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FOREWORD
This special issue of the Bulletin appears in honour of a double anniversary the seventy-fifth birthday of Professor Minorsky and the twentieth anniversary of his joining the School of Oriental Studies (as it then was).
It is an ; appropriate moment in his long and illustrious career for i his colleagues and friends to salute the rare qualities, both personal and academic, w-hich.have won for him the honour and. distinction which he so justly enjoys ; and tit is in (that spirit that those whoihave been able to contribute to this volume offer him the studies which it contains. They are intended as a slight recognition of the debt which the authors, and Orientalists generally, owe to Professor Minorsky's profound and wide-ranging scholarship.
Vladimir Minorsky was born on 5th February, 1877, in Korcheva, a small town on the Volga, now lying submerged at the bottom of the Moscow sea. He was educated in Moscow. As a gold medallist of the Fourth Grammar-School he entered the University of Moscow where he read Law from 1896 to 1900. On his graduation he studied Oriental Languages at the Lazarev Institute for three years.
In 1903 he entered the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, serving from 1904 to 1908 in Persia and from 1908 to 1912 in St. Petersburg and Turkestan; and in 1911, jointly with a British representative, he carried out a mission in North-Western Persia. In 1912 he was appointed to the Russian Embassy in Constantinople, and in the following year acted as Imperial Russian Commissioner on the international commission for the delimitation of the Turko-Persian frontier. He was next appointed to the Russian Legation in Tehran, from where, in 1919, he went to France, remaining for some years at the Russian Embassy in Paris. In 1923 he began to lecture on Persian literature at the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, and later taught Turkish and Islamic history in the same institution. From August, 1930, to January, 1931, he acted as Oriental Secretary to the Exhibition of Persian Art at Burlington House, London. His association with London University began in 1932 when he was appointed lecturer in Persian at the School of Oriental Studies ; in 1933 he became Reader in Persian Literature and History, University of London, and, in 1937, Professor of Persian in succession to Sir E. D. Ross. In 1944 he retired, receiving the title of Professor Emeritus and being appointed Honorary Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies. In 1948-9 he acted as visiting professor at the Fu'ad University (Cairo).
Other academic titles Professor Minorsky has received include that of Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (1943), Honorary Member of the Societe Asiatique of Paris (1946), and Doctor honoris causa of the University of Brussels (1948). At the invitation of the Persian Government he took part in the celebrations of the Firdausi millenary in Tehran and Tus. He attended the Interallied Congress of Orientalists in London (1923), the International Congress of Linguists in Geneva (1931), the International Congress of Orientalists in Leiden (1931), in Rome (1935), in Brussels (1938), in Paris (1948), and in
Istanbul (1951).
All the articles in this issue were specially invited. The Editorial Board, although their duties with this number were restricted to the issuing of invitations and the arrangement of the material received, are happy to associate themselves with this tribute to one who has given so much to the Bulletin, and join with the contributors in wishing him many more years of fruitful scholarship.
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