's Diary. One day Mr. Kinoshita invited me to see him through his secretary, and we talked the whole evening. I never actually asked him to have the articles retracted. And yet the articles about me stopped appearing. Only after I had returned to Vladivostok did word come from the university secretary of Mr. Kinoshita's death. The letter also set out the detailed circumstances of the affair. It turned out that Mr. Kinoshita had sent a letter to the director of the newspaper defending me, in which, among other things, he said that if the articles about me did not stop, he would sever all relations with the director. That is the impression Mr. Kinoshita left with me — a man who, in that difficult time, was able to show such generosity and courage.Shimizu Masatarō, secretary of the Law Faculty of Kyoto Imperial University, helped the scholar's family move into the Gion district, into the former house of Professor Nitobe Inazō, who had been transferred to Tokyo. Professor Nitobe's book on bushido had been partially translated into Russian and published by Spalvin in the Bulletin of the Oriental Institute as early as 1902.

On 14 August 1907, Kiyotsugu Maeda, who had briefly returned home, was murdered in Shiba Park in Tokyo by a man named Imamura Katsugorō. The press accused Maeda of treason and branded him a collaborator and traitor to his country. For Spalvin, who arrived in Japan a little later, the murder of his longtime assistant was a heavy blow. In his comments to the press he demanded that Maeda's name be cleared of slander, firmly rejected the accusations of espionage, and insisted that the purpose of his own trip to Japan was to acquire printing type. The type brought back from Japan made it possible, from 1907, for the Oriental Institute's publications to typeset complex combinations of Russian and Oriental scripts in seven languages. From Kyoto secondhand booksellers the scholar acquired eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century manuscripts — Oroshiyakoku Suimudan (Dreams of Russia), Bandan (Discussions of Barbarians), and Kankai Ibun (Curious Accounts of the Surrounding Seas). After the Oriental Institute was closed, these books were transferred to the Lenin State Library (Russian State Library) in Moscow. In 1909 Spalvin made a fourth trip to Japan to complete his work on phonetics and dialectology, primarily to prepare textbooks for publication.

Spalvin's initial reaction to the Bolshevik coup was sharply negative, and after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly he signed a protest submitted on behalf of the Union of Employees of Government Institutions of Vladivostok on 29 January 1918. In the spring of 1918, working as an observer for the military censorship committee, he dealt with the Vladivostok Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies, an experience that significantly changed his attitude toward the Bolsheviks. Still, the central project of the scholar's life became the transformation of the Oriental Institute into the Far Eastern State University while preserving the priority of Oriental studies within its structure. Already in 1919, in correspondence with the Omsk government, the professor set out special conditions for the future Faculty of Oriental Studies, including preservation of all the teaching staff's rights and the retention of its own library, museum, and printing works. The Council of the Oriental Institute set up a commission on the conversion into a university in October 1919, which Spalvin joined. On 13 February 1920, the Institute issued a resolution on the need to establish a university while preserving all the autonomous rights of the Higher School of Scholarly and Practical Oriental Studies, as the new internal structure was to be called. In fact, Spalvin had first aired a number of the ideas he voiced in these revolutionary years back in 1906, in an attempt to change the Oriental Institute's curriculum.

The Maritime Zemstvo Administration authorized the conversion of the Oriental Institute into the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the Far Eastern State University on 17 April 1920.

The professor's standing remained high. On 25 February 1923, an organizing bureau of the Far Eastern branch of the All-Russian Scientific Association of Oriental Studies was established, with Spalvin elected as its head and Roman Kim as secretary. Spalvin also worked for the newspaper Krasnoye Znamya and founded the journal Novy Dalny Vostok, which was exempted from prior censorship. In April 1924 Spalvin was elected chairman of the provincial branch of the Society for Aid to Victims of the Intervention, while continuing an extensive lecturing schedule. According to the historian , Spalvin's subsequent career was shaped by the establishment in Moscow of the Committee for the Study of Japan. Its chairman was S. I. Dukhovsky (of the Far Eastern department of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs), its secretary Roman Kim, and among the japanologists included were Nikolai Konrad, Spalvin, and N. V. Küner, along with Oleg Pletner, who had been expelled from Japan and represented the Red Army intelligence directorate on the Committee. In the autumn of 1924 Spalvin became de facto head of the journal Vostochnaya Studiya, intended for young scholars and students of the Far Eastern University. In the combined January–February 1925 issue of the journal, Spalvin published an article, The Plenipotentiary Mission of the USSR on Japanese Territory, whose content shows his familiarity with the workings of that institution. It was probably to Pletner — whom Spalvin, in his time as dean, had tried to bring onto the Far Eastern University's Faculty of Oriental Studies — that he owed his appointment as dragoman of the plenipotentiary mission; their correspondence from 1921–1922 survives. When the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs established the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries on 8 August 1925, Spalvin, already sent to Japan as translator and secretary of the mission, was appointed its representative there.

