Alfred Arends

Alfred Karlovich Arends was born on 4 October 1893 in Saint Petersburg. He studied at Karl May’s school from 1902 to 1905 and at the German Catherine School from 1905 to 1911. He took part in the First World War and served in the Red Army until 1923.

From 1923 to 1926 he studied at the Leningrad Institute of Living Oriental Languages, and as a student already taught Persian at a military technical school. He then did postgraduate work and taught at the institute until 1930. He began with the scientific and technical terminology of Persian, moved to Persian lexicography, and later to the history of Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan. From 1930 to 1936 he headed the institute’s Persian department and, with colleagues, helped prepare a Persian–Russian terminological dictionary.

From 1936 he was a researcher in the Iranian Cabinet of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1938 he was granted the degree of candidate of philological sciences without defending a dissertation. In March 1942, like the other Petersburg Germans still in the city, he was expelled from Leningrad and lived as a “special settler” in Nizhny Tagil until 1947.

From 1947 he lived in Tashkent, where he headed the department of Iranian philology at the Central Asian State University. From 1952 until his retirement in 1974 he led the sector for the study and publication of manuscripts at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR.

Arends translated and published written sources on the history of Central Asia and neighbouring lands. He translated Bayhaqi’s “History of Mas‘ud” into Russian and in 1963 defended his doctoral dissertation on the basis of that published work. He also wrote on the history of Eastern science, above all the legacy of Ibn Sina and al-Biruni.

In 1970 he was named Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR. Alfred Arends died in Tashkent on 20 June 1977.