On February 13, 1938, the outstanding Russian orientalist Alexander Nikolaevich Samoilovich died. In 1937, A. N. Samoilovich was arrested on a denunciation, accused of pan-Turkism and espionage in favor of Japan. Archival materials from the investigative case of A. N. Samoilovich are published in the book "Repressed Turkology" by F. D. Ashnin, V. M. Alpatov and D. M. Nasilov (Moscow, 2002). It took only 15 minutes to decide the fate of the academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The sentence of execution of A. N. Samoilovich was carried out on February 13, 1938. 18 years later, on August 25, 1956, the verdict of the Military Collegium was overturned, and the scientist was rehabilitated.

A. N. Samoilovich was born on 17/29/12. 1880 in Nizhny Novgorod in a large family of a teacher (and then - director of a gymnasium) N. Ya. Samoilovich. According to the scientist, it was his father who sent him to study the East. In the conditions when in the last decades of the XIX century The Emirate of Bukhara, the khanates of Kokand and Khiva were subordinated to Russia, and Turkmenistan was subordinated in 1880-1881. N. Ya. Samoilovich was able to foresee the practical need for Russian orientalist cadres for Central Asia, including Turkmenistan.

After graduating from the Nizhny Novgorod Noble Institute (with a silver medal), in 1899, on the advice of his father, A. N. Samoilovich entered the Faculty of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University (FWY) in the Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Tatar category.

A. N. Samoilovich studied at the University enthusiastically and purposefully. Already in his student years, at the suggestion and under the guidance of Professor V. V. Barthold, based on his historical and geographical works, Samoilovich compiled and published the textbook " Western Turkestan from the time of the Arab conquest to the Mongol rule "(1903).

He was one of the students of P. M. Melioransky, who, as students, were engaged in collecting materials on the language and folklore of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. A. N. Samoilovich chose Turkmenistan as the object of study - in the summer of 1902, he examined the dialects of the Tekin people of the Transcaspian region, using the collected materials for his thesis. Samoilovich's archive contains five general notebooks of his "Experience of linguistic research of the Tekin dialect of the Turkmen dialect" (St. Petersburg, 1903); this work was recognized worthy of being awarded a gold medal. Since June 1903, he was left at the university to prepare for a professorship in the Department of Turkish-Tatar Literature.

Samoilovich made his first report on the Turkmen historical poem Abdu-s-Sattar "The Book of Stories about the battles of the Tekin people" (XIX century) on April 29, 1904. This work was later devoted to the master's thesis of the scientist.

The sudden death of P. M. Melioransky (May 16, 1906) and the resulting change in the balance of forces in the confrontation between representatives of the new and old schools of Turkology in the VWF, on the one hand, and the equally sharply complicated family circumstances (early marriage without the blessing of parents, the birth of a son in 1906) slowed down the young scientist's progress in He published his dissertation in 1914 and defended it in early 1915. Now he had to feed his family, take on any additional work.

In September 1906, V. V. Radlov, on his own initiative, expressed his readiness to study with a young master's student. In 1914. Samoilovich wrote: "Fate has given me great happiness to live and work under the direct charm of the tireless activity of the hero of Turkology V. V. Radlov."

On June 1, 1907, A. N. Samoilovich was confirmed in the full-time position of privat-docent (not associate professor!) and he remained in this status until December 1918. He started teaching at the FWY in September 1907: he taught the course "Introduction to the Study of Turkish Tribes and Dialects", which continued the topic of P. M. Melioransky's lecture "Introduction to the Study of Turkish Dialects"; led seminars on reading and commenting on medieval literary memorials-

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nikov ("Babur-nameh" and a poetic novel of the XIII century). Ali "Yusuf and Zuleikha"), later - on reading and analyzing the text of "Kutadgu Bilig", the Yenisei-Orkhon runic.

At the same time, in 1907-1909, he was the registrar of collections in the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum; from the beginning of 1911, he was appointed curator of the Oriental Museum at the St. Petersburg State University, and from the same year he taught Turkish at the Practical Oriental Academy. From a letter to V. A. Gordlevsky dated March 29, 1911: "I'm busy as hell and I've started my personal work...".

