Our Notes & References

First French translation of this medieval Persian poem on Alexander the Great’s campaign against Russia – a gem of 19th-c. Russian orientalism, dedicated to the great German-Russian scholar Adelung.

François Bernard Charmoy (1793-1869) was a French professor of Turkish and Persian in the Asiatic Department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he taught future government officials for service in Asia. He saw in the study of oriental languages—first developed in the early 1800s at the University of Kazan—a fundamental instrument for the understanding of Russia’s shared historical heritage with Asia.

This Éxpedition d’Alexandre was his first major work: a translation from Persian into French of sections narrating Alexander’s alleged wars against the seven Russian tribes, from the epic Iskander-nameh by the 12th-c. poet Nizami. This edition was published as two volumes in one. The first contains Charmoy’s own biography of Nizami, a study of the poem and an apparatus of hitherto unpublished variants from manuscripts of the Iskander-nameh recently subtracted from Iranian libraries during the Russo-Persian War. The second features the Persian text and a French translation, much revised by Charmoy, of the original made by his former student, Louis Spitznagel, in 1827.

With provenance: with the printed booklabel of Nikolay Nikolaevich Turoverov (Touroveroff, 1899-1972), a Cossack officer, man of culture and bibliophile. He fought on the side of the White Guards in General Wrangel’s Don Ataman Regiment during the Civil War. After his evacuation with Wrangel’s army from Crimea, he eventually settled in Paris, where he put great efforts into preserving and promoting the Cossack traditions and culture: he founded the Museum of the Leibgarde of the Ataman Regiment in Paris, published the Cossack almanack and the magazine Rodimy Krai and organised exhibitions on the military history of Russia among other projects.

He was also a talented poet, writing about the wars he witnessed and his nostalgia of the native land. Banned in the Soviet Union, his poems became widely known in Russia only in the end of the 20th century. His library and his archive were important and eclectic; they have recently been sold in parts.