Otto Bohtlingk an Rudolph Roth: Briefe zum Petersburger Worterbuch 1852-1885.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book review

Otto Bohtlingk an Rudolph Roth: Briefe zum Petersburger Worterbuch 1852-1885. Edited by HEIDRUN BRUCKNER and GABRIELE ZELLER. Veroffentlichungen der Helmuth von Glasenapp-Stiftung, vol. 45. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2007. Pp. xxi + 870.

This hefty volume is especially hard to review. It is so filled with data and so fascinating that the reviewer wonders how to do justice to it. It prints 484 letters addressed by Otto Bohtlingk to his main collaborator in the Sanskrit-Worterbuch, Richard Roth, from January 1852 to April 1885. The letters were discovered in 1983 by Gabriele Zeller in the Nachlass that Roth's descendants deposited in the library of the University of Tubingen in 1944. The letters were transcribed by Agnes Stache-Weiske; judging from the four specimen pages reproduced in this volume (pp. xv-xviii), this must not have been an easy task.

Readers of this book will be grateful to learn that the search for Roth's side of the correspondence, which for a long time was unsuccessful, may finally bear fruit (p. x). Indeed, in the absence of that part, as well as that of letters to and from Weber and other contributors, not only the intense discussions about specific entries in the dictionary, but also the numerous allusions to facts and individuals in Bohtlingk's epistles cannot be fully appreciated. Once all these source materials are available, however, the definitive history of the epic enterprise of the PW--and allied subjects--can be written: it promises to be a revealing new chapter in the history of Indology.

It is clear, from the first letter, dated 13 January 1852, that the initiative to undertake the dictionary lay with Bohtlingk (born 1815; member of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg), and that the final decisions on what to include, the printing arrangements, not to forget the honoraria of the collaborators, were his. It may not be so obvious that the participation of Roth (born 1823; since 1848 extraordinarius and from 1856 ordinarius at Tubingen), whose name was to figure next to Bohtlingk's on the title page, was secured only indirectly, via "our common friend" Albrecht Weber (born 1825; at this time still four years away from an extraordinariat in Berlin) (p. 3). Initially, Roth's name was to be only the third to appear on the title page. However, Bohtlingk's earlier collaborator, Theodor Aufrecht (born 1821; Privatdozent in Berlin), was dropped when he went to Oxford in 1852 and made the unpardonable faux pas of collaborating on Max Muller's Rgveda (pp. 16, 18, 21, 24; cf. the curt note on Aufrecht, PW 1: vi). The two remaining editors of the dictionary had never met; they were to come face to face only in 1866--they exchanged photographs in 1854--but the rapid development of their relationship is astonishing, from Bohtlingk initially addressing Roth as "Hochverehrter Herr Professor," but soon thereafter, via intermediary titles such as "Hochverehrter Herr und Freund," to the final and lasting "Lieber Freund" (as early as 28 November 1853).

Reading through the letters, I see three different aspects of Bohtlingk's personality emerge. Although at least two of these, and often all three, appear in all letters, I will try to illustrate each of them separately with just a few examples, out of...