REVIEWS: Anton Schiefner (1817-1879) und seine indologischen Freunde. Seine Briefe an die Indologen Albrecht Weber (1825-1901), Rudolf Roth (1821-1895) und William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) sowie den Indogermanisten Adalbert Kuhn (1812-1881)

Hartmut Walravens and Agnes Stache-Weiske : Anton Schiefner (1817-1879) und seine indologischen Freunde. Seine Briefe an die Indologen Albrecht Weber (1825-1901), Rudolf Roth (1821-1895) und William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) sowie den Indogermanisten Adalbert Kuhn (1812-1881) . (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungsberichte der phil.-hist. Kl., 868. Band, Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, Nr. 89.) 445 pp. Vienna : Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , 2015. ISBN 978 3 7001 7799 9 .

Reviews: South Asia

Franz Anton Schiefner was undoubtedly one of the most outstanding scholars of the nineteenth century. Born in 1817 in Reval, the son of an immigrant from Bohemia, he studied jurisprudence in St Petersburg and classical languages and Sanskrit in Berlin. Back in St Petersburg, in 1852 he became a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and a director at its library; he was also in charge of the Ethnographical Museum and held a professorship in classical languages at the Catholic Spiritual Academy. When Schiefner died in 1879, he left many influential and pioneering contributions to several linguistic and philological disciplines - Tibetan, Indian, Finno-Ugric and Caucasian studies - and he studied myths and folklore as well. A list of his writings contains 185 items (cf. H. Walravens, "Anton Schiefner (1817-1879): Leben und Werk", Zentralasiatische Studien 2007, pp. 131-69), most of them in German.

It goes without saying that an appraisal of such a man would be incomplete if it were merely based on his publications irrespective of their historical context. It is therefore highly desirable that Schiefner's letters to his colleagues and friends be published. For the volume under...