ON THE HISTORY OF STUDYING EAST TURKESTAN. M. M. BEREZOVSKY'S LETTER TO D. A. KLEMENTZ FROM THE ARAN SPF FUNDS* Introductory article and commsnt by M. D. BUKHARIN The collections of the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as the archival collections of other Russian scientific institutions, contain many documents that shed light on the history of the study of Eastern (Chinese)languages Turkestan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Field diaries, maps, plans, manuscripts, correspondence, and various official documents of a number of important representatives of Russian Oriental studies remain unpublished. Mikhail Mikhailovich Berezovsky (1848-1912), a prominent zoologist and art critic, is among those whose works are least known to the reader and need to be brought into scientific circulation as soon as possible. Indeed, the unpublished scientific heritage of Berezovsky has only recently been introduced into circulation [Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya, 2012, p. 176-182]. However, his collection from the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences is still waiting for a thorough study: Berezovsky's articles and diaries contain the most important information on the archaeological and art history study of the Kutch Oasis area in 1905 and 1907. Berezovsky himself treated writing articles and reports as hard labor, so it is all the more interesting to find a document of high scientific value written in the form of a letter to a fellow archaeologist. We are talking about a letter from M. M. Berezovsky to Dmitry Alexandrovich Klementz (1847-1914), a researcher of Siberia and Central Asia, organizer of one of the first expeditions to Turfan in 1899, which is kept in the S. F. Oldenburg Fund of the SPF ARAN (F. 208, on. 3, ed. ch. 718, L. 1 bob.). In it, Berezovsky reconstructs the technique of making the decor of Buddhist cave temples: clay, plaster, wooden and stone figures, as w ... Читать далее