Background
Roman Fedorovich Brandt was born on December 4 (16), 1853 in Saint Petersburg. He was the son of the founder of the Zoological Museum, academician Johann Friedrich von Brandt.
The building of the St. Petersburg Imperial University
Roman Fedorovich Brandt was born on December 4 (16), 1853 in Saint Petersburg. He was the son of the founder of the Zoological Museum, academician Johann Friedrich von Brandt.
After graduating from the 4th Saint Petersburg Gymnasium in 1870, Roman Fedorovich entered the Faculty of History and Philology of Saint Petersburg Imperial University, graduating in 1875.
From 1877 to 1886, Roman Fedorovich worked as a teacher of Russian literature at the Nezhinsky Institute of Philology. In 1881, he published an article Opinion of Mr. Tulov on Russian spelling, where he proposed to simplify Russian spelling by eliminating some sounds. He also advocated the transition of the Russian language to the usage of the Latin alphabet in order to remove unnecessary letters from words.
After, in the period of 1886-1920, Roman Fedorovich was a professor at the Department of Slavic Philology at Moscow University. He was fluent in 20 languages and was able to write poems in many of them. In 1886, he published a collection of translations of ancient and Western European poets, later he also translated Shakespeare's sonnets.
In the late 1890s, Roman Fedorovich became interested in fables and published Fables translated, imitative and original (1899), he published another collection in 1910 only. In Brandt's fables, contrary to the rules, there was no moralizing ending. One of the main parts of his literary activities were articles devoted to Slavic and Western European parallels to individual works of Russian poets. In 1912-1913 he also published several courses of his lectures: Overview of Slavic literature (History of literature of Bulgarian, Serbian and Czech), Introduction to Slavic philology.
From 1900 to 1910, Roman Fedorovich was actively keen on Esperanto: he founded the Esperanto Society in Moscow, and also edited the Esperanto Wave magazine.