The scientist is increasingly interested in a broad cultural approach to field work. To collect the material, he goes on business trips through the university and the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and East Asia. During this period, he increasingly focuses on source studies, literary studies, folklore studies, as well as ethnography, trying to involve representatives of the Turkic peoples in collecting local lore. Samoilovich's scientific talent was characterized by a variety of topics and a precise semantic core, which at that time was for him Turkmen studies, including the study of Turkmen culture and its history.

The purposeful expansion of the problems of Samoilovich's works was noticed, and the energetic, proactive young scientist began to be intensively involved in scientific, organizational and scientific and social activities. In 1908, he was elected a full member of the Russian Archaeological Society (RAO) for the Eastern Branch, and in 1909 he became a member of the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) for the Ethnography Department (1910-1915-Secretary of the department and secretary of the editorial committee of the department, who took part in editing the Zhivaya Starina magazine, the department's organ).. In 1912, he actively participated in the publication "The World of Islam", edited by V. V. Barthold.

At the same time, as V. V. Barthold, his teacher and later senior colleague and comrade, wrote about him, " A. N. Samoilovich had to work "in the field" more than many other Russian Orientalists, extract new material and study modern life... " Exploring the inexhaustible riches of the manuscript treasures of Petrograd book storehouses, Samoilovich worked in the library of St. Petersburg. the most difficult area of Eastern philology is the description of Turkic manuscripts collected by him. His "Brief inventory of Central Asian manuscripts collected by A. Samoilovich" marked the beginning of a whole series of his publications - "Materials on Central Asian-Turkish literature" (1 - 4 vols., 1910-1927). An indefatigable discoverer of written monuments, he achieved a colossal readability in Turkic texts and became-on a global scale-a connoisseur of medieval manuscripts. Wherever Samoilovich went, he managed to find new manuscripts that attracted the attention of his senior colleagues.

A faithful disciple of P. M. Melioransky, he sought to fulfill the precept of his mentor-to publish and examine all the" Jagatai " manuscripts, which was a necessary condition for bringing the latter "into a more scientific system". As a kind of preparation for the traditional research activity, A. N. Samoilovich completed the printing of the reprint of Muhammad Salih's essay "Sheibaniname", undertaken by P. M. Melioransky. It was published in 1908 "under the supervision and with a preface by A. N. Samoilovich" (in addition, he processed, arranged and completed those blanks for the index that remained after Melioransky).

Later, A. N. Samoilovich continued the painstaking, incredibly time-consuming work on preparing for the publication of the "Book of Stories about the battles of the Tekin" by Abdu-s-Sattar. Formulating the tasks of a turkologist in the field of studying the history of Central Asian-Turkic literature and the history of the literary language, A. N. Samoilovich emphasizes, in particular, the lack of special scientific works on Central Asian-Turkic orthography (which, by the way, are not available to date). He saw his tasks in the publication and translation of unpublished monuments and in a comprehensive survey of them; in a detailed study of already published and translated monuments; in the compilation (based on the accumulated material) of preliminary consolidated works of historical, literary, grammatical and dictionary nature. At the same time, he improved the traditional research methodology proposed by him. Thanks to this, the work of A. N. Samoilovich became the first experience of systematization of spelling, grammatical, dictionary, historical and literary information extracted by him from the "Book of Stories...".

In his further work on the monuments, A. N. Samoilovich tried to fulfill all the research parameters. He managed to do this most fully (excluding only the translation) in the article " Which of the Turkish literatures should I refer to the novel of the XIII century "Joseph and Zuleikha"?", which is almost already completed (the article was found by the author of this publication in the archive-

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Samoilovich Foundation (RNB. f. 671. D. 100. l. 165-269) and first published in "Rocznik Orientalistyczny". 2001. t. LIV, z. 2 (reprinted by A. N. Samoilovich). Turkic linguistics. Philology. Runika.
During his first trip to Western Europe in 1913, A. N. Samoilovich learned about the existence of the Diwan Babur manuscript in the Paris National Library and in this connection turned to the study of Chagatai literature of the XV-XVI centuries. The second manuscript he found in this library was Khusrau wa Shirin by Qutb. In 1913, at a meeting of the Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Education, he made a report on these manuscripts.