In Japan (1925–1931) After the conclusion of the Convention on the Basic Principles of Relations between the USSR and Japan, the 53-year-old Spalvin, who had never before undertaken diplomatic work, was appointed secretary and translator to the Soviet plenipotentiary mission in Tokyo. On 15 April 1925 he set out for Harbin, where he met the new plenipotentiary, Viktor Kopp. From there he travelled by train to Busan, by ferry to Shimonoseki, and by train on to Tokyo.

In Tokyo, the professor and his wife (since 1922 he had been married to Kaoru Maeda, widow of his longtime assistant) lived in the embassy building. As not only secretary-translator at the embassy but also a member of the VOKS, the workers' and peasants' union organization for cultural ties abroad, he was drawn into propaganda work that was closely monitored by the Japanese police. For instance, during a public lecture on Russia organized by the Japan-Russia Literary and Artistic Society and held at the on 8 October 1925, Spalvin announced that he intended to speak about the education system in Russia. The police cut the lecture short. The pretext for accusations of propaganda was his remark that communism was the ideology of contemporary Russia. The Soviet plenipotentiary lodged a protest with Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stating that "the address in no way touched on Japan's internal politics and was purely an objective statement of fact."

At the embassy Spalvin founded a Circle of japanologists, made up of young diplomats who were former graduates of the Far Eastern State University. One of its members was the university graduate Andrei Leifert, who later illustrated one of Spalvin's books. From 1928 the papers presented to the circle were printed by the embassy in special Russian-language editions. On 27 October 1930, Tokyo marked, with a formal celebration, the 35th anniversary of Spalvin's career in Oriental studies; 111 people attended the banquet, including the new plenipotentiary, Alexander Troyanovsky.

The Spalvins with their belongings were settled in apartment No. 6 at 26 Girinskaya Street, which held several thousand volumes of books and various collections. The Chinese Eastern Railway board even reduced the scholar's rent because of the great value of the materials he had brought, with the understanding that the books would pass into the organization's ownership. By order of the railway's managing director, Yu. V. Rudy, Spalvin was enrolled as senior agent of the commercial department pending a suitable vacancy, with a salary of 4,620 rubles a year plus relocation allowance and other benefits. He found the position tedious.

Manchukuo (1932–1933) On 27 April 1932, he was transferred to the post of senior agent to the deputy chairman of the board, with a salary of 5,040 rubles a year, which allowed him to subscribe to the Japanese press, acquire new publications, and "maintain at least a minimal level of specialized expertise." One account holds that Spalvin's work was mainly intelligence-analytical in nature, connected with the general situation on the Soviet border; it is known that in March 1933 he was sent on assignment to Xinjiang.

Family

According to family tradition, Yevgeny was accompanied on his first trip to Japan by Berta Maria Buscher, a native of Riga and the daughter of a tailor, who appears to have been a relative of the Spalviņš family. She managed the scholar's household for many years. Having arrived in Vladivostok unmarried, the 29-year-old Spalvin married Vera Ivanovna Segal, daughter of a hereditary honorary citizen of Vladivostok, on 27 July 1901; the ceremony was performed by Father Konstantin Tsivilev, an auditing student at the Oriental Institute. The couple had four children: a daughter, Valentina (born 1902), a daughter, Yevgenia (1904), a daughter, Irina (1906), and a son, Vyacheslav (born 1908). The ever-present Berta Buscher served as housekeeper and governess. Their daughter Irina was born during a posting to Japan; her name, meaning "peace" in Greek, was chosen symbolically, alluding to good relations between Russia and Japan. Since Spalvin had to return to his work at the Institute, Vera Ivanovna and the newborn were left in Japan for over a year in Berta Buscher's care; Irina Spalvina even attended a Japanese kindergarten as a result. In 1909 Berta married K. I. Tarulis, a staff member of the Oriental Institute's library.

