Sylvain Levi et I'entree du Sanskrit au College de France.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane

Sylvain Levi et I'entree du Sanskrit au College de France. By ROLAND LARDINOIS. Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Sequens, n[degrees]3. Paris: ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2018. Pp. 147.

Roland Lardinois, author, editor, and coeditor of several volumes devoted to, or making much space for, Sylvain Levi, returns with a smaller volume on Levi's account of the creation in November 1814 of the first chair of Sanskrit in Europe, its announcement to the faculty of the College de France in December 1814, and its inauguration in January 1815. Levi's text is well known from its first publication in the Revue bleue on the occasion of the fourth centenary in 1931 of the College de France (founded 1530), its insertion in the commemorative volume for that anniversary, and its inclusion among Levi's works in the Memorial Sylvain Levi in 1937. It is minimally edited, with notes, from those publications, in Lardinois's book (pp. 19-46). A second section of the book provides a new printing, also lightly edited, of the inaugural lecture that Antoine Leonard (de) Chezy gave at the College de France on acceding to its first chair of Sanskrit in 1815 (pp. 47-62). These two historical documents, along with additional sources from public archives and from Levi's private correspondence, provide the material for the third and core part of Lardinois's book, which gives the entire book its title and analyzes the conditions under which Levi delivered a discourse that was unusual for the circumstance (pp. 63-119).

For the grand jubilee of the venerable institution, chair holders were asked to speak of the history of their respective disciplines. Such assignments usually result in encomiums of the stellar scholarship of heralded predecessors or in proud accounts of successfully overcome obstacles on the path to the growing significance of disciplines. Levi, the fourth holder of the chair of Sanskrit, focused instead on the social and political conditions that led to the creation of a novel chair of Sanskrit in the then not quite three-centuries-old College de France. He also traced the sinuous road of young Chezy through several oriental languages to Persian, and finally and secretly to Sanskrit. At this point Lardinois expresses repeated reservations about the trustworthiness of Chezy's account of himself. That the reclusive Chezy stayed aloof from the group of German scholars, most famously Friedrich Schlegel, who learned Sanskrit from Alexander Hamilton during...