The author of the present selection of papers obtained his doctor`s degree at Humboldt University of Berlin in 1960.

Then he was employed for some years at the Institute of General Linguistics and taught in the Iranian section of the Oriental Institute, Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Later he worked at University of Leuven (Flemish branch) in Belgium; appointed in 1975, he was, until his retirement in 1998, a professor in the Department of Eastern and Slavic Studies of that university. The selection comprises three series of articles written in the years 1968-2000. All of them deal with Iranian languages and Persian literature. Their reader will be impressed by the author`s erudition and inventiveness shown in the first and the third series of papers which elucidate, among other things, many etymological and semantic problems unsolved before. The most fascinating topic, however, presented by Professor Wojciech Skalmowski is his new and convincing theory on the origin of the mysterious literary genre of the ghazal in classical Persian literature (see the middle part of the book).