Vera Ivanovna died on 1 November 1920, after nineteen years of marriage. Because of her funeral, the council of the Far Eastern State University cancelled the celebration of the 21st anniversary of the Oriental Institute's founding, which had been due to take place on 3 November; on that day Vera Spalvina was buried at Pokrovsky Cemetery in Vladivostok. Two years later, eleven days before his own 50th birthday, on 29 September 1922, Spalvin married Kaoru, the Japanese widow of his longtime assistant Maeda, who took the baptismal name Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna. Archpriest Konoplyov performed the ceremony at the university church. The marriage documents stated that Ye. A. Maeda was "a native of Verkhneudinsk in Transbaikal Province, Orthodox, born in 1880, and had worked for many years at the library of the Oriental Institute."

Personality Although Spalvin described himself as a gentle person, he also admitted that he always could fight back. He was sharp in his judgments, blunt, and quick-tempered, and was occasionally unfairly harsh with those close to him. Exactingness and a propensity for conflict were defining traits of the scholar's character throughout his life. Even in his later years, while in Japan, Spalvin fell out badly with Boris Pilnyak and was unable to get along with the art historian Nikolai Punin, who complained about him to VOKS during the organization of an exhibition of Soviet painting that toured Japanese cities from May to July 1927. Spalvin's supervisors at VOKS wrote to him that visitors from Japan, both foreign and Russian, had been complaining about his high-handed and unfriendly manner, adding that information they had since received bore out these long-standing rumours rather than dismissing them as isolated or unfair, as they had previously assumed. Spalvin was, in Sladkovsky's account, a particular picture of high spirits and gaiety that evening — sweeping up his young Japanese wife, whose elaborately styled hair barely reached his shoulder, and whirling with her into the middle of the dancing crowd of young people, dancing the most fashionable foxtrots, waltzes, and tangos.

Drawing on his own experience, as well as on the practical needs of applied Oriental studies, Spalvin consistently argued, in preparing textbooks and designing courses, for expanding practical spoken-language work. Japanese, in the wake of the Meiji reforms, was in a state of transformation and far from codified or literarily refined. Official communication was conducted in the literary language, bungo, while the new fiction increasingly used the colloquial language then gradually taking shape as education reform proceeded; a traditional literature also existed in kanbun, effectively a written dialect of Chinese. All these registers formed an organic whole within national communication, complicated further by the coexistence of kanji and kana scripts and by the absence of standardized spelling or pronunciation norms.

The Institute's director, A. M. Pozdneyev, noted in a report on Spalvin's work that in the 1901 academic year the teaching of Japanese underwent a general overhaul: the professor folded the entire theoretical grammar course into practical study. Learning kana and memorizing the key postpositions, verb forms, and common auxiliary verbs took no more than four or five hours, while spoken-language practice occupied seven daytime lessons and three evening ones (an hour each); grammar instruction took three hours, later reduced to one. Students were required to memorize ten new kanji characters a day, with one hour a week set aside for dictation.

Spalvin's principal textbooks were produced under time pressure and were of extremely poor print quality, since they were reproduced from typescripts or lithographed from handwritten notes — though this did nothing to diminish their pedagogical value. His fundamental Japanese Reader, in its final form, comprised twenty sections drawn from genuine letters, telegrams, receipts, contracts, public lectures, political speeches, international treaties, and even transcripts of prisoner-of-war interrogations. Spalvin also published a Collection of Excerpts of Literary-Style Japanese Prose, a Collection of Excerpts of Japanese Belles-Lettres, and a Collection of Everyday Japanese Business Papers. In 1909, for advanced courses, he published a manual titled The Japanese Army, and in 1913 a Collection of Talks and Discussions by Contemporary Japanese Figures. His Reader of Colloquial Japanese, first published in 1903, was written entirely in the Japanese syllabaries — katakana and hiragana — used alternately (odd-numbered pieces in katakana, even-numbered ones in hiragana). In 1907 the reader was typeset and published in the Bulletin of the Oriental Institute in mixed kana-kanji form. Its material was designed to cover the widest possible range of real communicative situations — several hundred of them — reflecting speakers of very different social status and level of speech culture, so that students could engage with and understand the speech patterns of every layer of society, from professors and former samurai to prostitutes and vagrants. Larger still were his Practical Japanese Conversations, comprising 1,668 texts grouped into 57 sections. This manual was based on the Japanese-language textbooks of Ernest Satow and Rudolf Lange, though all the language examples were carefully edited, partly rewritten, and in part specially composed by the lecturers Kiyotsugu Maeda and Mamoru Matsuda. Every text was given in two forms: on even pages in mixed kana-kanji script, on odd pages in kana alone. Instruction proceeded from the simplest forms of spoken language toward complex written forms, aiming at the ability to read Japanese texts of any difficulty in any combination of scripts.

