Doctor of philology and professor at the department of the Slavic philology, Sankt-Petersburg State University, professor emeritus, doctor honoris causa at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald (Germany); the honour professor at the Olomouc University (Czech Republic) and the president of the Phraseological Commission by the International Committee of Slavists. He is the author of 1237 publications on Slavic, Russian and comparative studies, among them is more then 76 books (the monographs and vocabularies). The main directions of his scientific and pedagogic activities are Slavic studies (especially Russian, Ukrainian, and Bohemian), ethnolinguistics, comparative linguistics and Slavic dialectology, lexicography and lexicology, phraseology, and onomastics. He is a member of the editorial board of 18
international Slavic journals.