N. I. Ashmarin, Participant of the First Turkological Congress: Portrait Sketches

Abstract

The prominent Turkologist scholar of Chuvash origin, Professor N. I. Ashmarin (1870–1933), was in Baku at the time of the First Turkological Congress held in 1926. He had already been working at Baku University for nearly three years. Alongside his teaching activities, he was actively involved in the work of the Azerbaijan Society for Research and Publication, which at that time was the country’s first scientific research center. Within this framework, he conducted research on Azerbaijani dialects and worked on the compilation of dictionaries. N. I. Ashmarin was a member of the Organizing Committee of the Turkological Congress together with prominent scientific and political figures of the former Soviet Union. On the opening day of the congress, February 27, he delivered a paper entitled “Some Notes on the Past and Present State of Turkology” at the fifth session of the scientific forum, devoted to the topic “The Current State and Immediate Tasks of the Study of Turkic Languages.” In this presentation, he attempted to provide a brief overview of the history of the emergence of Turkology in Russia. In fact, the original Russian title of the report (“Кое-что о прошлом тюркологии и ее настоящем состоянии”) more accurately reflects its content and scope. Most likely, due to the lack of sufficient sources and materials at his disposal, Ashmarin spoke only in general terms about XIX century Russian Turkology.

By that time, Ashmarin had already passed through a major scholarly school. He had studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, where he mastered several Eastern languages, and was generally known as a polyglot. During his student years, he authored A Grammar of the Chuvash Language. In his work The Bulgars and the Chuvash (1902), he scientifically substantiated the linguistic and ethnic continuity between two ancient Turkic peoples of the Volga region the Bulgars and the Chuvash.The pinnacle of his scholarly legacy is the seventeen-volume Dictionary of the Chuvash Language (1910–1950). During his work at Baku University from 1923 to 1926, Ashmarin also made significant contributions to Azerbaijani philology. With his active participation, work began on the multi-volume Dictionary of the Azerbaijani Language, the first volume of which was published in 1930. In 1926, as a result of his dialectological research, he published the book A General Survey of the Turkic Folk Dialects of the City of Nukha, devoted to the Sheki (Nukha) dialect of the Azerbaijani language a work that has not lost its scholarly significance to this day.In 1929, N. I. Ashmarin was elected a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. His scientific legacy was highly valued by such scholars as V. V. Bartold, V. A. Gordlevsky, F. E. Korsh, V. F. Miller, B. Munkácsi, Professor Z. V. Togan, and others.