By Leonid Kulikov
Each of personalia includes the following information: date of birth; scientific degrees and
titles awarded; affiliation; participation in international congresses; and a short
bibliography of scientific works, more specifically, of those related to Asian or African
studies.
There is no reference work comparable to the BD in terms of the sheer volume of data
and completeness of the bibliography. Some criticism addressed to the first edition has
been heeded, so that a number of shortcoming have been removed. One of the important
and very positive achievements of the BD is that finally information about emigrant
Russian scientists is included, a subject which was of course taboo before Perestroika.
The BD is also unique because of the information it contains about Oriental Studies
outside the two main Russian centres of Humanities in Moscow and St.Petersburg. It has
data on orientalists in Siberia, in the Transcaucasian (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and
Central Asian (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc.) republics, which are usually very difficult to
obtain.
There are some annoying mistakes and gaps; for instance, an indologist will notice the
absence of personalia about B.Oguibenine and A.Syrkin. These lacunae are easy to fill,
however, and they do not diminish in any way the importance of the BD. It is remarkable
to consider that this work, which would be no easy task even for a big department, is
prepared by S.D.Miliband on her own, without the assistance of any supporting staff!
Impartial representation
It is worth mentioning that the BD is free of any partiality, which is not a feature
characteristic of official Soviet editions of such a kind, where personalia of bureaucratic
staff of the Academic Institutes often predominated, namely of persons of whom some are
authors of but a few political and ideological pamphlets, rather than of scientific works
proper, while the information about "untitled" scholars ranking low in the official Soviet
hierarchy was quite scarce. In the BD we find personalia of both eminent academicians
and professors alongside those of young researchers. Times have changed, and we finally
have a reference book which represents Oriental Studies in the Soviet Union and CIS in a
more impartial and exhaustive way than any reference work has done before.
Biobibliograficheskij slovar' otechestvennyx vostokovedov
s 1917 g. [A Bio-bibliographic Dictionary of Soviet Orientalists from 1917
onward], by S.D. Miliband. 2 vols., Moscow: Nauka, 1995.