Moriz Winternitz: Kleine Schriften, 2 vols.

• Author: Salomon, Richard

After studying Indology in Vienna under such great figures as Georg Buhler and Eugen Hultzsch, Moriz Winternitz (1863-1937) spent ten years (1888-98) in Oxford as a librarian and research scholar under F. Max Muller. The rest of his scholarly career, until 1934, was spent at the German University of Prague (since 1911 as professor). Winternitz is nowadays known to Indologists mainly from his still-useful Geschichte der indischen Litteratur, published in 3 volumes and 5 parts between 1905 and 1922, but the publication of his Kleine Schriften now reminds us that he was a prolific author with wide-ranging interests and expertise in diverse fields. The Kleine Schriften contains 79 articles and other publications covering more than 900 pages, and even this is a selective compilation. The major fields represented (as arranged by the editor) include Vedic Studies, Epics and Puranas, Dharmasastra and Arthasastra, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, and poetry. Among the specific subjects which are particularly well represented in this collection are Mahabharata studies, the Sanskrit drama (especially the dramas attributed to Bhasa), and the Kautilya-Arthasastra.

The editor's selections from Winternitz' voluminous writings are intended to include "all of his Indologically significant articles," plus a representative selection of his more than 200 reviews (p. v). Here one could quibble with the editor's judgments as to what articles are "Indologically significant," a notion which inevitably depends to some extent on one's own fields of interest, but perhaps we should rather be grateful that such a large, if not complete, body of material could be included.

In addition to the papers themselves, which (as in the other volumes of Glasenapp-Stiftung Kleine Schriften series) are presented in the form of photo-reprints of the original publications, the editor has provided a complete bibliography of works by and about Moriz Winternitz, and indices of names and subjects, text citations, and Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan words. A page of corrigenda corrects some (but by no means all) of the typographical errors in the original articles.

One of the most characteristic and distinctive features of Winternitz' publications is a recurrent interest in folkloric and ethnological approaches to the interpretation of Indic texts and classical culture, a dimension which is often ignored by exclusively text-oriented scholars in the traditional European mode. One gets the...