Between 1913 and 1933, Spalvin published no further work on the Japanese language. Already settled in Harbin, he and his wife Kaoru Maeda prepared what became his best-known textbook of spoken Japanese, published in three parts after his death. It was based on the practical Japanese grammar Colloquial Japanese by , published in 1920. From the original, Spalvin's textbook took over the structure of "concentric" presentation, in which the same material is given twice, first briefly and then in expanded form. The volume of grammar was more than doubled through expanded teaching material and vocabulary; in the grammar course proper, McGovern's original text was retained wherever it matched Spalvin's own views. The section on voice, however, was rewritten entirely, as was the section contrasting the markers wa and ga , which anticipated research by Soviet grammarians of the postwar period; in his treatment of plurality markers, Spalvin likewise anticipated similar observations later made by Alexander Kholodovich. Entirely original was the third "concentric" section, describing the history and contemporary state of the Japanese writing system and setting out a method for teaching its various forms based on the graphic elements common to kanji and kana; this system had already been described in 1931 in Spalvin's book Japan: A View from Outside. Equally original were the sections on the contemporary Japanese linguistic situation as Spalvin saw it — he treated the classical written language and the modern literary language as wholly distinct, whereas McGovern had called them merely different styles — and on the Romanization of Japanese script. remarking that objections of the kind raised against him often stemmed simply from critics knowing one of his works but not others that would have answered them fully, and citing Spalvin's own published protest — in a Japanese journal, against Polivanov's transliteration of the syllable chi — as a case in point, dismissing it by pointing to a passage in his own 1928 Introduction to Linguistics concerning Japanese perception of that syllable as pronounced by Latvian speakers.

In the end, Spalvin's work had no significant influence on the development of Japanology as a discipline. Nor did the Cyrillic transcription of Japanese phonetics that he devised, based on an adapted Hepburn system, take hold in the field more broadly, although it proved convenient and was used consistently in the Oriental Institute's Vladivostok publications, and partly persisted in the press and popular publications (for example, in rendering the sound "yo," as in "Yokohama" or "Yoko"). The Polivanov system, published in 1930 but devised considerably earlier, differed from Spalvin's mainly in its principles for representing paired consonants. Polivanov's system was subsequently popularized by Nikolai Konrad in the Great Japanese–Russian Dictionary and was never revised again, despite criticism. Spalvin made no mention at all of the reader's positive qualities; instead, illustrating numerous errors with heavy irony, he offered a great many judgments about its author's character, arguing that Pozdneev's command of Japanese and general erudition were inadequate for the task of preparing teaching materials. The translations in the reader, he found, contained a great many lexical and grammatical errors arising from an over-literal approach, ignoring set phrases and producing awkward Russian collocations. Yet in the heat of polemic Spalvin often failed to offer a better solution himself: rejecting Pozdneev's rendering of (yōsui ike) as a "reservoir pond," for instance, Spalvin substituted "water reservoir," even though the original Japanese term still meant, essentially, a pond.

