Gordlevskii, Vladimir

Born Sept. 25 (Oct. 7). 1876, in Sveaborg; died Sept. 10, 1956, in Moscow. Soviet orientalist and Turkologist; specialist in Turkish language, folklore, and history. Academician of the Academy of Science of the USSR (1946).

Gordlevskii graduated from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in 1899 and from the history and philology department of Moscow University in 1904. In 1907 he began to teach Turkish and the history of Turkish literature at the Lazarev Institute (later reorganized into the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies); from 1918 to 1948 he was a professor at that institute. He later directed the division for language and literature of countries of the Near and Middle East at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Gordlevskii was the author of Grammar of the Turkish Language (1928) and edited the first Turkish-Russian dictionary (1931). His most important works on history are the monograph The Seljuk State of Asia Minor (1941), which contains a great deal of factual material on the economic and social history of the Near and Middle East in the 11th through 13th centuries, the works The Internal Condition of Turkey in the Second Half of the 16th Century (1940), and From the Life of the Turkish Guilds (1927). He was awarded two Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.