The most eminent scholars engaged in the philological and ethnological investigations undertaken by the Empress Catherine II. were foreigners; as, for example, Pallas, and Bakmeister. Some, however, were native Russians, but few details are preserved regarding them. Of Sujeff, who accompanied Pallas in the expedition to Tartary and China, and who translated the journals of the expedition into Russian,[215] I have not been able to obtain any particulars. I have been equally unsuccessful as to the history of Theodore Mirievo de Jankiewitsch, the compiler of the alphabetical Digest of Pallas’s Comparative Vocabulary, described in a former page; but it can scarcely be doubted, from the very nature of his task, that he must have been a man of no ordinary acquirements as a linguist, at least as regards the vocabularies of language.
During the present century a good deal has been done in Russia for the cultivation of particular families of languages. The “Lazareff Institute,” founded at Moscow in 1813,[216] by an Armenian family from which it takes its name, comprehends in its truly munificent scheme of education not only the Armenian, Georgian, and Tartar languages, but also the several members of the Caucasian family.[217] An Oriental Institute[218] on a somewhat similar plan was established at St. Petersburg in 1823. Another was opened at the still more favourable centre of languages, Odessa, in 1829; and a fourth, yet more recently, at Kazan, the meeting point of the two great classes of languages which practically divide between them the entire Russian Empire.[219] Individual scholars, too, have taken to themselves particular branches of the study, some of them with very remarkable success. Timkoffsky, the well-known missionary in China,[220] and Hyacinth Bitchourin, who was head of the Pekin Russian Mission from 1808 to 1812, have contributed to popularize the study of Chinese.[221] Igumnoff of Irkutsch published a useful dictionary of the Mongol: Giganoff, and more recently Volkoff, a dictionary of the Tartar languages; of which Mirza Kazem-Beg, professor of the Turkish and Tartar languages at St. Petersburg, has compiled an excellent grammar. The same service has been rendered to the language of Georgia and its several dialects by David Tchubinoff.[222] The numerous philological writings of Goulianoff, too, and, more lately, Prince Alexander Handjeri’s Dictionnaire Français, Arabe, Persan, et Turc,[223] have established a European reputation.
The present Prefect Apostolic of the Arctic Missions, who is a convert from the Russian Church, is said to be a very extraordinary linguist. Even before he entered upon his missionary charge, in which, of course, the circle of his languages is much enlarged, he habitually heard confessions, at Paris, in six languages.
Perhaps also it may be permitted to enumerate among Russian linguists three eminent literary men who have long been resident at St. Petersburg, and who, although not natives of Russia, may now be regarded as naturalised subjects of the Empire—Senkowsky, Gretsch and Mirza Kazem-Beg.
The first is by birth a Pole;[224] but having early attained to much eminence as an Orientalist, and having travelled with some reputation as an explorer in Syria and Egypt, he obtained the Professorship of Oriental languages in the university of St. Petersburg, in which he has since distinguished himself by an important controversy with the celebrated Von Hammer. Senkowsky, since his residence in St. Petersburg, has made the Russian language his own, and is one of the most prolific writers in the entire range of modern Russian literature. His grammar of that language is among the most intelligible to foreigners that has ever been issued. With most of the languages of Europe, he is said to be perfectly familiar, and his attainments as an Orientalist are of the very highest rank. He is a corresponding member of the Asiatic Societies of most of the capitals of Europe, and publishes indifferently in Polish, Russian, German, and French.
Gretsch, the editor of the well-known St. Petersburg Journal, “The Northern Bee,” is perhaps less profound, but equally varied in his attainments. Although a German by birth, he writes exclusively in Russian, and is the author of the best and most popular extant history of Russian literature; of which Otto’s Lehrbuch der Russischen Literatur, although apparently an independent work, is almost a literal translation.[225]
Mirza Kazem-Beg is of the Tartar race, but a native of Astracan, where his father, a man of much reputation for learning, had settled about the commencement of the century. Soon after the establishment of the professorship of the Turkish and Tartar languages at Kazan, Kazem-Beg was selected to fill it; and, after some time, he was removed to the same chair in the University of Petersburg, which he still holds. Besides the ordinary learned languages, he is acquainted with the Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, Syrian, Persian, and Turkish, as well as those of the Tartar stock; and he is described as perfect master of the modern European languages, especially French, Italian, German, and English. The last named language he speaks and writes with great ease and elegance, and has even published some translations into it, as, for example, the “Derbend-Nâmeh.”[226]
The reputation of the Poles as linguists is equally high. So far back as the election of Henry de Valois, Choisnin, who accompanied Henry to Poland, says that of the two hundred Polish nobles who were then assembled, there were hardly two who did not speak, in addition to their native Polish, German, Italian, and Latin.[227] So universal was the knowledge of the last named language that, with perhaps a pardonable exaggeration, Martin Kromer alleges that there were fewer in Poland than in Latium itself who did not speak it.[228]
Nevertheless, few names present themselves in this department which have left any permanent trace in history. Francis Meninski, the learned author of the Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium,[229] was not only a profound scholar in most of the ancient and modern languages, but, from his long residence in the East, and from the office of Oriental Interpreter which he held, first in the Polish and afterwards in the Imperial service, must be presumed to have spoken them freely and familiarly. But Meninski was a native of Lorraine, and by some is believed to have been originally named Menin, and only to have adopted the Polish affix, ski, on receiving from the Diet his patent of naturalization and nobility.
Among the early Polish Jesuits were many accomplished classical and Oriental linguists, but in the absence of any particulars of their attainments, it would be uninteresting to enumerate them. In later times the names of Groddek and Bobrowski may be mentioned as philologers, if not as linguists. The learned Jesuit historian, John Christopher Albertrandy, also, possesses this among many other lilies to fame. He was a most laborious and successful collector of materials for Polish history, in search of which he explored the libraries of Italy, from whence he carried home, after three years of patient research, a hundred and ten folio volumes of extracts copied with his own hand! From Italy he proceeded to Stockholm and Upsala, where many important documents connected with the time of John III. and Sigismond III. are preserved: and here, being, from some unworthy jealousy, only permitted to inspect the desired documents on the condition of not making notes or copies in the library, his prodigious memory enabled him on his return each evening to his apartments, to commit to writing what he had read during the day, and the collection thus formed amounted to no fewer than ninety folio volumes![230] Albertrandy’s historical works are very numerous; and when his labours in this department are remembered, his success as a linguist will appear almost prodigious. Besides Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he knew most of the modern languages, French, English, Italian, German, and Russian, and spoke the majority of them with ease and propriety.