From Jan Luňák to Ivan Ivanovich Lun’jak and Back: An Austro-Hungarian Classicist and His Iter Slavicum

Abstract

The present paper is the first attempt at a bio-bibliography of Jan Luňák (1847–1935), the peripatetic classicist who roamed the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires before founding the classical seminar at the University of Ljubljana, in 1919, in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians. Luňák studied in Prague and Leipzig and then moved to St Petersburg to earn his master’s in classical philology from Dorpat (now Tartu) and his doctorate in Greek literature from Kazan. In 1890 he became extraordinarius in Moscow, and in 1892 ordinarius in Odessa, from where he retired in 1907. Known primarily for his Quaestiones Sapphicae, he was forced to launch a second career in 1919, after World War I and then the October Revolution permanently separated him from his family and deprived him of his pension. He served as contractual professor of classical philology in Ljubljana until 1930 when he finally returned to Prague. Based on both published and archival material, the paper provides a historical context for his academic career (which had its roots in the Russian Philological Seminary in Leipzig, where Luňák was recommended by Friedrich Ritschl). It thus attempts to understand the somewhat disparate aspects of his complex scholarly itinerary. Apart from providing his comprehensive bibliography, the study hopes to serve as a stimulus for other primary sources to surface in the future.