Mikhankova, V. Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr: An Essay on His Life and Scholarly Activity (Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr. Ocherk ego zhizni i nauchnoi deiatel'nosti). 1948. In Russian.

Миханкова, Валентина Александровна. Николай Яковлевич Марр : очерк его жизни и научной деятельности / В. А. Миханкова.
Москва ; Ленинград : Издательство Академии наук СССР, 1948. 450, [1] с. : 8 л. ил. ; 22 см.
Серия: Академия наук Союза ССР. Научно-популярная серия. Второе, существенно расширенное издание. Переплёт, титул и заставки работы художника А. С. Данилова. Тираж 5000 экз.
Состояние очень хорошее: переплёт чистый, тиснение чёткое; блок незначительно тонирован, страницы полные; 8 иллюстрационных вставок в наличии.
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Mikhankova, Valentina Alexandrovna. Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr: An Essay on His Life and Scholarly Activity / V. A. Mikhankova.
Moscow ; Leningrad : Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1948. 450, [1] pp. : 8 plates ; 22 cm.
Series: Academy of Sciences of the USSR: Popular Science Series. Second, substantially expanded edition (first edition: Moscow-Leningrad: OGIZ-Sotsekgiz, 1935, 360 pp.; third edition: Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1949, 571 pp.). Binding, title page, and ornamental headpieces designed by A. S. Danilov. Print run of 5,000 copies.
Condition very good: binding clean with crisp gilt lettering; text block lightly and uniformly toned; pages complete; all 8 illustration plates present.

Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (1864-1934) was the most powerful and ultimately the most controversial figure in Soviet linguistics: a brilliant Caucasian archaeologist and philologist who excavated the medieval Armenian capital of Ani and pioneered Armenian-Georgian studies, and who in the 1920s-1930s developed the "Japhetic theory" of language, which proposed a common ancestor for the Caucasian and ancient Mediterranean languages and reimagined language as a "superstructural" category reflecting stages of social development. By the late 1920s, "Marrism" had become effectively the state doctrine of Soviet linguistics, enforced with near-ideological authority. Valentina Alexandrovna Mikhankova was a long-term student and collaborator of Marr, and her biography draws on direct personal knowledge, his personal archive, and an unusually extensive collection of rare documentary photographs. The 1948 edition - the second, substantially expanded version of her original 1935 monograph - appeared at the precise historical moment of Marrism's maximum dominance in Soviet intellectual life: just two years later, in June 1950, Stalin personally intervened in a public "discussion on linguistics" with his article "Marxism and Questions of Linguistics," which attacked Marrist theory directly and discredited it overnight. This makes the 1948 second edition a remarkable document of Soviet intellectual history: a biography of a scholar at the absolute peak of his posthumous official prestige, written two years before his theories were publicly demolished.