Full professor of Russian literature at the Naples Eastern University, he was elected to many scholarly societies and academies of Europe.

Uspenskij worked with Juri Lotman and was influenced by his ideas as a member of Tartu-Moscow semiotics school.

His major works include Linguistic Situation in Kievan Rus and Its Importance for the Study of the Russian Literary Language, Philological Studies in the Sphere of Slavonic Antiquities, and The Principles of Structural Typology.

Uspenskij is the member of the editorial boards of the following academic journals: Sign Systems Studies, Arbor Mundi (Moscow), Zbornik Matice srpske za slavistiku (Novi Sad), and Slověne.

Author of 550 publications in the fields of general linguistics, philology, semiotics, slavistics, history.