Some Unknown Episodes in the History of Buddhist and Indian Studies in Anton Schiefner’s Correspondence with Theodor Benfey and Ivan Minaev

Abstract This review article is based on the published corpus of letters by Franz Anton Schiefner (1817–1879) addressed to various Russian and foreign scholars, including Theodor Benfey (1809–1881) and Ivan Pavlovich Minaev (1840–1890). The corpus, edited by Hartmut Walravens and Agnes Stache-Weiske and completed in 2022, marks the conclusion of their work on Schiefner’s surviving epistolary legacy (unfortunately, his personal archive has not survived, and only a few of the letters addressed to him are now available). Anton Schiefner served for many years at the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was one of the most distinguished European philologists of the 19th century, notable for the breadth of his interests and his contributions to various branches of philology, although he is best known as a Tibetologist and Sanskrit scholar. His letters to Theodor Benfey and Ivan Minaev, with whom he maintained extensive, long-standing correspondence, contain valuable information about the lives and scholarly work of these two figures, who played a major role in the development of Buddhist and Indological studies as academic disciplines, and they also reveal Schiefner’s friendly engagement with their academic careers.