Part of the process of researching Nawa'i includes, of course, engaging with previous scholarship. It is an onerous task: major monographs and articles have appeared in Russian, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, German, French, Tajik ... and so on. Curiously, little is available in English - it's a similar situation that alluded to in an earlier post, when I was bemoaning the paucity of English-language translations of Mir 'Ali Shir.
I've recently been loaned by my advisor a volume written by the Soviet orientalist E. E. Bertel's, simply titled Navoi: opit tvorcheskoy biografii [Navoi: An experiment in creative biography] (Moscow/Leningrad: Academy of Sciences, 1948). Bertel's was one of the leading Russian orientalists of the 20th century, despite the obvious political and philosophical constraints placed upon him by the Soviet system, which often required scholars to bend their conclusions to match the prevailing ideological trends.
Bertel's has made an attempt here at a scholarly biography, but with (on the face of it) a populist slant. However, I should refrain from making judgment until I've actually, well, read it.
Bertel's also wrote a similar work on Jami, and it's the relationship between Jami and Nawa'i that is the focus of the latest phase of my research. I'm also holding onto a volume edited by the late Uzbek scholar Asom Urunbaev, entitled Pis'ma-avtografi Abdarrahmana Djami iz "Al'boma Navoi" [Signed letters of Abdurrahman Jami from the "Navoi Album"] (Tashkent: Fan, 1982).
It consists of (Russian) translations from the Persian of letters written by Jami, taken from the so-called Nava'i Album' of collected letters (Ms. of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, no. 2178). Some of these letters were quoted from in Nawa'i's composition Khamsat al-Mutahayyirin, his memoir of his friendship with Jami.
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