Glinka Gregory (1774–1818) – philologist, translator, State Councilor.
He studied at the Pageant Corpus, worked as Censor of foreign books in Kronstadt. In 1802, he got a position of Professor of Russian Language at the University of Dorpat, where he wrote a manual in Russian for the Ostsee Region (1805). In 1811, he was invited by Empress Maria Fedorovna to the Court, where he taught Russian to Empress Elisabeth Alekseevna, great princes and the future Emperor Nickolas I, whom he accompanied in his travel to Europe in 1816.
In 1804, in Mitava he published his book ‘Ancient Religion of Slavs’. He was longing to prove that the ‘beliefs of Slavic people’ ‘was the purest of numerous pagan ones’, because there was not ‘any man taken for god’. In his introduction G. stressed that there is ‘no danger for Orthodoxy’ in his composition on pagan beliefs, ‘because that narration is a food for curiosity’.
The main sources of his work were: ‘Vladimiriade’ by Kheraskov based on the Lexicon by Popov, and ‘Petriade’ by Lomonosov, but G. mentioned that he invented something. He thought that in the ancient times people created gods ‘according their image, i.e. according their folk peculiarities, ways of life, level of enlightenment’. He tried to explain the origin of the veneration of gods as a result of ignorance and the absence of understanding of real reasons of natural phenomena. He included 59 mythological persons whom he took for ancient Slavic gods, building a special classification in the style of classical mythology: gods of heavens, gods of underground, of earth and water, The first ones belong out of earth – Perun, Dazhbog interpreted as a god of prosperous life, Golden Woman – goddess of calm and quiet ways, Led – god of war, Kolyada – goddess of peace, Belobog or Zhvot – god of Life. He interpreted god Khors (or Kors) as protector of drunkness like Dionysus.