Sounds extremely interesting (a bit reminiscent of Potocki) but I got diverted to the Golytsin family, which I know only from "Khovanshchina".

It turns out that they were the senior heirs of the pagan Gedminid regime in Lithuania. (Christianized Gedminids of the Jagiellon branch ruled most of Central Europe around 1500.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golytsin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagiellons

It's no worse than the fact that American and Australian writers are routinely excluded from surveys of "English literature", as if it meant "the literature of England" -- although the North and West Britons are reluctantly allowed in as long as they avoid being too ethnic.

In England we have Tracey Emin who is of Turkish origin. She is a well-known 'artist'and sells to gullible buyers and for vast amounts of money installations comprising her soiled bed linen and samples of her bodily wastes.
I wonder whether the Emins are related? We should certainly be told.

Looks like the New York Public Library has a copy, and Columbia has it on microfilm...

"The first Russian novelist was Fëdor Emin (c. 1735-70), who wrote didactic and philosophical romances of adventure in a florid and prolix literary prose."

And thus a tradition was established...

(Would it not have been shorter to say simply, "the first Russian novelist, Fëdor Emin, was notable for writing like a Russian novelist"?)

Saif is being naif (or nasty). Tracy Emin is admired enough to have been made a Royal Academician http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracey_Emin

Emin, incidentally, means either "trustworthy" or "confident" in Turkish.
http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/tur.php

If I remember corectly (which means I can't be bothered to Google it), Turks only took up surnames as we in the Western European tradition understand them at the insistence of Ataturk after the fall of the Ottoman empire. Tracy Emin's father was a Turkish Cypriot, however and thus not, as Saif claims, "of Turkish origin" ...

And since Fedor Emin was a convert to Islam, it wasn't his family name anyway.

More off-topic: Musorgsky disliked Tchaikovsky and always referred to him as "Sadik Pasha", after the Polish anti-Czarist renegade Czajkowski, who fled to Turkey and converted to Islam.

The Turkey / Russia / Austria interface produced a lot of exoticism. Not a generally happy or prosperous part of the world, but it sure is an interesting one.

"American and Australian writers are routinely excluded"

Not so much any more; every edition of the Norton includes more ethnic literature. (And they've liked the Pearl-Poet and D. H. "Mouldiwarp" Lawrence from the start.)

There seems to be a whole class of writers who are sort of Irish, for example Swift. Probably the pre-XIXc practice was to count all the good ones as English, but then when the nationalist and independence movements arose, everything became confused.

I was surprised by LH's apparent surprise that someone would convert to Orthodoxy. It seems to me that growing up in the Ottoman Empire it seems very possible Emin was originally born Orthodox - whether Serb, Bulgar, Greek, etc. I suppose we may never know. He may well have converted to Islam purely out of expediency (and of course may have converted back for the same reason). Certainly plenty of room here for lots of unwarranted speculation. A Slavic/Orthodox background could certainly explain why he chose to go to Russia, which backward as it was, still was the most powerful independent Orthodox (or Slavic) state in existence at the time. I wonder if his writing style might give some clues as to what his native language actually was?

Terry: given the choice I'd always prefer to be nasty rather than naif!

I was surprised by LH's apparent surprise that someone would convert to Orthodoxy.

Oh, not in general—Orthodoxy is a fine religion, and I've found Russian Orthodox services extremely impressive—it just seems so sudden and unmotivated in the context of a brief dash through Emin's biography. If he'd wound up somehow in Russia and then converted, sure, but why on a visit to London of all places? Doubtless there would be a good explanation if one knew more, which is why I'd like to read a good biography, but at this remove in time it may be impossible to discover.

I think a lot of people get new religions in London. There are plenty to choose from within a short walk of each other, and their officials are often quite willing and competent to accept a stranger. Seems quite sensible to me.

Not quite a biography, but a quick trawl through the Bodleian produceds David Budgen's The works of F.A. Emin (1735-70) : literary and intellectual transition in eighteenth-century Russia, which might be of some interest. Unfortunately, it's Budgen's DPhil thesis, so it's quite possible that it's not easily obtainable outside Oxford.

It does indeed sound interesting! The School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies Budgen Collection page says "Unrestricted access" and "Copies, subject to the condition of the original, may be supplied for research use only," but I imagine a copy of "1 volume, typescript photocopy, 338 pp" would cost me an arm and a leg. Come on, Oxford, digitize those theses!

Hmm, I've found the e-mail address of a Budgen who may be the same guy; I think I'll write and ask him if he is.

My curiosity's been piqued enough that I've called it up from the stacks;I don't have time to pop into the Bodleian today, but I ought to be able to take a look at it tomorrow.

Budgen's thesis is by no means a complete biography, but given the dearth of other sources I'd say it's worth a look. Most of the thesis deals with literary analysis, but the first chapter tries to assemble what is known of Emin's life.

There are three contemporary sources for his life: Emin's own account, in his Petition to be accepted for employment in Russia of May, 1791, a substantially different account in Novikov's Opyt istorichiskogo slovarya o rossiiskikh pisatelyakh, and third version written by Petr Bogdanovich, the editor of some of Emin's works and (alledgedly) a friend of his. None of the three are complete or wholly convincing accounts, although elements of Emin's and Bogdanovich's stories are coherent and plausible.

Novikov and Bogdanovich place Emin as having been raised by Jesuits and spending a lot of his childhood travelling around Europe, coverting to Islam either as a lapsed Jesuit or out of convenience, before eventually winding up in London. Emin's version is a bit wild and fairly complicated. Emin says his granfather was a Pole who converted to Islam. His father, Husein, married an orthodox slave-girl in Constantinople and held a variety of government positions. Emin, born Meh(e)met Ali, was educated in Latin and Polish by his father and then sent to Venice in his teenage years to finish his education in Italian. Later on he became a slave, escaped thanks to a pirate attack on the ship carrying him, studied in a Jesuit college in Lisbon, and then came to the Russian embassy London in 1761 and asked to convert to Orthodoxy and move to Russia. At this point he took the name Fedor Aleksandrovich Emin.

Budgen's account of his life and work in Russia is a good deal clearer and more factual, although for the sake of brevity I won't go into any detail.

Thanks! I guess there's no way of knowing the details for sure, but what a life!

Sergei M. Soloviev devoted some space to Emin's "History of Russia" in his "Russian History Writers of the 18th Century." I don't have Soloviev's text before me but as far as I remember, he doesn't take Emin seriously, partly because of Emin's childish attempts at comparative linguistics and other extravagances. The spirit of Emin's derivations survived into the 21st century, apparently showing itself in Anatoly Fomenko's "Phoenicia is Venice" insight, and claims by various Ukrainian and Russian hotheads that their nation, the oldest in the world, is derived from the Etruscans. However, unlike his latest imitators, Emin was indeed a polyglot.

Soloviev makes another mention of Emin in his History, this time as a satirist and an opponent of the theater.

that their nation, the oldest in the world, is derived from the Etruscans.

What! Not from the Sumerians!?! I'm deeply disappointed.