Serge Elisséeff (; born Sergei Grigorievich Eliseyev; 13 January 188913 April 1975) was a Russian-French scholar, Japanologist, and professor at Harvard University. He was one of the first Westerners to study Japanese at a university in Japan. He began studying Japanese at the University of Berlin, then transferred to Tokyo Imperial University (modern University of Tokyo) in 1912, becoming the first Westerner to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University in Japanese as well as its first Western graduate student. Elisséeff served in 1916 as Privat-Dozent at Petrograd Imperial University (modern Saint Petersburg State University), and in 1917 as Professor in the Institute for the History of Foreign Affairs in Petrograd. Many years later, his émigrée memories of chaos and fear during the Russian Revolution were stirred by the effects of pernicious McCarthyism at Harvard. In the 1930s he became a professor of Far Eastern Languages at Harvard, where he became the first director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and founded the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Fluent in eight languages, including Chinese and Japanese, Elisséeff was one of the foremost Japanologists of his time, both in the West and in Japan. The American Japanologist Edwin O. Reischauer, who was one of Elisséeff's students, wrote that "perhaps no one better deserves the title of Father of Far Eastern Studies in the United States." He had close personal ties to many of the greatest Japanese literary names of the early 20th century and wrote occasional articles for the Asahi Shimbun. Life and career Early life Serge Elisséeff was born "Sergei Grigorievich Eliseyev" (Russian: ) on 13 January 1889 in St. Petersburg. Elisséeff's great-grandfather Pyotr Eliseyev (1775–1825) was born a serf in bondage to the Sheremetev family but started a wine and fruit import business that with subsequent generations became a large economic empire including the St. Petersburg Private Commercial Bank (first joint-stock bank in the Russian Empire), the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade and the Russian Lloyd's insurance company among others. Elisséeff's father, Grigori Eliseyev (1858–1949), inherited the family business, and was one of the builders of the Eliseyev Emporium in St. Petersburg. Due to the great wealth of Elisséeff's family, his parents spared no expense in educating him and his brothers. When Elisséeff was six years old, he began regular lessons in German with his mother's private secretary. His parents also had a custom of only speaking French at their dinner table in