Immediately after Spalvin joined the Oriental Institute, its director put him in charge of censoring the Japanese press; he took up this work on 27 March 1901. The Institute's building had no proper space for it, and bundles of newspapers were simply dumped in the courtyard. Spalvin later recalled that the work was physically demanding, since old and new newspapers had to be sorted outdoors in all weather, year-round; in bad weather he had to work in the library instead, where students and censor got in each other's way. He marked passages he judged to be clear breaches of the censorship regulations and then drew up a dated report on the copies received. Subscribers received several copies of an issue at once, often with pages blacked out or cut away. Judging from Spalvin's 1901 reports, the Japanese newspapers held little political interest; they were most often subscribed to by the Japanese Club, mainly for their satirical columns and cartoons. Japanese residents in Siberia subscribed to papers from Osaka, while those in Vladivostok took theirs from Nagasaki or Hakodate; almost no one subscribed to the official Tokyo papers. Before long, Spalvin was noting in his reports the futility of censoring the Japanese press at all, since subscribers could get much the same material through English-, French-, and German-language papers published in China, Japan, and Korea, making any effort to police the Japanese and Chinese papers alone essentially pointless given the press's remarkable solidarity across borders. From 10 April 1901, by order of the Governor-General, the Oriental Institute's Conference was also required to review publications in European languages and to permit or ban the sale of books from Korea, China, and Japan; catalogues of already-reviewed works were sent from the Foreign Censorship Committee in Petersburg, and only titles absent from those lists needed review locally. Books approved with cuts were returned to their owners with the offending pages removed, while banned titles were forwarded to customs. It also turned out that Vladivostok had no local Japanese readership for serious literary or scholarly works. Over the course of 1901, Spalvin and his colleagues — Grigory Podstavin, Apollinary Rudakov, and Pyotr Schmidt — processed 1,882 volumes of Japanese books (608 titles) and some 2,926,200 individual newspaper issues.

During business trips to Japan in 1903, 1906, and 1909, Y. G. Spalvin acquired the publications the library needed. Thus, in 1903 he acquired a large amount of literature on Japanese studies, along with books on trade, economics, and industry. In preparing for the 1906 trip, Spalvin requested the purchase of 25 copies of Alexandrov's English–Russian dictionary, 10 copies of Makarov's French–Russian dictionary, and 10 copies of Scott and Bray's English Commercial Reader. For the needs of state-funded scholarship students, orders were placed for between 5 and 30 copies each of the Russian–Chinese dictionary published by the Beijing Ecclesiastical Mission (of Bishop Innokenty Figurovsky); the Russian–Chinese dictionary by Popov; the Chinese–Russian dictionary by Peshchurov; the Chinese–Russian dictionary by Palladius and Popov, and so on. At Spalvin's insistence, the Institute's Conference took out a subscription to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (a set printed on India paper cost 30 pounds sterling and 9 shillings), the 20-volume Russian Encyclopedia (at 3 rubles 60 kopecks per volume), and so on. The guiding principles were the acquisition of the newest specialized books and subscription to periodicals.

Reporting to the Institute's Conference in 1908, Y. G. Spalvin specified that over the period 1899–1907 appropriations for the library had totaled 42,895 rubles 77 kopecks, but had been distributed extremely unevenly. With an average annual expenditure of 5,300 rubles, this figure was twice as high in the first year and three and a half times lower in 1902. The budget was allocated roughly as follows: 2,000 rubles for subscriptions to periodicals from Far Eastern countries and "the most essential scholarly journals of Russia"; 500 rubles for supplies, including catalogue cards; 150 rubles for mailing the "Izvestiya of the Oriental Institute" to recipients abroad. The remaining 2,500 rubles covered the cost of publishing instructors' teaching aids and the binding of books and journals. No more than 1,000 rubles, and rarely more, remained for actual book purchases. The subscription list, however, was very extensive: 149 titles of newspapers and journals, including 20 in Russian, 5 in Chinese, 15 in Korean, 28 in English, 25 in German, 11 in French, and 45 in Japanese. The librarian cited the authority of the former Russian envoy to Beijing, D. D. Pokotilov, who maintained that even private individuals engaged in the study of China spent no less than 2,000 rubles a year on the latest foreign literature. This meant that the budget of the Oriental Institute's library ought to have been at least 10000 rubles. Under the existing conditions it was impossible to maintain a complete, multi-disciplinary library. This argument formed the basis of a report to the Minister of Public Education. The appeal was apparently heeded: in 1908 the Institute was inspected by Secretary of State V. N. Kokovtsov, and in March 1911 an inspection was carried out by the Master of the Horse of the Court of His Imperial Majesty, Governor-General N. L. Gondatti. Despite all these appeals, however, the matter of increasing the library's holdings made no progress. By 1912 the library's budget was even below 3,500 rubles (of which only 1,542 rubles went toward book acquisitions). A way out of the situation was found by requiring three mandatory copies of all the Institute's publications and by appealing to private individuals and graduates to send in foreign book catalogues and new releases.