A. N. Samoilovich managed to publish in 1917. "Collected poems of Emperor Babur. Part I. Text", including not only a copy of the Paris manuscript (Turkestan and Afghan periods of the poet's life), but also the text of the previously published manuscript of the Rampur collection (Indian period) by E. Denison Ross. Until about the middle of 1919, he continued to criticize the text of poems. At this time, he still hoped that he would be able to prepare the second part of the book for publication. In it, he intended to publish his own translation of Babur's Divan; at the same time, he considered the study of the language of poetic works to be the "main part". A. N. Samoilovich also intended to compile a "dictionary closely related to the text" (he managed to do this only in the study of the novel of the XIII century. "Joseph and Zuleikha"), because " existing dictionaries are poorly developed for reading Chagatai poetry. The first task of a poetry researcher is to provide material for a dictionary, " he wrote. Even in Russian studies, this problem was solved only in the second half of the XX century (Dictionary of the language of A. S. Pushkin).

About the manuscript "Khusrau va Shirin" in 1928, Samoilovich reported that he had long started preparing a copy of this monument for publication, repeatedly quoted it in his works; materials on the study of the Qutb manuscript were preserved in his archive fund (later E. Najip and A. Zayonchkovsky were engaged in studying this monument).

A. N. Samoilovich's research activity was closely connected with teaching, in particular with the development, compilation and publication of various textbooks (mostly lithographed): a practical grammar of the modern Ottoman-Turkish language, a newspaper anthology, and a collection of documents. Compiled and published in 2000 by Simferopol scientists, A. N. Samoilovich's" Selected Works on the Crimea " gives an idea of how the scientific interests of the scientist were combined with the educational process at courses for Crimean Tatar teachers (organized in 1912 and 1913). Tavrichesky provincial zemstvo). Close contacts with "intelligent Crimean Tatars" were fruitful, especially with teachers, whom he introduced to scientific transcription for further field research of folk literature, compiled a short program of ethnographic study of the Crimean Tatars, etc. Joint fieldwork allowed Samoilovich to compile and publish the first in the history of Turkic linguistics "Experience of short Crimean Tatar Grammar" (Pg., 1916) in three years. With the teaching of the Uzbek language in the courses of the Ministry of Justice (1915), the compilation and publication of Samoilovich of the special manual " Modern documents from Tashkent "(Tashkent, 1916). His handwritten Manual for the Study of Uzbek Dialects (1919) was supposed to be published at the Petrograd Institute of Living Oriental Languages (PYZHVYA, later LIZHVYA) in the early 1920s (the manuscript was not found in archival collections).

After the publication of the "Short Educational Grammar of the modern Ottoman-Turkish Language "(Leningrad, 1925), A. N. Samoilovich, as he informed V. V. Barthold, was going to "concentrate on the work on the comparative grammar of the Turkish languages...", but this idea did not come true. In the 1918-19 academic year, he taught a course of lectures on "Fundamentals of General Turkish Comparative Grammar" at Petrograd University and the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages (later the Peredneasiaticheskiy Institute).

The October Revolution found A. N. Samoilovich at the height of his creative plans, in the midst of intensive and purposeful research work, based on years of painstaking research and work on ancient manuscripts. In 1919, he wrote sparingly about life in a changed Russia as "the most difficult days of the destruction of the old norms of our life and unprecedented bold attempts to replace them with new ones." He did not turn a blind eye to the fact that in these conditions a revision of worldview attitudes became vital. "[No personal heroism could support something that did not find social support, and therefore] The new Oriental studies building had to be rebuilt in accordance with the new needs of the country," recognized his younger contemporary N. K. Dmitriev in the article "Oriental Philology at Moscow University" (ARAN. f. 1568. D.48; in square brackets - crossed lines).

