Yevgeny Chelyshev

Eugene Petrovich Chelyshev or E. P. Chelyshev (, 27 October 1921 – 13 July 2020 ) was a Russian Indologist, academician and public figure. He was a full-time member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he was the Academician-Secretary of the Department of Literature and Language Sciences (1988–2002), and a member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star (1944, 1949), Order of the Patriotic War II degree (1985), Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" IV Degree (1997), III degree (2007), II degree (2020), Order of Honour (2012). Member of the Writers' Union of Russia.

Biography Chelyshev was born on 27 October 1921, to a Moscow merchant family. In 1939, after graduating from high school, he started his studies at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering. A freshman, he was drafted into the army and sent to flight school in the military townlet Sescha in Oryol Military District. At the same time, he became the director of the Department of Indian Languages, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR (1956–1975). along with Russian scientist Gury Marchuk In 2004 he became the first Russian to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship by the Government of India.

Chelyshev has been a member of the Writers' Union for the last 30 years. For more than last thirty years he has been researching on and working to spread the culture and message of Vivekananda. He was one of the vice-presidents of the Committee for Comprehensive Study of Ramakrishna Vivekananda Movement.

He told about Vivekananda— I think that Vivekananda's greatest service is the development in his teaching of the lofty ideals of humanism which incorporate the finest features of Indian culture.... In my studies of contemporary Indian literature, I have more than once had the opportunity to see what great influence the humanistic ideals of Vivekananda have exercised on the works of many writers.... [In] Vivekananda's humanism, we recognize that it possesses many features of active humanism manifested above all in a fervent desire to elevate man, to instill in him a sense of his own dignity, sense of responsibility for his own destiny and the destiny of all people, to make him strive for the ideals of good, truth and justice, to foster in man abhorrence for any suffering.... Together with the Indian people, Soviet people who already know some of the works of Vivekananda published in the USSR, highly revere the memory of the great Indian patriot, humanist and democrat, impassioned fighter for a better future for his people and all mankind.