George V. Bobrinskoy was born on 23 January 1901 in
Tula, Russia as Count Grigory Vladimirovich Bobrinskiy. He was a "left-hand" descendant of the Russian empress
Catherine the Great. After the
Russian Revolution he left his country at the end of the Civil war, fighting in the ranks of the Preobrajensky Guards regiment. After a short stay in
Novi Sad in
Serbia, he
immigrated to the
United States in 1923. Bobrinskoy resumed his undergraduate studies at the Philadelphia Lutheran Seminary, earning his BA in 1926. Then he went to
Yale University and studied Sanskrit under
Franklin Edgerton. During the
Second World War, the
University of Chicago was selected as a Center for Russian language and area instruction under the
Army Specialized Training Program. After the death of
Samuel Northrup Harper the chairman of the Russian department in January 1943, Bobrinskoy his associate was asked to head the Russian-language program. After the war he was chairman of the department of linguistics from 1951 to 1966 and dean of students in the humanities division from 1954 to 1967. ==Personal life==