“She did what no orientalist with all his learning would have done, what all orientalists together would not have done, with all their knowledge of oriental languages and their studies of the literature of the East. None of them could synthesize such an important work from a material with such a variety of colors. None of them was able to create space out of that chaos - but a Russian woman with a low level of education did it. Without being a scientist and without claiming this title, she somewhere received knowledge that allowed her to do something that no one else would have done: neither a scientist nor an amateur.”