Professor N.F. Katanov (1862-1922) is one of the outstanding national scholars, representatives of Russian scholarship, education and culture of the 19th-20th centuries. His life’s journey and legacy reflected important events and trends in domestic and world oriental studies and Turkic studies. Stages of his biography and a huge creative heritage are interesting and outstanding, instructive and tragic at the same time. He became the personification of two worlds in Russia - European and Asian. The biography and heritage of N.F. Katanov are of academic and especially scientific and educational, humanistic interest. His life and works should not be perceived only in the system of coordinates of the history of Russian and European oriental studies. It is necessary to take into account the broad socio-political and socio-cultural context of the development of Oriental studies, including Turkic studies, as well as Russian society and the state in the second half of the 19th - the first quarter of the 20th century.