| Summary/Abstract |
This article is an endeavour to give a portrait of the outstanding Russian emigrant scholar Sergei Shirokogoroff (1887–1939) as an anthropologist on the basis of his letters to the well-known Soviet sinologist V. M. Alekseev (1881–1951). The letters relate to the period 1926–1932 and were written in the Chinese towns of Amoy (now Xiamen), Canton (Guangzhou), Yunnanfu (now Kunming), and Peking. Today, they are kept in the V. M. Alekseev archive in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The letters touch on themes that the scholars had considered and worked on: general, special, and applied questions of linguistics (the Ural–Altaic language family; Chinese phonetics and hieroglyphics, and the languages of the people of China; and Latinisation of the Chinese script); the anthropology of science, mainly ethnology and sinology; Tungus-Manchurian ethnography; and general theoretical speculation including thoughts on ethnos. This unique source permits one to get acquainted with scientific views that were not reflected in Shirokogoroff’s works and also to understand his personality more deeply.
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