Minorsky was born on 5 February 1877 in
Korcheva,
Tver Governorate, northwest of
Moscow on the upper
Volga River, a town now submerged beneath the
Ivankovo Reservoir. His father was Feodor M. Minorsky and his mother was Olga Minorsky (). He was a gold medallist of the Fourth Grammar School in Moscow. In 1896 he entered
Moscow University to study law, graduating in 1900, then entered the
Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, where he spent 3 years preparing for a diplomatic career. He made his first trip to
Qajar Persia in 1902, where he collected material on the
Ahl-i Ḥaqq religion. In 1903 he entered the
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, serving as a diplomat in Persia, first in the
Tabriz Consulate-General and then the Legation of
Tehran (1904–1908), and in
Saint Petersburg (1908–1912). In 1911, jointly the Four-Power (British, Russian, Turkish, and Persian) Commission, he carried out a mission in
northwestern Persia to delimit the
Turco–Persian border, and also published a monograph on the
Ahl-i Ḥaqq religion, for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Ethnography Section of the Imperial Society of Natural Sciences in Moscow. One of the most important
Kurdish manuscripts he obtained during this period was
The Forqan ol-Akhbar, by
Hajj Nematollah, which he later wrote about in "Etudes sur les Ahl-I Haqq, I.", Revue de L'Histoire des Religions, tome XCVII, No. 1, Janvier 1928, pp. 90–105. His surveys in Persia also provided invaluable material for his 1915 work,
Materialï dlya izucheniya vostoka ("Materials for the Study of the East"), published by the Imperial Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Saint Petersburg. From 1915 to 1917 he served as ''
chargé d'affaires'' in the Russian Legation at
Tehran, Persia. As the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 made problematic his return to Russia, in 1919 he moved to
Paris,
France where he worked at the
Russian Embassy. There, his expertise in
Middle Eastern and
Caucasian affairs was useful during the
Versailles and
Trianon peace settlements. In 1923 he began to lecture on Persian literature at the
École nationale des langues orientales vivantes, where he subsequently taught
Turkology and
Islamic studies. In 1930 he was named Oriental Secretary to the 1931 International Exhibition of Persian Art at
Burlington House,
London, and in 1932 was made lecturer in Persian at the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS),
University of London. In 1933 he became Reader in Persian Literature and History,
University of London; Professor of Persian in 1937; and in 1944 retired. In 1934, Minorsky was one of the distinguished participants in the
Ferdowsi Millenary Celebration in
Tehran,
Imperial State of Persia. During
World War II, SOAS had evacuated to
University of Cambridge, and there the Minorskys retired apart from a year (1948–49) at
Fuad University in
Cairo,
Kingdom of Egypt. In 1960, Minorsky was invited by the
Soviet Academy of Sciences to attend the meeting of the Twenty-Third International Congress of Orientalists in
Moscow, but he never returned in
Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. After his death, his ashes were interred in the
Novodevichy Cemetery, which was reserved exclusively for outstanding artists, literary men, composers, scholars, etc.; the bulk of his personal library was given to
Leningrad. Minorsky received numerous honors during his lifetime, including being made a
Corresponding Fellow of the
British Academy, 1943, Honorary Member of the
Société Asiatique of Paris, 1946, and
Doctor honoris causa of the
University of Brussels, 1948. ==Selected works==