Era V. Kuznetsova: A Life in Scholarship and Scholarship as Life

Abstract

The authors consider the life and scholarly activity of Era Vasilyevna Kuznetsova (1927–1988), a doctor of philology, professor, and the first head of the Department of the Modern Russian Language at Ural State University. The article describes her rich inner world of emotions and scholarly thinking, focusing on the peculiarities of her academic style and the manner and direction of her work. Her biography is considered within the historical and social context and the circumstances of her private life, scholarly research, and achievements. Being an outstanding linguist, Kuznetsova was a remarkable and open-minded person with a wonderful capacity for communication. She sincerely believed in social justice and was convinced that it was possible to change the world ethically and socially in accordance with the laws of social harmony. She was a talented scholar: one could not doubt her linguistic gift. Her manner of thinking was logical; she easily became fascinated with new ideas and knew how to introduce them to others. She was a prominent scholar and the leader of a research group which laid the foundations for lexicological and lexicographic studies at Ural State University. Kuznetsova released her main works during the 1970s and 1980s, when structural semantic linguistics was being formed amidst heated discussions and arguments. In academia, she is known as the most influential specialist in lexical semantics, the systemic organisation of vocabulary, and the semantics and grammar of the Russian verb, the author and editor of a number of monographs and a textbook, and the organiser and head of the Russian Verb research group, which gave rise to the Ural Semantic School in the late 1990s.