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Agafangel KrumskiyUkrainian Soviet historian, writer, translator, orientalist, Turkologist and Semitologist
Date of Birth: 15.01.1871
Country:  Kazakhstan |
Content:
Biography of Agafangel Krymsky
Agafangel Yefimovich Krymsky was a Ukrainian Soviet historian, writer, translator, orientalist, Turkologist, and Semitologist. He was born in 1871. He completed his secondary education at the Kyiv "Collegium of Pavel Halagan", where he was influenced by the ideals of Little Russia and decided to dedicate himself to the scientific study of his homeland's past, particularly the history of its language.
Krymsky attended special classes at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and later enrolled in the Historical and Philological Faculty of Moscow University. In 1896, he was sent to Syria, where he worked for two years in Arabic manuscript repositories, improving his knowledge of the Arabic language and dialectology. He became a contributor to scientific Arabic journals.
Krymsky held positions as a professor of Arabic literature and the history of the East at the Lazarev Institute and the V.A. Poltoratskaya Women's Higher Courses. He also served as the secretary of the Eastern Commission of the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society and the editor of its works on "Eastern Antiquities".
Writer
As a writer, Krymsky is primarily known as a lyrical poet of the suffering soul. His "exotic poems" were published under the title "Palmovoe Gillya" (2nd edition, Zvenigorodka, 1902; Part II, 1908). The same lyrical subjectivism permeates his "Notes and Sketches from Ukrainian Life" (3rd edition, Zvenigorodka, 1904) and, especially, the novel "Andriy Lagovsky" (Lviv, 1905). His "Beirut Narratives" (Kyiv, 1906) have an ethnographic hue.
Most of Krymsky's fiction works were banned by the Russian censorship and published in Austria. Reviews of his works can be found in B. Hrinchenko's "Krymsky as a Ukrainian Writer" (Kyiv, 1903) and in A. Hrushevsky's (Kyiv, 1909), S. Yefremov's (Kyiv, 1911), and N. Yevshan's (Kyiv, 1910) histories of Ukrainian literature. Samples of Krymsky's poetry can be found in the Russian poetic translation by L. Staritskaya in "Russian Thought" (1902, October).
Scholarly Works
Krymsky's important scholarly works in Russian are included in the series "Works on Oriental Studies" published by the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages. These include "Semitic Languages and Peoples", "History of the Arabs" (2nd edition, 1912-1914), "Arabic Literature in Sketches and Samples", "Arabic Anthology", "Sources for the History of Muhammad and Literature about Him", "History of Islam" (Moscow, 1904-1912), "Lectures on the Quran" (2nd edition, Moscow, 1905), "Arsacids, Sasanids, and the Arab Conquest of Iran" (2nd edition, Moscow, 1905), "History of Persia, Its Literature, and Dervish Theosophy" (3rd edition, 1909-1914), "History of Turkey and Its Literature" (1909-1910), a monograph on "Wandering Stories", and others.
Separate works by Krymsky on Oriental Studies in Ukrainian include "Islam and Its Future" (Lviv, 1904, 2nd edition; the first edition is available in Russian translation, Moscow, 1899), "Shahnameh, or the Iranian Book of Kings" (Lviv, 1896), and "Folk Tales and Inventions - Following Clouston. How They Wander and Turn Over" (Lviv, 1896).
His works on the history of the Little Russian language were separately published, including "Criterion for Dialectological Classification of Old Russian Manuscripts" (Lviv, 1905), "Philology and the Pogodin Hypothesis. Fate of the Kyiv Little Russian Dialects in the 11th-16th Centuries" (Kyiv, 1904), "Ancient Kyiv Dialect" (St. Petersburg, 1907, from the "Proceedings" of the Academy of Sciences), and "On Little Russian Verbal Nouns Ending in -en'ye and -in'ye" (Moscow, 1900).
Krymsky, along with Mikhalyuk, compiled the "Program for Collecting Peculiarities of Little Russian Dialects" for the Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, 1910). Many of Krymsky's articles on Oriental Studies, ethnography, Little Russian philology, and literature until 1912 can be found in the jubilee "Dictionary of Members of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature" (1912), which also lists the numerous editions edited by Krymsky. He also contributed to the 82-volume "Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary" and other publications.