Thanks to Y. G. Spalvin's work, the library, which he had taken over in 1900 with a collection of around 6,000 volumes, grew to 120000 items and came to include an almost exhaustive collection of Oriental studies literature from the first quarter of the twentieth century. The library enjoyed a high reputation not only in Russia but abroad as well. This gave rise to numerous problems, chief among them a shortage of space for both the book depository and the reading room.

Y. G. Spalvin as journal editor

Izvestiya Vostochnogo instituta and Sovremennaya letopis Dal'nego Vostoka

From his very first days at the Oriental Institute, Y. G. Spalvin was drawn into the editorial board of Izvestiya Vostochnogo instituta, a journal founded by the director V. M. Pozdneev. Its very first issue was presented to the Sovereign Emperor and began to be sent out to scholarly institutions abroad. The format established at that time was maintained for almost two decades — the publication of the latest teaching aids, along with applied research on questions of linguistics, history, geography, and the economics of Asian countries.

On 11 November 1900, at a meeting of the Institute's Conference, Y. Spalvin also set out his ideas on publishing an information digest, Sovremennaya letopis Dal'nego Vostoka. This publication was to cover matters of current politics in China, Korea, and Japan. Evgeny Genrikhovich proposed three subject sections: domestic and foreign policy, the material culture of society, and intellectual life. Spalvin intended to reserve the bulk of the material for the Japanese direction, pointing to the need to analyze that country's policy in light of its growing military strength and its external expansion in Korea. Japan was also regarded as Russia's potential military adversary in Asia. The first issue of the Chronicle was dated August, covering events from 25 July to 5 August 1900. The plan was to publish the journal every ten days, making material from more than a hundred periodicals in Asian and European languages available to the Russian reader. The Governor-General of Priamurye took an interest in the initiative and allocated an annual subsidy of 1,200 rubles for publishing needs. However, after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War the funding stopped. Spalvin, then acting director of the Institute, asked for the funding to be resumed, stating that he had been ready to resume publication since the summer of 1904. There was no reply. The 1905 initiatives likewise failed to rouse any enthusiasm from higher authorities, and publication ceased for good.

After Y. G. Spalvin's election as librarian of the Oriental Institute in 1906, his duties also came to include managing the printing house and editing Izvestiya Vostochnogo instituta, some issues of which had fallen behind schedule. Evgeny Genrikhovich succeeded in restoring the work of the editorial board, and by 1908 the print run of the Bulletin had reached 1,100 copies. The list of institutions and individuals receiving free copies numbered 235 that same year, ranging from the Sovereign Emperor and members of the Imperial House (including Grand Dukes Michael Alexandrovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, and Alexander Mikhailovich). The mailing list also included the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, ten ministers, the Asiatic Department, and a number of institutions of the Priamurye Governorate-General, including the Governor-General himself, the Archbishop of Vladivostok, and the commander of naval forces in the Pacific. By 1911 the list had grown to include the geography office of Kazan University and the Dobroflot agency in Nagasaki.

Vostochnaya Studiya During 1924–1925 the Oriental Faculty of the Far Eastern State University (FESU) published the journal Vostochnaya Studiya. At least 22 issues appeared, of which only Nos. 3 and 10 were not compiled and edited by Y. G. Spalvin, who also served as its editor-in-chief. The publication's concept was made public in the form of "Extracts from the Provisional Regulations on the Publication of 'Vostochnaya Studiya'" in the third issue. This material shows that on 23 August 1924 the FESU board "recognized it as possible to publish the orientalist bulletin 'Vostochnaya Studiya' using funds allocated from the budgets of the Oriental Faculty's offices, with the introduction into the journal of sections corresponding to the names of the offices." The offices had been created during the university's 1923 reform and existed under four of the Oriental Faculty's eighteen departments (Chinese studies, Japanese studies, the history and culture of East Asia, and the economics and politics of East Asia and the USSR). The offices were meant to coordinate students' classroom and practical work, supplying them, under conditions of scarcity, with the latest literature and visual aids. An editorial article in the inaugural issue stated that the journal was intended for the Oriental Faculty of the FESU, reflecting "the scholarly and educational life of the faculty and the gradual progress of achievements in Oriental studies"; it was "an unfailing companion, above all, of the young generation of future orientalists ... on their path toward the ideals of practical Oriental studies". Pilnyak had a low opinion both of the Japanese literary works and of the quality of their translation. Several further incidents followed, which raised the level of mutual ill will.

