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Nikolai A. Baskakov


Nikolay Aleksandrovich Baskakov (Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Баска́ков; 1905-1995) was a Russian Turkologist, linguist, and ethnologist. He created a systematization model of the Turkic language family (Baskakov's classification), and studied Turkic-Russian contacts in the 10-11th centuries CE. During 64 years of scientific work (1930-1994), Baskakov published almost 640 works including 32 books. The main area of Baskakov's scientific interests was linguistics, but he also studied folklore and ethnography of the Turkic peoples, and also was a musician and composer.

Baskakov was born in 1905 in Solvychegodsk in Vologda Governorate (now Arkhangelsk Oblast) in a large family of a district government official. His father came from a family banished in the beginning of the 19th century from Saint Petersburg to the Vologda province, and mother was a daughter of an official and a teacher. In a book about Russian surnames of Turkic origin (1979) Baskakov gives the following comment about his surname: "Surname Baskakov comes from a Tatar baskak, Amragan (*Amyr-khan), a viceroy in the second half of the 13th century in Vladimir. The Turkic origin of this surname is confirmed by the very root of the surname basqaq "the one who puts seal, a viceroy of the Khan of the Golden Horde", and by the heraldic data: a curved sword in the center and an image of a Tatar over the crest who is holding a red curved saber" (p. 245).

As a young student, in 1916, Baskakov met an old friend of his father's, Bessonov, a Russian dragoman or envoy to Jedda (then part of the Ottoman Empire). The Russian diplomat's stories about eastern countries affected young Baskakov's imagination. He took a great interest in the East, and Turkey in particular. He began reading about Turkey and even tried to study the Turkish language by himself. In N.Baskakov's words, "This pursuit probably affected choice of my speciality - Turkology, which my father later named "missionary work", or maybe my speciality was prompted by the genes of my ancestors, Turks or Mongols?".


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