Radlov, Vasilii, And Bartol’d, Vasilii

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Radlov, Vasilii, And Bartol’d, Vasilii

Vasilii Radlov, also known as Wilhelm Radloff (1837–1918), was a Russian Turkologist, museum director, explorer, and teacher. His scholarly contributions covered the ethnography, history, folklore, text redactions, archeology, and material culture of the Turkic peoples of central Asia and southern Siberia, and the linguistics, including the comparative lexicography, of all Turkic peoples. In addition, he was a professor, an academician, and a government adviser on Turkic matters.

Vasilii V. Bartol’d, also known as Wilhelm Barthold (1869–1930), academician and professor at St. Petersburg, specialized in the history of Islam and of the Turkic peoples and Iranians (Tadjiks) of central Asia. He combined a life of scholarship and teaching with long and frequent field trips. Bartol’d’s work is being considered here together with Radlov’s, since it contained important modifications of Radlov’s theories.

Of German origin, Radlov was introduced to Oriental studies at the University of Berlin in the 1850s by two of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s disciples, A. F. Pott and H. Steinthal. These men were engaged in a struggle against Gobineau’s doctrine of the inequality of races, and Radlov also eventually devoted much of his energy to affirming the like potentialities of all human groups. He discounted the influence of biological race on human development and, on the contrary, echoed Humboldt’s older ideas: while intelligent occupation does develop the critical faculties, nevertheless sound judgment and sharpness of wit may be found among peoples without letters or education as, for example, among the peoples of central Asia. These ideas of Humboldt’s constitute a sort of “noble barbarian” theory.

On completing his studies, Radlov taught German and Latin for 12 years at a Gymnasium in Barnaul, Siberia. This period was essential to his future career, for it gave him close and uninterrupted access to the Turkic peoples of the Altai and Sayan mountains, of southern Siberia, and of Kazakhstan and Kirgizia. His ethnographic descriptions, text collections, and linguistic analyses were begun at this time.

Following his Siberian period, he went to St. Petersburg. Here he published a series of volumes, Die altturkischen Inschriften der Mongolei (1894–1897), in which Turkic script carved on stelae was deciphered, transliterated, and translated. N. Yadrintsev, Radlov himself, and others had discovered these inscriptions in the region of the upper Yenisei and Orkhon rivers in western Mongolia; Radlov and a Danish contemporary, V. Thomsen, were able to master the script and language. Bartol’d, then a junior colleague of Radlov at the University of St. Petersburg, wrote a chapter in the series on the historical meaping of the inscriptions. Radlov’s contributions lie at the foundation of all subsequent work on this civilization; his interpretations, modified and extended by later work, stand to this day. He identified the documents as those of a pastoral Turkic people who built an indigenous state of great extent but simple form in the sixth to eighth centuries A.d. The script was their own; it had a superficial resemblance to Scandinavian runes, and both were connected ultimately, through diffusion, with alphabetic systems of the ancient Near East. Many of the inscriptions were multilingual, and the inclusion of Chinese translations of the Turkic shows that this civilization had connections with east Asia as well as with the West.

At this time Radlov also translated (1891–1910) the Kudatku (better, Kutadgu) Bilik, a lengthy moral-didactic poem of the medieval Uighurs, Turkic-speaking peoples of central Asia, a poem composed by the royal adviser, Yūsuf Khāss-hājib of Balasagun. In a preface to the poem, Radlov provided both an account of Uighur society and a general theory of state formation by usurpation, with particular reference to the Uighurs. This was a theory to which he repeatedly adverted and which was further developed by Bartol’d. According to Radlov, pastoral nomadic tribes developed a permanent political state of their own only when a powerful or wealthy person usurped the popular authority. The usurper’s group was then eponymously named, whereby the leader sought to stabilize his power within his descent line. Radlov based this theory of the origin of the state upon his ethnographic observations of just such a process among the Kazakhs; subsequently he extrapolated this process to ancient times. The method of applying current ethnographic observation to reconstructions of bygone eras and peoples was used by L. H. Morgan and other theorists of evolutionary stages, especially in the nineteenth century.

Radlov worked out a three-stage theory of evolution in his book Aus Sibirien (1884), a general ethnography of central and northern Asia. He believed that human life in this area developed and made the transition from a hunting to a pastoral nomadic stage and then to agriculture. Each stage was characterized not only by the economy associated with its name but also by a particular social and political organization and a predominant religion. For the pastoral Turkic peoples of central Asia the predominant religion was shamanism. At the same time Radlov noted that the diffusion of Christianity through contact with Russians, the diffusion of Islam through contact with Iranic and Semitic peoples, and the diffusion of Buddhism from India, Tibet, and the Mongols all changed the indigenous religion. The Russian Orthodox church regarded shamanism as evidence of unclean powers at work among the peoples of Asiatic Russia. Radlov controverted this view, asserting that shamanism was a religion to be studied in its own right. He succeeded to a degree in modifying the official Russian view of shamanism, but his educational ventures among the Turkic peoples were opposed by those who supported education only when it was connected with the propagation of Christianity.