Pilnyak spoke of Spalvin in openly hostile terms in his 1933 book Stones and Roots. He accused the japanologist of creating a distorted image of Japan, placing him in the same category as Loti, Hearn, Farrère, and Kellermann. In Pilnyak's assessment, Spalvin was one of those scholars who, for all his learning, confused a thousand years of history while studying the millennium-old Murasaki Shikibu, and who, apart from that same Murasaki Shikibu, knew little else with any real depth. The French Slavist Dany Savelli suggested that the chapter on prostitution in Japan in Pilnyak's book — which drew the most criticism in Soviet publications — was based on material supplied by Spalvin. In terms of content, it does indeed correspond to an essay in Spalvin's own book Japan: A View from the Outside, in which Japanese eroticism is treated from a highly distinctive point of view. That essay was heavily cut by Japanese censorship.

Y. G. Spalvin's library and art collections After the scholar's death, his library, archive, and collection — which occupied two rooms in his Harbin apartment — remained behind. Some researchers, including V. E. Molodyakov, have claimed that Spalvin's collection was lost. Documents show that in December 1933 his widow petitioned the board of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) Society to extend her free residence in the apartment, since she had not managed to settle the fate of her late husband's collections. As a result, Elizaveta-Kaoru Spalvina continued living on Girin Street until May 1934, when N. A. Setnitsky moved into the apartment. The japanologist V. N. Goreglyad reported, apparently on the basis of personal observations and communications, that as early as 1935 a substantial part of Spalvin's manuscript and book collection had reached the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (IOS), where the Japanese section was headed by N. I. Konrad. Although the inventory ledgers from the mid-1930s were destroyed during the Siege of Leningrad, some materials have survived in the archive. Thus, on 8 January 1935 a letter reached the Soviet Control Commission under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR from the director of the IOS, Academician A. N. Samoylovich, stating that Spalvin's library had been located. Its total volume came to 9 crates weighing 1,310 kg, and it was already sitting in a Leningrad warehouse. According to a further account from May 1935, sorting and initially describing Spalvin's library took the institute three and a half months.

As of 2018, most of the Japanese books — at least 500 items — in the collection of the IOM RAS bear Spalvin's bookplates or presentation inscriptions (in particular, from Nobori Shōmu), ownership signatures, and the like. Many other volumes are scattered throughout the wider collection. In the view of K. G. Marandzhyan, even an approximate number of the books in Russian and other European languages is difficult to give. The IOM archive holds a number of Spalvin's typescripts, ranging from his 1909 works Information on Japanese Societies in Vladivostok and The Japanese Societies of the City of Vladivostok. Materials from the Soviet period include 1929 articles on translations of Marxist-Leninist literature into Japanese. The art collection turned out to include a set of 262 postcards, sorted by Spalvin himself into thematic categories and divided into "family" and "collection" sections. These materials directly confirm that the scholar took his personal collection with him when he left Vladivostok, and that he went on diligently adding to it in both Tokyo and Harbin. The collection also includes 34 scenic postcards — for example, Views of Fuji or The Hot Springs of Beppu — and photographic albums of Japanese sights (Matsushima or Lake Wada), two chapters of which are devoted to in the book Japan: A View from the Outside. There are also materials of an erotic character, so-called "spring pictures," though not printed originals but albums of their reproductions. Spalvin's collection also included early erotic photographs. K. G. Marandzhyan noted that this part of the scholar's collection deserved separate study and would be examined in an article then being prepared for publication, but the researcher died without ever carrying out her plan.