Alexander Chodzko

Aleksander Borejko Chodźko (1804-1891) was a Polish poet, Slavist and orientalist, born in Krzywicze in what is now Belarus and educated at the Imperial University of Vilnius, where he joined the Filaret Association. He served as a Russian diplomat in Persia from 1830 to 1844 and used the posting to record Persian oral poetry, publishing Specimens of the Popular Poetry of Persia in London in 1842. In 1857 he succeeded Adam Mickiewicz in the chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the Collège de France, holding the post until 1883. His collections of Slavic folktales belong to that later Paris period, when his scholarly attention turned back toward the storytellers of his own region.