Metadata: V. M. Zhirmunskii
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences
- Holding institution (official language):
- Санкт-Петербургский филиал архива Российской академии наук
- Postal address:
- 199034, St. Petersburg, Universitetskaia naberezhnaia, d. 1
- Phone number:
- (812) 323-08-21
- Web address:
- http://isaran.ru
- Email:
- archive@spbrc.nw.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 1001
- Title:
- V. M. Zhirmunskii
- Title (official language):
- Жирмунский В. M.
- Creator/accumulator:
- Zhirmunskii, V M
- Date(s):
- 1900/1978
- Language:
- Russian
- English
- German
- Extent:
- 1,993 archival storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
The fonds contains scholarly works by V. M. Zhirmunskii: manuscripts of his articles, reports, collections and monographs on comparative literary studies, verse studies, dialectology and linguistics, as well as lectures and collections of sources on the history and theory of the Germanic language and German dialects and the Eastern and Slavic epic; V. M. Zhirmunskii’s reviews and evaluations of other scholars’ works and activities (1909-81); documents pertaining to his biography (1900-78); correspondence (1913-71); and scholarly works by other persons (1929-70).
The fonds contains fragmentary materials on the history and theory of Yiddish, which can be divided into three thematic groups:
1) V. M. Zhirmunskii’s remarks on M. M. Gitlits’s dissertation “The Issue of the Slavic Stratum in the Yiddish Language” (1935) and M. Kh. Fridberg’s articles “Subordinate Conjunctions in Yiddish (On the Question of the Influence of Semitic and Slavic Languages on the Syntactic Structure of Yiddish)” and “The Evolution of the Middle High German Conjunctions das and als in Yiddish and the Emergence of the Conjunction vos (On the Issue of the Influence of the Slavic Languages on the Yiddish Syntactic System)” (1950s-70s).
2) V. M. Zhirmunskii’s correspondence with Soviet and foreign specialists in Hebraic and Judaic studies, including with Uriel Weinreich and in particular, regarding the collective work The Field of Yiddish, his article “Notes on the Yiddish Rise-Fall Intonation Contour,” and a report titled “Yiddish and Colonial German” (1956-65); L. Sh. Vilenkin (1929-66); I. N. Vinnikov (1942); Paul Ernst Kahle (1926-53); M. Kh. Fridberg (1961, 1971) and others.
3) Material of others, including the manuscript of an article by L. Sh. Vilenkin titled “On the Issue of the Dialects of the Yiddish Language” (1965), presented at the Fourth World Congress of Jewish Studies, with an appended review of the article by V. M. Zhirmunskii (1966).
- Archival history:
- The Academy’s archive was established by decree of Emperor Peter I in 1728 to house documents of the Conference (supreme assembly) of the Academy of Sciences. At the same time, Academy of Sciences President L L Bliumentrost appointed Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a student of the Academy gymnasium (subsequently an academician, and the first historiographer to the Russian Empire), to organise the files of the Conference of the Academy of Sciences. During the 18th-20th centuries, separate archives of other subdivisions of the Academy of Sciences existed as well: the archives of the Chancellery of the Academy of Sciences (18th c.) and the Committee of the Board of the Academy of Sciences (the chancellery’s institutional successor; documents date from 1803), and archives of departments. In 1922, all Academy archives were merged into a single Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, renamed in 1930 the Archive of the USSR Academy of Sciences (and in 1991, once again the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences). In 1936, a Moscow branch of the archive was created in connection with the Academy’s relocation to that city. In 1963, the Archive of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad was reorganised as the Leningrad Branch of the Archive of the USSR Academy of Sciences, while the Archival Directorate was transferred to Moscow. In 1991, the Leningrad branch was renamed the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPF ARAN). The archive houses over 1,600 fonds containing approximately one million storage units.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
Viktor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky (1891-1971) was a literary critic, linguist and folklorist. Upon graduating St. Petersburg University in 1912 he remained in the university’s department of Romance and Germanic philology, serving as a privat-docent from 1915-17. In 1917, he became a professor and head of the department of Romance and Germanic philology of Saratov University. In 1919, he became a professor and later a department head, at Petrograd University. In the 1920s he studied issues of poetics and the theory of verse. In 1926-31, he made several dialectological and folkloric expeditions to German settlements of Ukraine, Crimea, Transcaucasia and the Leningrad Region on behalf of the People’s Commissariats of Education of the RSFSR and Ukrainian SSR. He also studied folklore, his research in which occupies a significant place in his scholarly legacy. In 1935-41 and 1944-50, he served as a department head in the Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From 1942-44 he was a professor at the Central Asian State University and Tashkent State Pedagogical Institute. From 1950-71, he was a senior researcher, then sector head of the Leningrad branch of the Linguistics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences; and was also a member of the bureau of the language and literature department of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1944 he was honoured as a Distinguished Worker of Science and Technology of the Uzbek SSR. He was awarded the Order of Lenin (1954), two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor (1945 and 1961) and medals. In 1956 he became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR; in 1967, of the British Academy and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences; and in 1970, of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences; he was also an honorary member of many foreign universities and scholarly societies.
His main scholarly works were: The Composition of Lyric Poems (Petrograd, 1921); Rhyme: Its History and Theory (Petrograd, 1923); Byron and Pushkin: From the History of the Romantic Poem (Leningrad, 1924); Introduction to Meter: The Theory of Verse (Leningrad, 1925); National Language and Social Dialects (Leningrad, 1936); Goethe in Russian Literature (Leningrad, 1937); A History of the German Language (Moscow, 1938); German Dialectology (Moscow, Leningrad, 1956); Epic Works of the Slavic Peoples and Issues in the Comparative Study of the Epic (Moscow, 1958); The Tale of Alpamysh and the Bogatyr Tale (Moscow, 1960), Folk Heroic Epic: Comparative-Historical Essays (Moscow, Leningrad, 1962); An Introduction to the Comparative Historical Study of the Germanic Languages (Moscow, Leningrad, 1964); The Writings of Anna Akhmatova (Leningrad, 1973); The Theory of Verse (Leningrad, 1975); General and German Linguistics (Moscow, 1976; a collection of selected works); and An Introduction to Literary Studies. A Lecture Course (Moscow, 2004, 2nd ed.).
- Access points: persons/families:
- Fridberg, M K
- Gitlits, M M
- Kahle, Paul Ernst
- Vilenkin, L S
- Vinnikov, I N
- Weinreich, Uriel
- Zhirmunskii, Viktor Maksimovich
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds comprises four inventories arranged primarily by structure and alphabetically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary