For many decades the eminent Ukrainian Orientalist Ahatanhel Krymsky built bridges between civilizations and cultures, especially between the rich cultures of his native Ukraine and the Oriental peoples (Arabs, the Turkic peoples, Persians, and the inhabitants of India). At the same time, this prominent 20th-century scholar made an invaluable contribution to Ukrainian linguistics. He authored such fundamental works as the Ukrainian Grammar for Students of Higher Grades in two volumes (1907-08), Philology and Pogodin’s Hypothesis (1898-9), The Ancient Kyivan Dialect (1906), and The Ukrainian Language: Whence It Came and How It Developed (1922), and An Outline of the History of the Ukrainian Language (1924). He headed the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Orthography Commission, which drew up the first official Basic Rules of Ukrainian Orthography (1919- 20). He was also a historian, philosopher, writer (he wrote masterful poems, dozens of exquisite novellas, and the novel Andrii Lahovsky), a brilliant translator, polyglot (he knew at least 16 living and classical languages, but some contemporaries double this number), an outstanding organizer of research, and the permanent secretary of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1918-28. The list may be continued.
Even today the figure of Academician Ahatanhel Krymsky (1871-1942) sparks a gamut of reactions: surprise, delight, immense interest, veneration, and pain for a tragic destiny — as well as subconscious rejection on the part of certain spurious, “free-thinking” intellectual “stars” mixed with envy, because the intellectual criteria are too stringent and the requirements of genuine Hamburgian-level knowledge are too high. Krymsky is one of a handful of personalities whose life seems to confirm the saying that “Great things are best seen from a distance.” Feelings of the profoundest respect for what he accomplished do not fade. On the contrary, they merely increase as one makes a closer inspection of the great scholar’s literary and academic legacy.
Ahatanhel Krymsky was born on Jan. 3 (15), 1871, in Volodymyr-Volynsky, Volyn gubernia, into a family of ancient Tatar lineage. His forefathers resided in Bakhchisarai, the capital of the once powerful Crimean Khanate, until the late 17th century, when they had to abandon this land because of social disturbances. An ancestor of the future prominent scholar settled on the territory of what is now Belarus (the cities of Borisov and Mstislav). The father of the Ukrainian encyclopedist, Yukhym Krymsky, a teacher of history and geography, had moved to Volodymyr-Volynsky shortly before his son’s birth and after a few months changed his place of residence again. The fee that the elder Krymsky was paid for publishing a geography textbook for two-grade schools was enough for him to acquire a house. In fact, it was a manor located in Zvenyhorodka, now in Cherkasy oblast, where the whole family moved and where Ahatanhel spent his childhood.
The boy learned to read at three, and when he was five his father sent him to the Zvenyhorodka High School, then to the Ostroh Proto-Gymnasium (1881-84), and Kyiv Gymnasium No. 2 (1884-85). The gifted youngster went on to study at the famous Pavlo Galagan College (1885-1889), where he matured intellectually. In this respect, an important role was played by the well-known Ukrainian linguist Pavlo Zhytetsky, who steadily led the 18-year-old youth to making a decisive choice that determined his subsequent life: to become a committed and conscientious Ukrainian, a person who regards the spiritual, cultural, and national renaissance of his people as his life’s goal. The striking fact is that Krymsky himself repeatedly admitted that he did not have a single drop of Ukrainian blood in him. He did so much for Ukraine’s intellectual development and enrichment in the 20th century that even the highest assessment will not be an exaggeration.
In a letter written to his friend Borys Hrinchenko on June 5, 1892, Krymsky said: “I devoted every hour free of ‘official’ classes [at the Moscow-based Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in 1889-92 — Author] to Ukraine.” This is not just a nice-sounding phrase. After learning Arabic, Persian, and Turkish at the institute and having already mastered German, Polish, French, English, Italian, ancient Greek, and Latin, Krymsky later mastered Hebrew, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Urdu. He would continue to expand his knowledge of languages to the end of his life. Krymsky, whose specialty was Arabic philology and Islamic and Arabic literature, frequently contributed poems, short stories, and research articles to Lviv periodicals, such as Narod, Pravda, Zhytie i slovo, and later Literaturno-naukovyi visnyk. He collaborated with Ivan Franko, who had high praise for his talent. In his book Young Ukraine (1910) Franko writes: “The emergence of Ahatanhel Krymsky among Ukrainians is extraordinary as far as his energy, passionate love for Ukraine, and multifaceted knowledge and talent are concerned. A philologist by profession and an Orientalist by inclination, he has shown himself to be a highly talented poet and a very original author of novellas.” Franko is obviously referring to such works as Palm Branches: Exotic Poems, Antara, Gulistan, Parental Right, The Debuts of a Radical, The Orphan Zakharko, and To the People! Without a doubt, Krymsky made an outstanding contribution to Ukrainian literature, not to mention his translations of Saadi, Firdausi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam, and Heine, which are enriched our culture.
