[1] He was born into a Baltic German family in Arensburg, Governorate of Livonia, and studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.

[1] He liked to experiment with language and, in one of his poems, introduced the female name Svetlana, which would gain popularity through Vasily Zhukovsky's eponymous ballad.

During his lifetime, Vostokov was known as a poet and translator, but it is his innovative studies of versification and comparative Slavonic grammars which proved most influential.

In 1815, he joined the staff of the Imperial Public Library, where he discovered the most ancient dated book written in Slavonic vernacular, the so-called Ostromir Gospel.

[1] Vostokov's works on the Church Slavonic language were considered a high-water mark of Slavic studies until the appearance of Izmail Sreznevsky's comprehensive lexicon in 1893–1903 and garnered him the doctorates honoris causa from the Charles University and University of Tübingen.