POLOVTSOFF, Aleksander.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Land of Timur: Recollections of Russian Turkestan. First edition, first impression, with the scarce jacket. The author was a Russian diplomat, orientalist, and ethnographer who served as the diplomatic adviser to the Russian Governor-General of Turkestan before the First World War.Alexander Alexandrovich Polovtsov (1867-1944) read law at St Petersburg's Imperial Legal College and worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "He spent several years in Siberia and Turkestan on behalf of the government, where part of his work involved negotiating with recalcitrant Khans and local chieftains. In 1909, at the end of the "Great Game" between Russia and Britain, Polovtsov was appointed Consul General in Bombay, representing the first official Russian presence there since the tensions eased. He was well-connected, well-traveled, and well-liked, with a flair for languages and a passion for art and culture" (Burlington). In 1917, he was appointed the first director of the Pavlovsk Palace Museum, helping to protect Russia's pre-revolution heritage.In 1920, he relocated to Paris and spent the remainder of his life there. The Land of Timur is partly a political lament: "The so-called Communists from Moscow have created in Samarcand an important propaganda-school for spreading revolution in Asia, and the beautiful old mosques are used, I hear, for expounding to gaping audiences the gospel of Marx" (p. vi).

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