Description:
This article is dedicated to the well-known literary critic and linguist, academician V.M. Zhirmunsky’s (evacuated to Tashkent during the Great Patriotic War) studies of Turkic languages. These scientific works resulted in a number of fundamental publications that opened a new stage in Turkic studies in general. This article highlights V.M. Zhirmunsky’s life in Tashkent and provides a detailed overview and a partial analysis of his researches, dedicated to the study of peoples’ of Central Asia living epic traditions, as well as the research of linguistics and stylistics of Turkic languages. The review includes published scholarly work and materials from a personal Zhirmunsky’s archive, located in the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.