Basil Nikitin

Basil Nikitin (* 1885 in Sostonovit, Russian Empire, † June 7, 1960 in France) was a Russian orientalist and Kurdish expert.

Basil Nikitin comes from a family of Orientalists. Therefore, he had early great interest in the Orient. His first trips took place in the Black Sea and the Caucasus. After finishing high school in 1904, he went to Moscow to study there at the Lazarev Institute for Arabic, Persian and Turkish. 1908 Basil Nikitin tried for a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia in St. Petersburg. As an interpreter, he was sent for the first time to the embassy in Afghanistan. After a year he returned to Moscow and married the Frenchwoman Laure H..

In 1911 he was transferred to the Russian consulate to Rasht in Gilan. After 1915 Basil Nikitin consul in Persian Azerbaijan in Urmia. He remained there from May 1915 to April 1918. During this time, where the event was the First World War and the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Basil Nikitin witnessed the upheavals in the region was. Basil Nikitin also learned Kurdish during this time. After the October Revolution and the fall of the Zarens, Basil Nikitin did not return to Russia, but immigrated to France. From there on, he withdrew from politics and wrote several works. Many of them deal with the Kurds but also other peoples of the Middle East.

Basil Nikitin knowledgeable about the Kurdish problem and the newly awakened nationalism. He divided the Kurdish nationalism in three phases:

Works (selection)

• Quelques observations sur les Kurdes in Mercure de France
• Les Valis d' Ardalan in the journal Revue de monde musulman
• Les Kurdes et le Christianisme in the journal Revue de l' historie des religions, Paris 1922
• La vie domestique Kurd in the journal Revue d' et des traditions populaires ethnography, Paris 1922
• The tale of Suto and Toto in the journal Bulletin of School of Oriental and Africa Studies, London 1923
• Kurdish Stories from my collection in the journal Bulletin of School of Oriental and Africa Studies, London 1926

• Orientalist
• Russian
• Born 1885
• Died in 1960
• Man