Olegas Trubačiovas

In Memoriam | 251 No, stone upon stone will remain; words will be gathered from the branches, from beneath the sod, put into a song, and the ancestral language will rejoice, the orphan humiliated—an old, long-forgotten pain rises from the depths. (Literature and Art, 1987 03 13)2. Antons Breidaks will no longer rejoice in his ancestral language or set words to song. Algirdas Sabaliauskas Olegas Trubačiovas 1930 10 23 – 2002 03 09 Russian Slavic studies have suffered a grievous blow: after a serious illness, one of their most prominent representatives, Olegas Trubačiovas, has died—a talented scholar who left a striking mark on the study of the Baltic languages as well. O. Trubačiovas was born on October 23, 1930, in Volgograd. After graduating from Dniepropetrovsk University in 1952, he studied in the postgraduate program at Moscow State M. Lomonosov University from 1952 to 1955 (supervisor: S. B. Bernšteinas). From 1955 to 1961, he worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From 1961 until his death, O. Trubačiovas’s main scholarly work was associated with the Institute of the Russian Language. 2 Latgalian writing: a lilac bush in place of a fence, there where stone lies upon stone... No, stone upon stone will remain; words will be gathered from the branches, from beneath the sod, put into a song, and the ancestral language will rejoice—the orphan humiliated—as an old, long-forgotten pain rises from the depths. 252 | IN MEMORIAM In 1957, O. Trubačiovas defended his candidate’s dissertation, which was later published as a separate book The History of Kinship Terms in the Slavic Languages and of Some of the Oldest Terms for Social Organization (История славянских терминов родства и некоторых древнейших терминов общественного строя, Moscow, 1959). While writing his dissertation, O. Trubačiovas worked in Lithuania for an extended period. He carefully reviewed the card index for Kazimieras Būga’s etymological dictionary, as well as his then unpublished work Notes and Supplements to A. Preobrazhensky’s Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language. Soon appeared another book by O. Trubačiovas, significant not only for Slavic but also for Baltic linguistics: The Origin of the Names of Domestic Animals in the Slavic Languages (Происхождение названий домашних животных в славянских языках, Moscow, 1960). Two years later, a work co-authored with Vladimir Toporov and widely acclaimed was published: A Linguistic Analysis of the Hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper Region (Лингвистический анализ гидронимов Верхнего Поднепровья, Moscow, 1962). It extended K. Būga’s earlier research and showed that the entire Upper Dnieper basin belonged to the territory of the ancient Balts. O. Trubačiovas also wrote a sequel to this work, The Names of the Rivers of Right-Bank Ukraine (Названия рек Правобережной Украины, Moscow, 1968). He published the ideas in this work that were of greater interest to Balticists in the Vilnius journal Baltistica (1968, 4(1), 31–53). In 1965, O. Trubačiovas defended his doctoral dissertation, which was also soon published as a separate book: Craft Terminology in the Slavic Languages (Ремесленная терминология в славянских языках, Moscow, 1966). Perhaps the conclusion of this work came as a surprise to many: there are far fewer Baltic–Slavic lexical isoglosses in this field than Slavic–Germanic and Slavic–Latin ones. O. Trubačiovas also examined various lexical issues in the Baltic languages in some of his other works. He addressed the earliest relations between the Baltic and Slavic languages in his much-debated monograph Ethnogenesis and Culture of the Earliest Slavs (Этногенез и культура древнейших славян, Moscow, 1991). With the help of a group of collaborators, O. Trubačiovas was preparing a monumental work on Slavic etymology, The Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Languages (Этимологический словарь славянских языков, Moscow, 1974–). Congratulating O. Trubačiovas on his seventieth birthday, his collaborators probably rightly called this work “the summit of his journey, a bitter and fascinating labor camp.” It is a pity that this summit had probably only been halfway reached (the beginning of the letter o in fascicle 26), and the principal traveler is already gone... O. Trubačiovas did a service not only to Slavists but also to Balticists by translating Max Vasmer’s Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language (Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg, 1953–1957, I–III) into Russian. He supplemented the translation with his own notes. In 1972, O. Trubačiovas was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. At the time, he was the youngest philologist in this academic institution and its only member whose scholarly interests were so closely connected with Baltic studies. In 1992, O. Trubačiovas was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. From 1997, he edited Russia’s leading linguistics journal, Вопросы языкознания. In 1963, he had founded and edited the serial publication Этимология. O. Trubačiovas collaborated quite closely with Lithuanian linguists. In 1967, at Vilnius University, he served as the opponent for Simo Karaliūnas’s candidate’s dissertation and Zigmas Zinkevičius’s doctoral dissertation. He also gave a lecture at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature. IN MEMORIAM | 253 On the occasion of O. Trubačiov’s death, Vladimir Toporov wrote to the author of these lines: “With Trubačiov’s death, in my opinion, the most distinguished etymologist of our time, an etymologist by the grace of God, has departed this life.” Oleg Trubačiov is buried in the Troekurovskoye Cemetery, southwest of Moscow. This cemetery has already received more than one Russian scholar well known to us. Algirdas Sabaliauskas