Aleksander Chodźko

Aleksander Chodźko (1804-1891) was a Polish poet, Slavist and Iranologist who worked across the Russian Empire, Persia and France. He matters because he connected Slavic literature, Persian culture and the European scholarly world of the nineteenth century.

He was born in Krzywicze, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus. He studied at the Imperial University of Vilnius and belonged to the Filaret Association, a circle of young Polish and Belarusian intellectuals, as well as to the Institute of Oriental Studies attached to the Russian Foreign Ministry in Saint Petersburg.

From 1830 to 1844 he served as a Russian diplomat in Persia. There he gathered popular poetry and dramatic texts, which he later translated and annotated with philological and historical notes. His collection of Persian popular poetry, published in London in 1842, brought him attention among European orientalists.

From 1852 to 1855 he worked for the French Foreign Ministry in Paris. After Adam Mickiewicz, he held the chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the Collège de France from 1857 until 1883, promoting comparative study of Slavic languages and traditions.

As a poet, his early work followed the Polish Romantic tradition, with ballads and poems circulating in Saint Petersburg and Poznań. His more lasting contribution, however, lies in scholarship: dictionaries, collections of Slavic folk tales, and studies of Persian theatre and religious thought. His manuscripts of Islamic drama, held at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, remain a reference for researchers.

His legacy is felt above all in European Iranian and Slavic studies, where his fieldwork and translations provided a foundation for later generations of scholars.