LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI XXXVI (1996)

LIETUVIŲ KALBA: TYRĖJAI IR TYRIMAI

Zigmas ZINKEVIČIUS

JURGIS GERULIS – A SCHOLAR AND A HUMAN BEING

Jurgis Gerulis was one of the great Lithuanian and Baltic studies scholars of the interwar period. He was born on August 3, 1888, in Jogaudai, near Vilkyškiai (present-day Šilutė District), into a peasant family. After graduating from Tilsit Gymnasium in 1909, he studied comparative linguistics and classical philology at the universities of Königsberg and Berlin. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 1912. He then held professorships at the University of Königsberg and later at the University of Leipzig. In 1934, he returned to Königsberg and for a time served as rector of the university. In 1937, he moved to the University of Berlin, indignant at the local administration’s replacement of Lithuanian place names in East Prussia with German ones; he did not want to contribute to that despicable work. Even earlier, in 1933, he had joined the nationalist party (under the influence of his wife, who came from a high-ranking family of German aristocrats in Latvia), and therefore held senior administrative posts. In May 1945, while ill, he was arrested at night by the Soviet security service and disappeared without a trace.

Gerulis made his greatest contributions to Lithuanian studies through his research on Lithuanian dialects and early writings. He accomplished especially much in the field of dialectology. He is regarded as the founder of modern Lithuanian dialectology outside Lithuania. His most important work in this field is the monograph “Studies in Lithuanian Dialectology,” published in German in 1930¹. In it, Gerulis was the first to apply the so-called Copenhagen transcription to the recording of Lithuanian dialects; this later played a very important role in the development of our dialectology. In this work, he also investigated and described the pitch accents of standard Lithuanian and its dialects, and provided examples of the most important dialects along with their dialectological characteristics.

Until his death, Gerulis himself researched Lithuanian dialects using instrumental phonetics and taught others to do so. He devoted several articles to this subject (e.g., in 1930 and 1935). Moreover, from 1931 to 1933 he led dialectology courses in Kaunas. Together with Chr. Stang, he published the German-language monograph “The Lithuanian Fishermen’s Dialect in Prussia” in 1933². The two also investigated the unique Zietela dialect, but did not manage to complete the work. After the war, Stang published his notes³, while the collections of materials gathered by Gerulis were lost, at least up to the present—

¹ Lithuanian Dialect Studies by G e o r g G e r u l l i s, with 8 X-ray plates and 20 kymograph recordings. Leipzig, 1930.

² The Lithuanian Fishermen’s Dialect in Prussia. Compiled by J. G e r u l l i s and C h r. S t a n- g’as. Kaunas, 1933.

³ S t a n g C h r. S. The Lithuanian dialect of Zasečiai in the Vilnius region. — Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 18, Oslo, 1958, 171—201.

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little is heard about them. The same fate befell the material he had collected on the dialects of Gervėčiai and Lazūnai (outside the borders of the Republic of Lithuania).

Another area of Gerulis’s scholarly interests was the study of old monuments of the Lithuanian language. In 1922 he published a collection of photographic reproductions of Mažvydas’s writings⁴. He himself discovered some of the texts in the Königsberg archives. After the war, some of the originals did not survive. Although newer reprinted editions of Mažvydas’s writings⁵ are now available, Gerulis’s edition is the most important and remains of great scholarly value to this day, especially since not all the originals of the texts he published have survived. In 1927 he published an excellent chrestomathy of old Lithuanian writings⁶, which is still in use today. It remains one of the principal teaching aids for the study of the history of the Lithuanian language in higher education, and is widely used in scholarly research as well. He discovered and published a considerable number of shorter old Lithuanian texts, along with much archival information about them. Among other things, he studied the biography of J. Bretkūnas.

Gerulis made a major contribution to the study of the history of the Lithuanian language in Prussia. He was interested in problems of sociolinguistics, especially Lithuanian-German bilingualism. He described the process of Germanization in his native village and his own family.

He was a highly erudite Balticist. His works on Prussian studies are important, especially his research on Prussian place names. His doctoral dissertation, defended in 1912, was also in this field. It was a work written in Latin, “On the Prussian Place Names of Sambia”⁷. He continued to study Prussian place names later on. In 1922 he published in German a significant work, “Old Prussian Place Names”⁸, and also published shorter works on Prussian studies in the press of Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia. He also wrote on Latvian studies.

Gerulis’s pedagogical work was also significant. He contributed greatly to the education of the younger generation of Lithuanian linguists between the wars. After the unexpected death of K. Būga, who had not had time to prepare successors at Kaunas University, it was Gerulis—and no one else—who improved the dire state of Lithuanian linguistics. His students included both renowned Lithuanian linguists of the interwar period, professors Pranas Skardžius and Antanas Salys, as well as Jonas Kabelka, who worked at Vilnius University after the war; Elzė Mikalauskaitė, at the Pedagogical Institute; and, in exile, Kazys Alminas (Alminauskis) and Izabelė Matusevičiūtė.

As a person, Gerulis was a contradictory and tragic figure, pulled in different directions by the circumstances of his life. For him, Lithuanian studies were a sacred discipline, and facts about the Lithuanian language were treasures. This is evident, for example, in his refusal to take part in the Germanization of Lithuanian names in East Prussia. A member of Hitler’s party, he did not obey the party in this matter. Yet throughout his life, while working

⁴ MAŽVYDAS. The oldest monuments of the Lithuanian language up to the year 1570. Prepared for publication by Dr. Jurgis Gerullis. Kaunas, 1922.

⁵ Latest edition: Martynas Mažvydas. Catechism and Other Writings. Katechismus und andere Schriften. Editor Giedrius Subačius. Vilnius, 1993.

⁶ Readings from Old Lithuanian. Part I. Texts with Glosses. Edited by Jurgis Gerullis. Kaunas, 1927.

⁷ De Prussicis Sambenzium locorum nominibus. Tilsit, 1912.

⁸ Die altpreussischen Ortsnamen. Berlin—Leipzig, 1922.

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among the Germans. Over time, Gerulis became deeply imbued with German culture, and his spirit and mindset came to coincide with those of the Germans, although until the end of his life he took pride in his Lithuanian origins. All this led many intellectuals of the time, who had not known Gerulis and his work at close quarters, to view him negatively and assess him one-sidedly, forgetting his immense contributions to the study of the Lithuanian language. Perhaps this also played a part in the tragic end of Gerulis’s life. In Vilnius, soon after the war, rumors circulated among linguists that the people directing Lithuanian scholarship (Juozas Žiugžda was blamed) had responded negatively to an inquiry from Moscow asking whether Gerulis was needed in Lithuania. It is impossible to verify how much truth there is in this. However, there is no doubt that, had Lithuanian linguists been given Gerulis, they would have found their feet at least a decade earlier, and Baltic studies in Lithuania would have flourished not in the 1970s, but already in the 1960s or even the 1950s. There would have been no need to start from scratch, rediscovering Americas that others had discovered long ago.

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