His evolutionary views shaped the policies he advocated for the progress of the Turkic peoples. He saw contemporary nomadism as a retarding force. The pastoral empires of Asian history were brilliant developments of the past but could not meet the needs of the peoples in modern times. Radlov’s analyses of the ancient and medieval Turkic khanates convinced him that they were essentially autocratic institutions which prevented the Turkic pastoralists from sharing in the progressive changes occurring in European life. This view is the dominant one in Soviet policy regarding the area today.

Radlov was active also in collecting the folklore of the Turkic peoples of southern Siberia and central Asia (1866–1907). The material he collected was published (in part) in ten volumes, the first systematic and precise coverage of this ethnographic field. Moreover, he brought out a monumental comparative lexicon of the Turkic dialects and languages. The study of the Turkic peoples was transformed into a scientific undertaking by virtue of these efforts. Radlov’s studies were related to the broad ethnographic, historical, lexicographic, and evolutionary problems of his time.

His activities in public affairs were as impressive as his scholarly contributions. He advanced an enlightened policy toward the peoples of Asia; he gave material and spiritual support to exiled revolutionary scholars; and he was a vital force in transforming the St. Petersburg Kunstkammer of Peter the Great into the modern Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

Bartol’d’s work was narrower in focus and less theoretical in tone than that of Radlov. He was concerned with the interaction between an individual and society, more particularly with refining Radlov’s theory of state formation by usurpation; he examined the role of Chinghiz Khan and of the founders of other pastoral empires of Asia from this point of view. Bartol’d eschewed inferential reconstruction of the past and committed himself straightforwardly to cultural and social history; thus, his interpretations of the personality of Chinghiz Khan are closely related to the textual record.

In line with this historical bent, Bartol’d studied the literate peoples of central Asia and their written record; he treated the nonliterate cultures marginally, and references to them appear only occasionally in his writings. Nevertheless, he did criticize Radlov’s designation of shamanism as the religion of the Turkic pastoral nomads. Bartol’d associated shamanism with the hunting cultures of the polar regions, although he agreed that it is found among those pastoralists living in remote areas such as the Altai Mountains. Bartol’d also criticized Radlov for failing to treat the function of shamanist religion in society; such an approach would have revealed that the role played by shamanism in hunting cultures was even greater than it was among pastoralists.

Bartol’d combined in his studies the results of both library and field work and alternated between specialized histories, such as those of cotton-growing in central Asia or of Christianity in Asia, and broader syncretistic topics, such as the cultural history of Turkestan, of Iran, and of the Turkic peoples of central Asia. He also compiled a bibliographic survey La découverte de I’Asie (1911). His brief and brilliant conspectus of Turko-Mongol history, published in Tashkent in 1929, reduced to a short essay the political dynamics common to all central and inner Asia ([1893–1929] 1956–1962, vol. 3, pp. 73–170). Of particular importance to Western scholarship are his short characterizations of Turkic peoples—Tadjiks, Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Turkmens, Kalmuks, and other peoples of Asia and the Caucasus—in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1913–1936).

Lawrence Krader

[For the polemical context of Radlov and Bartol’d’s work, see the biography ofGobineau. The biography ofBoasand the article onBogoraz, Sternberg, andJochelsoncontain relevant background material. For discussion of the subsequent development of their ideas, seePastoralism.]

WORKS BY RADLOV

1866–1907 Radlov, Vasilii V. (compiler and translator), Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme. 10 vols. in 18. St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften.

(1884) 1893 Aus Sibirien: Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. 2 vols. in 1. Leipzig: Weigel.

1891–1910 YŪsuf, KhĀss-hajib Das Kudatku Bilik des Jusuf Chass-Hadschib aus Bälasagun. Edited by Wilhelm Radloff. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften.

(1893–1911) 1963 Opyt slovaria tiurkskikh narechii: Versuch eines Wörterbuches der Türk-dialekte. 4 vols. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi Literatury.

1894–1897 Die alttürkischen Inschriften der Mongolei. St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften. → Issued in four parts. Part 4 contains a chapter by Bartol’d, “Die historische Bedeutung der alttiirkischen Inschriften.”

WORKS BY BARTOL’D

(1893–1929) 1956–1962 Four Studies on the History of Central Asia. 3 vols. Leiden (Netherlands): Brill. → First published in Russian. Volume 1: A Short History of Turkestan (1922) 1956; History of the Semirechye (1893) 1956. Volume 2: Ulugh-beg (1918) 1958. Volume 3: Mīr ’Alī-shīr (1928) 1962; A History of the Turkman People (1929) 1962.

(1900) 1958 Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion. 2d ed., enl. & rev. London; Luzac. → First published in Russian.

(1911) 1947 La découverte de VAsie: Histoire de I’orientalisme en Europe et en Russie. Paris: Payot. → First published as Istoriia izucheniia vostoka v Evrope i Rossii.

1935 12 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Türken Mittelasiens. Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Islam-kunde.

Sochineniia. Vols. 1—. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1963—. → The first three volumes of this projected ten-volume edition of Bartol’d’s collected works have appeared.