The Arabist from Shemakha Who Dreamed of the Sea: Theodor Adamovich Shumovsky (1913-2012)

Abstract

The twentieth century witnessed heyday of the Russian-Soviet Arabic and Islamic studies, whose academic school created by Victor von Rosen and his disciple Ignaty Krachkovsky had flourished already in the late Russian empire and survived the Soviet period. Its representa-tives included many outstanding yet controversial figures, whose scientific biography still needs to be rethought in the context of late post-colonial Orientalism under the Stalinist rule and the Cold War period. One of these scholars was Theodor Adamovich Shumovsky, political prisoner, poet and memoirist. He belonged to the last generation of students of I. Yu. Krachkovsky, specialized in early modern Arabic maritime geography, later translated the Qur’an into Russian in verses. The present work attempts to give a comprehensive discursive analysis of the work of this maritime Arabist, with whom the author knew well in the last decade of his life.