Niezwykłe dzieje pierwszych edycji Kitāb Ibn Faḍlāna. Orientalistyka i polityka w połowie XX w.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the political circumstances that influenced certain decisions regarding the first two editions of the travel report of the Arab traveler Ibn Faḍlān from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars (921–922). The now-famous text of the voyage account, known as the Mashhad manuscript, was discovered in 1923 by a Turkish orientalist of Bashkir origin, Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan (1890–1970) and formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Vienna in 1935. Due to various problems, the German translation (in book form) was only published in print in 1939. The same year saw the publication of a Russian translation of the voyage description by a Soviet Arabist – Andrei P. Kovalevskiy (1895–1969). Both scholars conflicted with the USSR authorities: Togan had fought with the Soviet Army in 1920–1923, while Kovalevskiy was sentenced to five years in the gulag in 1938 on (as it later turned out) a wrongful charge of counterrevolutionary activity. These circumstances unexpectedly influenced the scholarly study of Ibn Faḍlān’s medieval work, incorporating it into the USSR’s domestic and foreign policy at the time.