1 Published as “Introduction” to I.Y. Kratchkovsky, Among Arabic Manuscripts: Memories of Libraries and Men (Leiden: Brill Classics in Islam, 2016), 1-24. Krachkovskii and Soviet Arabic Studies, or: What is not in Among Arabic Manuscripts Michael Kemper (Amsterdam) Ignatii Iul'ianovich Krachkovskii (1883-1951) was an iconic scholar, and Among Arabic Manuscripts gives us a good indication of what made him so outstanding. This autobiographic text is the success story of strong will and endurance, of total dedication to Arabic literature and language. It tells of Krachkovskii's enormous achievements in the field, in a very personal manner and in an easily accessible form. Though not in chronological order, the book provides glimpses at the major phases of Krachkovskii's life, including his youth in Vilnius, his studies in St. Petersburg, his field work in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt (June 1908 - July 1910), and another trip to Holland (via Leipzig and Halle, June/July 1914). From reading the present work we also get a clear idea of what it was like to work in the Public Library in Leningrad, in the collections of the Asiatic Museum (since 1925: Institute of Oriental Studies), and to teach at Leningrad University. And Krachkovskii also depicts some of the enormous hardships he had to endure during the two World Wars. 1 But above all Among Arabic Manuscripts is organized around individual Arabic texts and their authors. In each chapter, Krachkovskii explains how he came into contact with a given text, how he fell under its spell, how he disclosed the manuscripts' fate and significance; and equally important, how this study brought him into contact with other Arabists in Russia and Europe, but also with litterateurs and scholars in the Middle East. Krachkovskii's goal was, as he stated in the preface, "to make a little propaganda" for Arabic studies; accordingly, the style of this book is very emotional, even sentimental and romantic – at times the manuscripts speak to him, invite him to not slacken in their investigation; or they approach him as "the prey comes to the hunter". This book therefore differs markedly from the style he employed in his academic writings. One of Krachkovskii's favorite mottos was that "books have their life stories", and the present work is no exclusion to this wisdom. He finished its first draft in August 1943 in Moscow, to which he had been evacuated from Leningrad, where he went through the horrors of the German siege. Most co-workers of the Institute of Oriental Studies had been evacuated to Tashkent, but Krachkovskii insisted on staying in Leningrad and took on the directorship of what was left of the city's academic infrastructure. He oversaw the transfer of the Oriental manuscript collections to shelters and showed extreme determination to keep up a minimum of scientific life in the Academy of Sciences. While the Germans were shelling the city and 1 For Krachkovskii's biography see Anna A. Dolinina, Nevol'nik dolga (St. Petersburg: Sankt Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 1994); for a concise summary in German see the obituary by Heinz Helmut Giesecke, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 105.1 (1955), 6-17.