The young Krymsky devoted most of his time to Oriental Studies (in the broadest sense of the word: literature, history, philosophy, and comparative analysis of languages) and Ukrainian Studies (also in the broadest interpretation as a comprehensive and fundamental discipline). It is this harmonious combination of Oriental and Slavic principles that makes Krymsky’s legacy extremely unique.
Convincing proof of this is the scholarly legacy that Krymsky left behind. As an Orientalist, Krymsky’s contribution to Ukrainian and international scholarship may easily be compared to the scholarly achievements of an entire university. Here is a brief list of this prominent scholar’s publications. In Arabic studies: Lectures on the History of the Semitic Languages (written in 1902-03 after a research trip to Lebanon), Islam and its Future (1904), A History of the Arabs and Arabic Literature (1911), and, finally, a translation of the Koran accompanied by a scholarly commentary (1907; Leo Tolstoy declared that he had “studied the Koran translated by Krymsky”). It was Krymsky who wrote all the important articles on the language, history, and literature of the Middle East for the renowned Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. Contemporaries also highly praised his translation of The Arabian Nights.
As an Iranist scholar, Krymsky was no less prolific. Among other works, he wrote A History of Persia and Its Literature (1923), The Persian Theater: Whence It Came and How It Developed (1925), Hafiz and His Songs (1924), and an earlier study A History of Persia, Its Literature and Dervish Philosophy (in three volumes, 1909- 12). The works of Krymsky the Turkologist are even more well known: A History of Turkey (1924, a brilliant study that in some aspects is still unsurpassed), The Turkic Peoples, their Languages and Literatures (1930), An Introduction to the History of Turkey (European Sources) (1916), and Nizami and his Contemporaries (1941) The latter manuscript was submitted to the printers, but the book was never published because of the war, and on July 20, 1941, Krymsky was arrested by the NKVD in his native Zvenyhorodka and later deported to Kustanai (Kazakhstan), where he died in prison of extreme exhaustion on Jan. 25, 1942).
No less impressive is Krymsky’s contribution to Ukrainian Studies, an aspect of his work that requires a special discussion, as does his longtime tenure as secretary of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the 1920s. He was the director of the Institute of the Ukrainian Scholarly Language (from 1921), head of the Academy of Science’s Department of History and Philosophy, chairman of the commission responsible for compiling a dictionary of the spoken Ukrainian language, commission on the history of the Ukrainian language, the Dialectological Commission, and the Orthography Commission, professor of world history at Kyiv University, and the head of the Arabic and Iranian Philology Center. This list of positions leaves one wondering how he managed to accomplish so much. The epithet “universalist scholar,” as applied to Krymsky, sounds like an approximate and absolutely inadequate cliche.
It is difficult to overestimate the role Krymsky played in formulating the rules of Ukrainian orthography. As early as 1897, in the article “On the Scientific Nature of Phonetic Orthography,” he provided convincing arguments against the so-called etymological principle of spelling, advanced by a considerable number of Lviv, Bukovynian, and Transcarpathian publications, and spoke decisively in favor of a single Ukrainian orthography largely based on the linguistic practice of Dnipro Ukraine. Here is just one concrete detail from the orthographic sphere of Krymsky’s titanic work: it is to him that we owe the seemingly “eternal” norm of writing the particle “sia” together with the verb (100 years earlier this was not done).
In 1918 Krymsky arrived in Kyiv from Moscow, where he was a professor at the Department of Arabic Literature and History of the Muslim Orient at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages. It was a well-considered decision. This becomes obvious when you read not so much Krymsky’s letters dated 1917-18 as his poems. Here is a fragment from his poetic cycle In Trabzon written in the summer of 1917, when the Russian Academy of Sciences sent Krymsky to the Russian-occupied Turkish city of Trabzon to organize the protection of ancient monuments. This poem was written far from Ukraine, but the eastern exotica could not make Krymsky forget about the events that were taking place in his native Ukraine.
“I am in the mountains over the sea, on the high Tauris. / Waves are rolling onto the cliff, as if they were ichthyosaurs. / But it is quiet and peaceful in the bay; / And ancient Trabzon town lies below me. / I could not stay behind there in the city. / I am celebrating — news from Ukraine: / Ukraine is free! — this is what I heard. / So I headed for the mountains, where I will take a free breath. / You, Ukraine, are on a free shining path to a new life. / You will sail daringly on the high seas, / In this newfound happiness you will begin to live proudly!”
These lines were written by an exceptional erudite, a truly world-class scholar, a man of all-embracing knowledge, who despised ignorance and dilettantish aplomb (the natural disaster of our times!) more than anything. The 70-year-old encyclopedist once confessed to his friends: “Now, in the twilight of my life, I know several dozen languages. This year I began to learn the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) and Babylonian languages.” We can say absolutely confidently that if the death of Academician Krymsky alone were on the conscience of the totalitarian Bolshevik government, this crime would have gone down in history perpetually cursed. Today there is a dire need for new Krymskys.
