Portrait of N.Ya. Bichurin in Chinese costume |
"To Dear Sir Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin from the translator as a sign of true respect. April, 1828."
This is an inscription on one of the books from the great poet's library called Description of Tibet in Its Present Day State. It was translated from the Chinese by Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin, or Father Iakinth in monkhood.
Fifteen works by this distinguished scholar were published between 1827 and 1851 in St. Petersburg. And every one of them was an event. They were narrations about the Chinese, the Mongolians, the Tibetans – about their culture, their diligence and their highly skilled craftsmen and artists. Materials for his works the author drew not only from books and manuscripts. His most valuable sources of information were the people – mandarins, merchants, peasants, craftsmen, Confucian scholars, Buddhist priests, wandering quacks, singers, comedians, - that is, all the people he had met in Asian countries.
Contemporaries wrote about Bichurin's books in magazines and newspapers. They were discussed in the auditoriums of St. Petersburg University, in literary salons and in the bookshops of the Russian capital. The Paris Academic Asian Society elected Bichurin its member. The Russian Academy of Sciences elected him its Associate Member. Sinological works by Bichurin were translated into different European languages. In 1830, his book Description of Tibet was published in French, then his Notes About Mongolia were published in German. As a matter of fact, Bichurin was a common monk at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg. And from his monastic cell he corresponded extensively on various scientific issues. It was in his cell that he created his brilliant works.
N. Ya. Bichirin’s authograph of a Chinese text |
It seemed that every page written by Bichurin had long ago been carefully studied by historians. They believed that they had compiled a most comprehensive inventory of Bichurin’s entire legacy. Suddenly, they made a surprising discovery. In one of the bookcases at the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences they discovered a weighty file. It contained 827 pages written in Bichurin’s fine hand. Even after a brief acquaintance with the manuscript it was recognized that a previously unknown study about Mongolia’s past had been discovered.
Bichurin first visited Mongolia in 1807. But he did not know the Mongolian language at that time. Fourteen years later, when he returned to the already familiar lands, Bichurin was able to fluently communicate with the local people of Mongolia. By that time he had studied its history, geography, economics and he had translated into Russian numerous documents about Mongolia’s past… Russian and foreign contemporaries highly esteemed Bichurin’s studies, which revealed “many facts from the life of the Mongolian people, which had hitherto been either unknown or misinterpreted.” Many more such facts were in the book The History of the Mongolian People, which was created on the banks of the Neva River and which remained unknown for a long time.
N. Ya. Bichurin’s grave |
Bichurin died in 1853. He was buried in St. Petersburg in the necropolis of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Over his grave there is a small black obelisk. The inscription says:
