Arabist who translated the Quran into Russian: Who is Ignaty Krachkovsky?
Ignaty Krachkovsky did not approach the translation of this book as if Muslims should learn the book. He translated the book as a cultural and literary monument of his time.
His name: Ignaty Krachkovsky. He was born on March 16, 1883, in the Vilensk province within the borders of Tsarist Russia (today Vilnius, the capital of the Republic of Lithuania).
His father, Yulian Fomich Krachkovsky, was the director of the Vilen Teachers' Institute. After graduating from the First Gymnasium of Vilen with a gold medal in 1901, he enrolled in the Arab-Persian-Turkish-Tatar department of the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the University of Saint-Petersburg.
Ignaty Yulianovich Krachkovsky (16 March 1883, Vilnius — 24 January 1951, Leningrad) was a Russian and Soviet Arabist, academician of the Russian Academy of Science (since 1921; since 1925 Academy of Science of the USSR). Krachkovsky was one of the founders of the Soviet school of Arab studies.
After graduating from the faculty in 1905, he turned to the field of science. He was in the Middle East between 1908 and 1910 in order to learn the dialects of Arabic better.
Since 1910, he worked as a lecturer on Arabic poetry, Christian Arabic written monuments, and contemporary Arabic poetry at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Saint-Petersburg (Leningrad after the socialist revolution).
He earned the title of professor in 1918. He became one of the founders of Soviet Arabism while being elected as a member of the Orthodox Palestine Society of the Empire of Tsarist Russia. Ignaty Krachkovsky, who received the title of Ord Prof Dr in 1925, is a member of the Damascus Academy of Sciences, the Asiatic Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland, the German Orientalist Society, Finland. He was elected as a member of the Polish, and Iranian Academies of Sciences, etc.
An exhibition was opened at the Russian National Library on March 8, 2023, on the occasion of the 140th birth anniversary of Ignaty Krachkovsky, who died in Leningrad on January 27, 1951. Ignaty Krachkovsky, who started translating the Quran into Russian from its Arabic original in 1920, did not publish this work even though he completed it in 1928. Krachkovsky, who worked on the translation many times in the following periods, did not see the publication of the book during his lifetime. As a result of his students' meticulous work on the translation, the translation of the Quran into Russian was finally published in 1963.
A LITERARY TRANSLATION WITH ITS PURPOSE FULLY SUITABLE FOR THE LANGUAGE OF THE QURAN
In their preface to the book, Russian Orientalists Belyayev and Gryaznevich drew attention to the different features of the translation and Ignaty Krachkovsky's work with the following words:
“The peculiarity of Ignaty Krachkovsky's research on the Quran was that he approached it (the Holy Book) as a literary monument, the first monument of Arabic literature written in prose. In this sense, his refraining from viewing the Qur'an as a predominantly religious-philosophical and law-making monument enabled his research to follow a new path, and this caused him to make a principled change in his translation methodology. Ignaty Krachkovsky, who excluded the text of the Qur'an from traditional interpretations and approached it (the Holy Book) as a monument of its time and environment, using all the latest achievements of Islamic science, aimed to give the text of the Qur'an a fully appropriate literary translation. However, a number of circumstances prevented Ignaty Krachkovsky from fully realizing the work he envisioned. Not only was the final proofreading work incomplete, but the enormous preparatory materials could not be fully used. "In addition to the fact that the text of the translation has not been processed in literary terms, it remains a literal translation in some places."
EVALUATION OF THE QURAN IN RUSSIAN
Dolinina, one of the students of Ord Prof. Dr. Ignaty Krachkovsky, one of the leading figures of Tsarist Russia and Soviet Oriental studies, made the following evaluation regarding the Quran translated into Russian by his teacher:
“Ignaty Krachkovsky did not approach the translation of this book as if Muslims should learn the book. He translated the book as a cultural and literary monument of his time. In other words, he tried not to introduce new meanings and new concepts that had emerged during the interpretation of the Quran over the centuries. He tried to translate the words of the Prophet Muhammad, which were sometimes incomprehensible, as they were. In other words, in the way his contemporaries could understand those words..."