Rudolf Růžička In Memoriam

Abstract

Rudolf Růžička In Memoriam Uwe Junghanns Rudolf Růžička died in Berlin on February 9, 2011, at the age of 90. When the news spread that he had died, a Russian linguist wrote: "An entire era in the history of Slavic linguistics has ended." For many, Rudolf Růžička epitomized an era. His work must be set against the background of the time in which he lived. Rudolf Růžička's academic and personal accomplishments exemplify the life of a dedicated scholar. He was born on December 20, 1920, in Löbau, a town in Upper Lusatia, Saxony, Germany. He went to school there and in 1940 began studying Russian and English at the Institute for Interpreters, a unit of the Commercial College of Leipzig. Růžička always remembered a scene from that time (1995: 4): 1 "In the spring of 1940, none other than Reinhold Trautmann tried to attract young people around the university to Slavic studies by acquainting them with startling etymologies of Slavic words." In October 1940 Růžička was drafted into the Germany army. For several months in 1945 he was held as prisoner of war by the Soviets. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked as an interpreter. In 1947, he took up Slavic studies at the University of Leipzig. He also studied English and philosophy. Among his academic teachers were Reinhold Trautmann, Theodor Frings, and Werner Krauss. He received a diploma from Humboldt University of Berlin in 1951. As he later recalled (1995: 6): "A special two-semester course was established in the years of 1950 and 1951 for aspiring young scholars in the field of Slavic studies. The aim was to educate a sufficient number of specially selected individuals considered suitable as lecturers. [...] Apart from Hans Holm Bielfeldt, it was primarily Wolfgang Steinitz, a specialist in the field of Finno-Ugric studies, who ran the linguistics program at Humboldt University." Steinitz impressed Růžička deeply (1995: 6): "On returning from fieldwork among the Khanty, the former emigrant narrowly escaped the Stalinist purges. In exile in Stockholm he hosted Roman Jakobson and helped him emigrate to the United States. The inspiring lectures [End Page 13] delivered by Steinitz acquainted us with his conception of cosmopolitan, liberal-minded science, a sense of curiosity, and a striving for innovation. He drew an authentic picture of structuralist approaches as pursued in Moscow and Prague, thereby giving us profound knowledge of theories and methods philologists throughout Germany had little knowledge of and certainly did not pay much attention to." Having gained his diploma, Rudolf Růžička was offered a position at the University of Jena, where he stayed for two years (1951-53). However, in 1953, after Reinhold Olesch had left Leipzig, Růžička was asked to take charge of the linguistics program at the Leipzig University Slavic Department. In 1955, he submitted his doctoral thesis on verbal aspect in the Old Russian text of Nestor's chronicle (1957). Early in 1960 he became acting director and, starting in 1962, director of the Leipzig University Department of Linguistics. In 1961, he submitted his habilitation thesis on the syntactic system of Old Slavic participles in comparison with Greek (1963). Also in 1961 he was made lecturer, and in 1963, professor "with the appointment to teach Slavic and General Linguistics" at the University of Leipzig. Both in research and teaching, he applied the findings of modern formal grammar. In 1963, he founded the Leipzig Linguistic Circle and became its chairman (for publications by circle members see, e.g., Růžička 1968 as well as issues of Linguistische Arbeitsberichte). The circle was modeled after similar groups of linguists, all of which had been organized with the participation of Roman Jakobson—the Moscow Linguistic Circle (founded around 1915/16), the Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in the late 1920's), and the Linguistic Circle of New York (formed in 1943; its journal Word was established in 1945). Like August Leskien, the Neogrammarian who studied Slavic languages in the context of the most advanced linguistic theories of his time, Růžička strove to introduce the latest grammatical theories into Slavic linguistics. From 1964...