Nikolai Fedorovich Katanov's life, library and works in Turkology

Nikolai Fedorovich Katanov (1862-1922) was a scholar who wrote a great number of influential works in Oriental Studies and Turkology. He produced various works covering Turkic peoples in Central Asia and Siberia in different fields such as linguistics, ethnography, folklore, history, archaeology, numismatics, history of religion and museology. Learning numerous European and Asian languages, N. F. Katanov began doing scientific studies even when he was a student at Krasnoyarsk Classical Gymnasium. Katanov's personality and scholarly life were heavily influenced by N. I. Ilminsky and V. V. Radlov. Once graduating from St. Petersburg University's Faculty of Oriental Languages, Department of Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Tatar Languages, in 1888, Katanov made his first scientific travels to Siberia, Northern Mongolia, Dzungaria and East Turkistan to examine the Turkic peoples. He taught at Kazan Imperial University from 1894 to 1922. He was an active member of several scientific societies in Europe and Russia, as well as being closely involved in the educational and social issues faced by non-Russian peoples residing in Siberia. He became a pioneer and founder of Siberian Turkology. In the second half of the nineteenth century, he played a significant role in helping Kazan become one of Russia's largest research centers for Oriental Studies. Through visual and written material collected during Katanov's scientific visits, many national museums and libraries throughout Russia and Siberia flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century. His studies on Turkic peoples and methods of research still remain valid in today's scholarly world. Today, Katanov's library forms a considerable part of IU's Research Institute of Turkology archives. The centuries-long preservation of this library, which served as a source for this study, by IU's RIT is an achievement of an important task that deserves appreciation on behalf of Turkey and the Turkic world.