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Zorin A. Tibetan studies in Russia: a brief historical account // École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses. Annuaire. Résumés des conférences et travaux
Tome 126. 2017—2018. Paris, 2019. P. 63—70.
Tibetology is one of the oldest branches of Oriental studies in Russia that used to
be closely connected with foreign and inner policy of the Russian State starting
from the late 17th century. The neighborhood with various Mongolian politia and
gradual spread of Russian sovereignty upon some of them caused the necessity of
studying and using Tibetan along with Mongolian, Oirat, Buryat languages and
also, from the 18th century, studying Tibetan Buddhism as the dominant religion
of these people. Huge collections of Tibetan texts and Tibetan arts were gradually
gathered in St. Petersburg and some other cities, and the initiator of this process was
Peter the Great, the first Russian emperor. However, Tibetology mostly remained in
the shadow of Mongolian studies. Official courses of Tibetan were first included in
the educational programs in the 20th century only, while there had been a lineage
of important scholars of Tibetan (mostly but not exclusively Germans who lived
in Russia) who had made a great contribution to European Tibetology. Naturally
enough, Tibetan studies in Russia were intertwined with Buddhology, and the
St. Petersburg School of Buddhology used Tibetan as a major language, along with
Sanskrit, Mongolian and, to a lesser extent, Chinese and Japanese. A great impact
was made by a series of expeditions to Central Asia from the 1870s to the middle
of the 1920s that had both academic and political goals. After the culmination
of the development of Buddhology and Tibetology in the Soviet Russia from the
late 1910s to the first half of the 1930s, both disciplines were almost totally cut
off with the political oppressions. The gradual revival started after World War 2
in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Moscow and Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryatia. The
process accelerated after the end of the Soviet era when any ideological pressure
on religious studies was removed. Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, joined the list
of major centers of Russian Tibetology in the 1990s. PDF-files
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