Minorsky was born on 5 February 1877[1] in Korcheva, Tver Governorate, northwest of Moscow on the upper Volga River, a town now submerged beneath the Ivankovo Reservoir.

[5] 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.

[4] 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.

[4] 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.

[4] 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.