Born in
Leningrad, Klimov graduated from the
Leningrad State University in 1952. From 1954 onward, he worked for the
Institute of Linguistics of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, becoming a professor there in 1988. He died in
Moscow in 1997, leaving behind over 360 scholarly works and many projects uncompleted. An important work in the field of
comparative linguistics of Kartvelian languages,
Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages, was published in 1998. == References ==