Shchutsky's father was of noble origin; he was a member of the House of Czartoryski, and worked as a forestry scientist.
Shchutsky graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1921 and was a research scientist in the Asiatic Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1920 to 1937.
A special qualifying commission in 1924 made it possible for Shchutsky to become an assistant professor in 1924, teaching at the university and also, from that year, in the Institute of Modern Oriental Languages, where he introduced Cantonese alongside Mandarin Chinese, and gave the first courses in Vietnamese.
[6] Shchutsky was influenced by his teachers, the sinologists Nikolai Iosifovich Konrad and Vasiliy Mikhaylovich Alekseyev.
Shortly before her death, he visited her in Tashkent, where she, influenced by him, wrote 21 poems attributed to Li Xiang Zi, a fictional Chinese poet exiled for his "belief in immortality of human spirit".