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In this situation, it was impossible to let go of teaching, it was necessary to preserve continuity in the best traditions of Russian Oriental studies, despite the extreme lack of teachers, especially in the former Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages (since 1921-Narimanov Institute of Oriental Studies, MIV). Participating in its reorganization, Samoilovich, at the invitation of N. Y. Marr, begins to teach at this institute among other Petrograd Orientalists, for which he makes periodic trips from Petrograd to Moscow. A. N. Samoilovich is a man of action and action, he fights for his favorite cause, to which he devoted himself. From the middle of 1920 to the beginning of 1922, he combined work in Petrograd universities, at the Lazarev Institute with service in the People's Commissariat of the RSFSR as a consultant to the Department of the East. He explains his decision in a letter to V. V. Barthold: "The unbearably uninteresting life that has developed for me in recent years in Petrograd prompted me to seize the opportunity for live activity in Asia Minor, but as a result I got stuck in Moscow..." And I. Y. Krachkovsky in 1921. he writes about his desire to avoid the situation in which "the object at hand remains inaccessible for study".

Working in the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs gave him a lot of improvement in the practical knowledge of Eastern languages, especially Turkish, as well as Persian, thanks to communication with Afghans. From March 9, 1921 to January 19, 1922, Samoilovich, while on a business trip to the Turkestan ASSR, Bukhara and Khorezm People's Soviet Republics as a consultant to the Plenipotentiary Mission of the RSFSR, compiled a description of Bukhara "in all respects", participated in the cultural life of the republics, got acquainted with the state of affairs in justice and education.

In 1921, the reform of the Oriental studies institutions of Petrograd continued. In 1922, A. N. Samoilovich was elected rector of PIZHVYA and actively engaged in scientific and teaching activities. In 1924, on his initiative, a Turkological Seminary was organized at LIZHVYA for the cultural and educational needs of the Union republics and regions with a predominant Turkic population; the scientist devoted much effort to the work of the seminary.

In the 1920s, the state scale of the tasks of language construction that unfolded in the country for a long time pushed into the background linguohistorical problems, significantly pushed aside the personal scientific plans of A. N. Samoilovich. Nevertheless, under these conditions, the scientist found the strength to "fit in" with the practical Turkology of the post-October period. He recognized the organization of education of the Turkic peoples of Russia as a matter of "high cultural importance" on the eve of October, so he took an active part in discussing and solving problems of Romanization of the alphabet for the Turkic peoples. He was preoccupied with the problems of the formation and development of young written literary languages, controversial issues of rationing the literary language, as well as issues of terminology.

A. N. Samoilovich was one of the initiators and organizers of the first All-Union Turkological Congress in Baku. In his proposed agenda, he pointed out the need to combine efforts in the compilation and publication of school manuals. In his report " The current state and immediate tasks of studying Turkish languages "( the placement of languages was shown on an ethnographic map specially made by the author), he outlined promising tasks for the development of domestic Turkology, which science will approach only in the last third of the XX century.

On February 2, 1925, A. N. Samoilovich was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and on January 12, 1929 - a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Almost simultaneously, he became academician-secretary of its Department of Humanities, and in March 1930, with a change in the charter, he became Academician - Secretary of Social Sciences and remained in this post until March 1932. Being, in fact, the generally recognized head of the new Turkological school, A. N. Samoilovich from the beginning of 1934 (and until his death) becomes Director of the Institute of Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences, while simultaneously managing the literature sector. He attached vital importance to his trips to the republics - to scientific expeditions, to give lectures, to participate in discussions on projects for applying the new alphabet to languages of various groups, and to do other scientific and organizational work.

In 1932, A. N. Samoilovich became Chairman of the Presidium of the newly formed Kazakhstan Base of the USSR Academy of Sciences. With the approval of Samoilovich, access to academic science was opened to scientists who were exiled in Kazakhstan (convicted up to the trial in the Industrial Party case).

