Andrey Klebanov

Andrey Klebanov

Contact: 

E-Mail: andrey.klebanov@univie.ac.at

Dr. Andrey Klebanov studied Classical Indology and Tibetology in Göttingen and Hamburg, where, in 2010, he received his Magister degree. His final thesis was concerned with the study of an ancient āyurvedic text, the Suśrutasaṃhitā, and its early transmission in Nepal. His engagement with this topic led, among other things, to an appointment at the NGMCP (Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project) office at Hamburg University, where he worked on preparing a catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts preserved at different libraries and archives in Nepal. In 2012, Dr Klebanov enrolled in the doctoral programme at Hamburg University and, during the preparation of his thesis, spent a substantial amount of time studying and researching at the EFEO (École française d'Extrême-Orient) centre in Pondicherry, India. In his doctoral dissertation, completed in early 2017 and published online, Dr. Klebanov turned his attention to the commentarial literature on Sanskrit belles-lettres and studied several commentaries on a classic work of Sanskrit poetry, the Kirātārjunīya by Bhāravi. During this time, Dr. Klebanov became invested in the study of Indian scholastic traditions, mainly those of vyākaraṇa (grammar) and alaṃkāraśāstra (poetics), which became the main focus of his subsequent teaching and research. From 2016 until 2021, he was appointed a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Letters at Kyoto University in Japan. There, he taught graduate and post-graduate students specialising in Classical Indology, Buddhist Studies, Transcultural Studies and other related fields.

Research focus

Dr. Klebanov’s engagement with several scholastic traditions and Sanskrit literary genres led him to focus his current research on looking at different linguistic concepts as understood and analysed by different pre-modern schools of Indian thought. These include, most importantly, (1) the phenomenon of polysemy and (2) the semantic value of Sanskrit preverbs.

Trained primarily as a classical philologist, Dr Klebanov also continues to devote himself to critically editing and translating several Sanskrit texts, which include the following:

• The Alaṃkārasudhā and the Ṣaṭpadānanda (or, Viṣamapadavyākhyā), two commentaries by Nāgeśabhaṭṭa (18th cent.) on the Kuvalayānanda by Appayya Dīkṣita (16th cent.);
• The Bālarāmāyaṇa by Rājaśekhara, a Sanskrit play retelling the famous epic story of the conflict between Rāma and Rāvaṇa albeit focusing the attention, as it were, on Rāvaṇa (in collaboration with Dr. Csaba Dezső, Budapest, and SAS Sharma, Pondicherry);
• The Gaṇapāṭhavivṛti by Prakāśavarṣa, an ancient (ca. 8th cent) versified version of the Pāṇinian Gaṇapāṭha composed in Kashmir;
• The Upasarganipātadyotakatvavācakatvavicāra by Harikṛṣṇa Paṇḍita, a late monograph summarising the views of the Navyanyāya school on the semantic value of Sanskrit preverbs and particles.