Nikolai Katanov

Born May 6 (18), 1862, in the ulus (village) of Turakhov, present-day Askiz Raion, Khakass Autonomous Oblast; died Mar. 10, 1922, in Kazan. Khakass linguist and ethnographer; authority on Turkic languages and peoples.

Katanov graduated from the Oriental faculty of the University of St. Petersburg in 1888 and was appointed a professor at the University of Kazan in 1893. From 1889 to 1892, on commission from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, he traveled through the southern regions of eastern Siberia, Uriankhai-Krai, and northwestern China. Katanov’s principal works are An Essay on the Study of the Uriankhai Language (1903) and two volumes of materials on the languages, ethnography, and folklore of the Khakass, Tuvinians, and Karagasy entitled Dialects of the Uriankhai, Abakan Tatars, and Karagasy (published in Examples of the Folk Literature of the Turkic Tribes by V. V. Radlov, part 9, 1907). These studies are of considerable scholarly importance as a compilation of factual material.