Issue III. Comp. by V. V. NAUMKIN (ed.), N. G. ROMANOVA, and I. M. SMILYANSKAYA. Moscow: Vostochnaya litra Publ., 2008, 719 p. No science pays as much attention to its own past as Oriental studies. Both in our country and abroad, works devoted to the life and work of classics of science, publications containing correspondence and other documents of scientists, memoirs and photographs regularly appear. Such publications often arouse quite a wide interest of readers. For example, when Wilhelm Pay published the photo album " One Hundred Portraits of German Indologists "(Wiesbaden, 1982), the book sold out so quickly that a second, substantially expanded edition was needed. In 1997, the first collection of "Unknown Pages of Russian Oriental Studies" was published, in 2004 - the second. In the third issue, as in the previous ones, the central place is occupied by the correspondence of two outstanding Orientalists-the Sinologist V. M. Alekseev and the Arabist I. Yu. Krachkovsky (the first issue contained the correspondence of I. Yu. Krachkovsky and A. E. Krymsky, the second-V. R. Rosen and S. F. Oldenburg). The letters are prepared for publication and provided with detailed comments by A. A. Dolinina. This section is joined by the publication of unknown archival documents by V. M. Alekseev (the texts were prepared for publication by A. N. Khokhlov, who also wrote the article "Academician-Sinologist V. M. Alekseev under threat of ostracism in 1938"). For the history of Russian Oriental studies, the published materials are of considerable interest - in correspondence, the thoughts of researchers are often expressed more clearly than in printed works. But their meaning is much broader - it's not just about historiography: the documents draw vivid portraits of famous scientists, demonstrating vivid personality traits. The correspondence of the 1920s and 1930s provides an opportunity to present the environment in which Orientalists had to work and live. These invaluable testim ... Read more