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terally dozens of articles on Middle Eastern subjects for the two great Russian encyclopedias of his day — the Brockhaus-Efron and Granat. He was, in fact, the prim ary oriental contributor to the Granat authoring major articles on Arabic, Persian and Turkish history and liter ature, on the Koran, and numerous other subjects as well. During the first years of the twentieth century, Krymsky also took an active interest in the cultural and political movements among the Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire. He was particularly interested in the revival among the Crimean Tatars and was a personal friend and admirer of their leader, Ismail Bey Gaspirali, who stood for a modern form of Islam and a constitu tional reordering of the Russian Empire. Gaspirali, in fact, was the foremost Muslim cultural leader in the empire and praised Krymsky’s work on the pages of his journal Tarjuman (The Translator). During the two decades that he spent teaching at the Lazarevsky Institute, Krymsky developed the style with which he would approach Islamic civilization throughout the rest of his career. In general, he was a popularizer and his works were meant to introduce Rus sian and Ukrainian students to a world which was almost completely foreign to them. At the same time, however, his works were based on first-hand knowledge and orig inal sources and were at the cutting-edge of the scho larship of their time. Moreover, he never treated litera ture or history in isolation from one another but rather used each to throw light on the other. He did this not only for the Arabs, but also for the Persians in his His tory of Persia, its Literature, and Dervish Theosophy (3 vols. 1909-1917), and in his various histories of Turkey. Throughout his Moscow period, Krymsky concentrated upon Arabic studies and he became such an authority in this field that the famous Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, once remarked that he “studied the Koran according to Krymsky.” The outbreak of the First World War changed Krymsky’s life completely. He worked for a while on an archaeological project in Trabizond in Russian-occupied Turkey but returned to Moscow before the October revolution. Although in Stalin’s day he recounted a story about how he had officially welcomed Bolshevik rule on behalf of the staff of the Lazarevsky Institute, in actual fact he seems to have left Moscow for Kiev as soon as he found it possible. In Kiev, the Ukrainian intelligentsia were busy organizing the political, social and cultural institutions of a non-Communist independent state and Krymsky soon joined in. Under the conservative regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, Krymsky, Vladimir Ver nadsky, and a number of other scholars managed to establish a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. Krymsky was elected Permanent Secretary of the Aca demy. Skoropadsky’s rule lasted less than a full year and An official portrait of Roksoliana thereafter governments came and went. But throughout this whole chaotic period, Krymsky’s delicate negotia tions with government officials managed to preserve the Academy, and when the Bolsheviks finally conquered Kiev it was his diplomatic skill and his flexibility that prevented the institution from being abolished. During the next ten years, Krymsky continued in his position as Permanent Secretary of the Ukrainian Acade my of Sciences and although the Bolsheviks instituted a regime of severe political censorship, works could now be published in the Ukrainian language as they never could under the Tsars. Krymsky took a direct interest in this process and used the opportunity to expand the physical base and intellectual breadth of Ukrainian scholarship. Continuing in the path that he had started in Moscow years before, Krymsky stood for simple lan guage, popular exposition, and solid scholarship in all the work produced on the Academy’s presses. Most of the Permanent Secretary’s own production, of course, dealt with the history and literature of the Islamic world. Throughout the 1920s, Krymsky produced one book after another on the Middle East. Many of these works were updated and revised Ukrainian versions of his ear lier studies written in Russian. Within the strict limits imposed by Moscow the Ukrainians were consciously striving to build a new national culture and Krymsky’s learned discourses on Islamic history and literature were "НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИПЕНЬ-СЕРПЕНЬ 1992 23
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