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Krymsky soon showed himself to be a very gifted child. He could read at age three and a half and in school proved himself an excellent student. After attend ing grade school in Zvynohorod, he was sent to the prestigious Halahan College in Kiev where he did espe cially well in languages. In Halahan College, which was known as a centre for raising young nationally con scious Ukrainians, Krymsky came under the influence of the noted philologist Pavlo Zhytetsky, who was a well-known partisan of the Ukrainian language which was suppressed and persecuted under the Tsars. Also at Halahan College, Krymsky became acquainted with some of the writings of the political emigre Michael Drahomanov, which argued in favour of a constitution, Ukrainian national development, and the federalization of the Russian Empire. At age 18 when he graduated, Krymsky was already a nationally conscious Ukrainian. Moreover, he had a very wide range of interests and had mastered several languages including Greek, Italian, and Turkish. It was probably because of his Crimean ancestry that Krymsky was especially attracted to Turkish and other oriental languages. (Crimean Tatar is closely related to Turkish). At any rate, he continued his educa tion in Moscow where he studied eastern languages at the Lazarevsky Institute, a training school for Russian diplomats stationed in the Middle East. He took both Turkish and Persian and developed a great love for Arabic. Thereafter, he attended Moscow University where he studied advanced classical Arabic under the distin guished polyglot, Fedor Korsh, a member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, who was personally sympathetic to the cultural claims of the minority peo ples of the Russian Empire, including the Ukrainians and the various Muslim nationalities. At Moscow University Krymsky also studied under the historians Kliuchevsky and Vinogradov and under the renowned Professor of Sanskrit, Philip Fortunatov. Through his studies under Fortunatov, in particular, Krymsky gained a solid background in Indoeuropean philology and this prepared him for the study of the his tory of the Persian language which was to have a pro found influence upon the literatures of the Islamic Mid dle East. By the time that he graduated from the Lazarevsky Institute, Krymsky had already mastered fif teen languages. Nevertheless, he still wanted to learn more. During these years in Moscow, Krymsky deeply felt the separation from his native Ukraine. He therefore kept up a lively correspondence with his family and began to contribute articles on literature, language, and history, to the press in Austrian Galicia, the most east erly province of the Habsburg Monarchy, where the Ukrainian language could be freely used. He established contact with the famous Galician Ukrainian writer, Ivan Franko, and contributed to his journal Narod (The Peo ple) an article on the quasi-epicurian Persian poet, Omar Khayam. Reflecting the influence of the reformer Drahoma nov, Krymsky entitled his piece: ’’One of the Persian Protestant poets — Khayam.” During this period, Krym sky took an active part in the Ukrainian literary move ment in Galicia, writing articles on Slavic philology and folklore as well as doing translations of various master pieces of the literatures of the Middle East. Not least among the latter were his translations from the Arabian Nights and from the great Persian epic poem the Shah- name or Book of Kings by Firdusi. After graduating from Moscow University, Krymsky went on a scholarly expedition to Lebanon to improve his Arabic and deepen his knowledge of Islamic culture through first hand experience. From 1896 to 1898, he travelled through Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and parts of Asia Minor. From his base in Lebanon, he studied Arabic dialects, established contacts with Arab scholars, sought out old manuscripts — especially those which touched upon Ukrainian history such as Paul of Aleppo’s Voyage of Patriarch Makarius through Rus’— and generally deepened his knowledge of Islamic civilization. He also translated much poetry from oriental languages into Ukrainian and composed many verses of his own. His letters from Lebanon to his family back in Ukraine were later to fill a whole volume in his Collected Works and his poetry from this period, later published under the title Palm Beaches, could fill a good part of another. All the while, he continued to publish new and unusual material in the Ukrainian press in Galicia. In 1898, Krymsky returned to Moscow to accept a position as lecturer in Arabic philology at the Laza revsky Institute. Two years later, he was appointed Pro fessor of Arabic Literature and the Cultures of the East and he held this post for the next eighteen years. In Moscow, Krymsky quickly established himself as one of the leading authorities in the Russian Empire on the Islamic world. In 1899, he published a short popular- style Russian language booklet entitled Islam and its Future which discussed current political problems and argued in favour of a cultural rebirth in the Islamic world. A Ukrainian version appeared in Lviv, the capital of Galicia, in 1904 and the book proved to be so popular that it was translated and published in Armenian and Serbian. This was the first significant work ever pub lished in the Ukrainian language on the Muslim Middle East. Krymsky soon proved himself an effective teacher and populizer of Islamic culture. His mimeographed lec tures on the history of the Semitic languages and on Arabic, Persian, and Turkish appeared in several edi tions one year after the next. There was also a History of Islam in two volumes (1904 ff.) and a full-scale His tory of the Arabs and of Arabic Literature in three volumes (1911-1913). Moreover, Krymsky produced li 22 НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИПЕНЬ-СЕРПЕНЬ 1992 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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