Since 1924, among his publications devoted to the time-appropriate research topics (the reform of Oriental studies, the new alphabet, issues of modern local lore and ethnography), there are also works closely related to his closest (pre-revolutionary) specialty.-

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the history and criticism of the Codex Cumanicus, amendments to the publication and translation of Kutadgu Bilig, a treatise on prosody by Alisher Navoi, and the work of the 15th-century poet. Atai, as well as Lutfi, Amiri, etc. The very fact of these publications reflected the scale and integrity of Samoilovich's personality, character structure, loyalty to established scientific aspirations and civic courage.

Linguohistory continued to be part of the academician's research plans in 1929-1931, despite the fact that the first half of the 1930s is considered the most difficult period of Marrism's dominance. A. N. Samoilovich published an article on historical grammar in the pro-phonetic collection "Linguistic Problems in Numerals "(1927) - "Turkish quantitative numerals and a review of attempts to interpret them". At the same time, he boldly insisted: "It is absolutely necessary to take into account this Turkish comparative historical material" - which went against the guiding principles of the new teaching on language, with the requirements of the struggle against dissidents ("bourgeois") comparativists. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, A. N. Samoilovich still hoped to implement such labor-intensive projects as" Grammar of the Chagatai language"," Chagatai Dictionary","Anthology of Central Asian-Turkic Literature (XI - early XX centuries)".

Being preoccupied with his own creative plans, A. N. Samoilovich responded with silence to the harsh criticism of his experience of classifying Turkic languages by Marr in the report "Settlement of languages and peoples and the question of the ancestral homeland of Turkish languages", published in the party press (J. "Under the banner of Marxism". 1927, No. 6), and this criticism of him thundered throughout the country.

Approximately eight years after Marr's report, when the "twilight of linguistics" (the expression of B. N. Bazylev and V. P. Neroznak) fell on the country, A. N. Samoilovich, as director of the Institute of Internal Affairs of the USSR Academy of Sciences and head of the new Turkology, was forced, as he put it, "to rearm methodologically". He wrote the article "Turkology and the new teaching of language" for the collection " Academy of Sciences of the USSR to Academician N. Ya. Marr "(1935). This was the first and only conformist article by Academician A. N. Samoilovich. Its conclusion is characterized by a call to master the unique linguistic wealth of the Turkic peoples in Russia. With this thesis, the scientist made it clear that he does not intend to retreat in matters of factual erudition and linguistic accuracy.

The last major linguohistorical study by A. N. Samoilovich "Rich and poor in the Turkic languages " (1936) belongs to the pioneering works of the scientist on comparative lexicology and semasiology and has programmatic significance, despite the husk of Marrist terminology that he inevitably attracts.

A true indicator of how high the scientific value and degree of demand for A. N. Samoilovich's articles "with a yafetidic orientation" is until now is the fact that four (out of six) such articles were republished in the one-volume collection of his selected works " Turkic Linguistics. Philology. Runika" (2005). In them, A. N. Samoilovich defended the originality of Turkology as a branch of knowledge and its special place in the cycle of humanities, even with the monopoly position of the new teaching on language, and took care that, if possible, "the good traditions of scientific work of the creators of Russian Turkology"were not interrupted.

A. N. Samoilovich's statement about his extensive archive of unfinished or unpublished works-manuscripts is becoming important in our time, when the historiography of science is actively developing on the basis of intensive study of archival funds. It is no accident, therefore, that when preparing for publication A. N. Samoilovich's one - volume book (2005), its compilers - G. F. Blagova and D. M. Nasilov-in addition to the works published during the scientist's lifetime, included archival materials that remained unpublished after his tragic death for more than half a century and which, together with lifetime publications, give a more complete description of the author's work. an idea of the multi-faceted creative activity of one of the most prominent figures of the Radlov and Melioransky school.

Taking into account that, on the one hand, the archives of A. N. Samoilovich (including epistolary ones) are now largely mastered, and on the other hand, 45 years have passed since the publication of his first scientific biography compiled by F. D. Ashnin, it seems advisable to prepare a more detailed biography of the scientist for publication especially considering his "business letters specifically on travel issues".

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