as equivalent to those from European universities, and his acceptance as a Ph.D. candidate had to be personally approved by Tsar Nicholas II. Elisséeff was then appointed a privat-dozent in Japanese and an official interpreter for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was also elected an assistant professor at the private Institute of Art History, where he gave a course on the history of Chinese art that has been recognized as probably the first Chinese art history course in the West to be based primarily on original Chinese and Japanese texts and sources. He spent the next two summers in Japan working on a Ph.D. dissertation on Bashō, but was devastated upon returning to Russia in the fall of 1917: the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution had allowed the Bolsheviks to take over the banking system, in which the Elisséeff's family fortune was seized, and the manuscript of his nearly completed dissertation was confiscated from the diplomatic pouch in which he had mailed it home and burned. Harvard and later career Elisséeff spent the years from 1917 to 1920 in St. Petersburg attempting to continue his work, but his family was frequently harassed and searched because of their affluent background, and Elisséeff was constantly pressured to make his teaching conform to Marxist ideology. Several of his relatives starved to death, and Elisséeff's family survived the winters by burning their furniture collections for warmth. In the summer of 1920, Elisséeff and his wife decided to flee Russia. They hid themselves and their two small sons, all malnourished and weakened, under the deck boards of a fishing boat that smuggled them across the Gulf of Finland to freedom in Finland. They stayed in Finland for a month, then moved to Stockholm for several months before, like many other White Russian émigrés, settling in Paris. From 1921 to 1929, Elisséeff was also the head interpreter at the Japanese Imperial Embassy in Paris, and formally obtained French citizenship in 1931. In 1932, Elisséeff came to the United States to serve as a lecturer in Japanese and Chinese at Harvard University. During the 1933-34 academic year, he returned to Paris to serve as Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He returned to the United States in 1934 when Harvard offered him a professorship in Far Eastern Languages. Elisséeff was the first director of the Harvard–Yenching Institute (HYI), an independent, non-profit