Evgenii Bertels

Born Dec. 13 (25), 1890, in St. Petersburg; died Oct. 7, 1957, in Moscow. Soviet Orientalist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939). Corresponding member of the Iranian Academy of Sciences (1944) and the Arabic Academy of Sciences in Damascus (1955). Received his higher education in music and law.

Upon graduating from the department of Eastern languages of Petrograd University in 1920, Bertel’s joined the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (now the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), where he worked until his death. He was a specialist in the history of Persian, Tadzhik, and a number of Turkic literatures. He did research work in the area of Sufism and Sufi literature, the works of Firdausi, Nizami, Jami, and Navoi. His main works were devoted to the history of the culture of the peoples of the Near and Middle East. He was the founder and leader of the Soviet school of Iranian textual criticism. A broad range of research and deep penetration of the artistic fabric of the literary monuments he studied were characteristic of Bertel’s. His monograph Nizami was awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1948). He was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and a medal.