Profesorius Antanas Salys – žmogus ir mokslininkas

LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXXIV (1994) LIETUVIŲ KALBOS TARMĖS IR JŲ TYRINĖJIMAI Algirdas SABALIAUSKAS PROFESSOR ANTANAS SALYS – A MAN AND A SCHOLAR Where are my dictionary slips? Even in his illness, he was concerned about the dictionary boxes. Student A. Salys makes an effort (= tries. — A.S.) through A. Vireliūnas and A. Varna to get the boxes of the “Dictionary of Lithuania” [...] These boxes belong not to Būga but to the wealth of Lithuania. It is hard to write. My head is getting hot from the letter. All the best! Greetings to A. Salys. K. Būga These lines, written by the great investigator of the Lithuanian language with a hand weakened by an already grave illness and barely able to hold a pen, would, it seems to me, make a very fitting motto for a biography of Antanas Salys to be written someday. Kazimieras Būga played an important role in the life of the future scholar A. Salys. Before coming to Kaunas to study, this young man, who had grown up “in a century-old Samogitian homestead, in Reketė’s low-lying meadow, among tall, dense trees,” had already heard a little about Professor K. Būga. Teachers determined the choice of profession for more than a few of us. The same happened to A. Salys. When, having completed the fifth grade of the gymnasium in Skuodas, he returned to Telšiai for the sixth, a new Lithuanian-language teacher, Matas Untulis, had arrived there. He was an extraordinarily interesting, almost legendary personality. Having completed a law degree at Saratov University as an external student and become a self-taught Lithuanian scholar, he was an enemy of every regime and an unconventional teacher; he knew how to kindle in his pupils a little flame of love for their native language. More than one cultural figure mentions him gratefully in their autobiography. Incidentally, the author of these lines, too, once saw M. Untulis. In April 1952, an inter-republican conference of lexicographers was held in Vilnius, where a new editorial guideline for the academic “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” was also discussed. As a fourth-year student, I was interested in looking at the faces of linguists of that time and hearing what they had to say. What I remember most vividly from that conference is M. Untulis: in a corner of the Academy of Sciences’ meeting hall, on a small spiral metal staircase, sat a short, hunchbacked little man. Although the hall was warm enough, he was wearing a worn country homespun coat, and beside him he had set down something resembling a beggar’s sack, 30 He looked through the dictionary cards and only occasionally raised his head to glance at one of the speakers. When I—I don’t remember whose question it was—asked, “Who is that beggar?”, I was told that he was Matas Untulis, the collector of words for the dictionary under discussion. Half a year later he was killed in the vicinity of Endriejavas1. Matas Untulis explained to A. Salys, then a sixth-form gymnasium student, that not everything written—even in books or newspapers—is good and correct; one has to listen to how people speak and sense what is good and what is bad in their speech. One might say that these were A. Salys’s first seminars in linguistics with Jonas Jablonskis, whom he would later meet at university. M. Untulis taught A. Salys for only one year. Yet that year was enough for Antanas Salys, after graduating from the gymnasium with a gold medal in 1923 (alongside, among others, the future renowned lexicographer Zuzana Jonikaitė), to set off to study Lithuanian at the first Lithuanian university, which had recently been established. At Kaunas University he still found both of our great linguists—Jonas Jablonskis and Kazimieras Būga. A. Salys immediately stood out from the other students. This is how the writer Juozas Paukštelis recalls J. Jablonskis’s first lecture. They are waiting in a small, rather dark hall, “within the old walls of a former monastery, steeped in mold and damp, at the beginning of Vilniaus Street, next to the ‘students’ church’ [...] Then the hall door opens, and a woman, no longer young, pale, with short hair, pushes in a wheelchair in which sits the professor I had seen before [...] I look—the white-haired head is trembling; he is very old, much older than a few years ago, when I saw him in Palanga. I feel a kind of sadness come over me. And the hall is silent—no one stirs. The professor in the wheelchair again passes his palm over his face, as if very tired, as if trying to shake off his fatigue. ‘Well then, let us begin,’ he says in a weary voice [...] He opens the notebook he is holding in front of him and reads: ‘To do a job well, you need to have good workers.’ Who can correct this sentence? The hall is silent. ‘Silence is a good sign. So the sentence is good?’ A fair-haired young man who has been reading raises his hand. ‘Please.’ ‘After kad, the infinitive is not used,’ says the young man, with a slight Samogitian accent. ‘And how would you put it?’ ‘In order to do a job well...’ ‘Correct: in order to do a job well... You’re a Samogitian—from Salantai or Plungė?’ ‘From Salantai...’ ‘From Salantai... Speech has remained purer there, too’2. 1 Kalbos kultūra. 1991. Sąs. 60. Šis leidinys skirtas šimtosios M. Untulio metinėms. Jame paskelbta M. Untulį pažinojusių žmonių atsiminimų. 2 Paukštelis J. I Often Remember Them. V., 1979. P. 73—75. 31 That young man was, of course, A. Salys. But did J. Paukštelis himself not dare name him then, or had the book’s publishers, out of caution, deleted the surname from the text3. Almost hard to believe, but J. Jablonskis offered his student the task of editing the second volume of Žemaitė’s writings published by Andrius Bulota (J. Jablonskis himself had edited the first). During K. Būga’s lectures, A. Salys sits in the front row. “He asked us where we were from, what dialect we spoke, because that was important for his dialectology course. He would keep asking how that feature was in your dialect. And that’s how I got to know Būga better [...] Then one day, after a lecture, he said to me: ‘You know, would you like to come and work for me as a secretary in the dictionary office?—I need one now.’ I was, of course, delighted—a first-year student offered a salary of, I think, one hundred and fifty litas [...] Every day, during certain hours free from lectures, I would make my way to the dictionary editorial office, which was also in the Seimas courtyard, in an old former gatekeeper’s lodge. All the dictionary card-index boxes were stored there”4. That is why, before his death, when K. Būga recalled “the dictionary boxes,” he would always remember the student Salys as well. At K. Būga’s urging, during his first university vacation A. Salys studied the native Samogitian dialects, trying to determine the boundary between the dounininkai and dūnininkai dialect groups. But when he returned to Kaunas after the vacation, a notice was hanging on the Faculty of Humanities’ bulletin board saying that Professor K. Būga would not be giving lectures that semester because of illness... K. Būga’s death was a terrible tragedy for Lithuanian linguistics, and the tragedy was felt especially keenly by Kaunas University, which was only taking its first steps. J. Jablonskis was already seriously infirm. The discipline of theoretical linguistics was taught, and after K. Būga’s death the Department of Comparative Linguistics was headed, by the Swiss Alfred Senn, who perhaps still did not know Lithuanian sufficiently well at the time. Seeing the dire state of Lithuanian linguistics, J. Jablonskis began working to ensure that a couple of the Faculty’s more talented students could study linguistics abroad. A. Salys was selected, along with another already famous student, “the Panevėžys Jablonskis,” Pranas Skardžius. In a letter to his former pupil, then Minister of Education Kazimieras Jokantas, J. Jablonskis wrote: “Two humanities students, Ant. Salys and Pr. Skardžius—they have been studying linguistics with Lithuanian studies here for two years—seeing that our faculty provides them with little intellectual nourishment (there is at present no linguist, no language researcher for comparative studies at the faculty), have long wanted (since K. Būga’s death) to go from here to some university in Germany, to a higher school where this discipline is already well established and properly taught. They have long been concerned about this matter and keep pestering me in one way or another, always seeking advice on how to carry it out; and, in my opinion, it would be best for them to continue their studies in Germany [...] Both of them (a Samogitian and an eastern Aukštaitian) are truly strong and knowledgeable about language and scholarship in general 3 Kniūkšta P. Prisimename Antaną Salį // Kalbos kultūra, 1992. Sąs. 63. P. 4. 4 Pokalbis su prof. Antanu Saliu // Gimtoji kalba, 1992. Sąs. 6. P. 25. 32 …a promising young man, from whom much can be expected for the future of our school; but both, alas, are equally poor country lads—both need, to be quite frank, substantial scholarships so that, while devoting themselves to study abroad, they will not have to starve without any benefit to themselves or to our school. I have particular confidence in these two students; I do not consider them flighty, and I have complete faith in their seriousness and perseverance. I ask you, if at all possible, not to be sparing in granting them scholarships from the coming autumn semester so that they may pursue their studies abroad”5. J. Jablonskis wrote a similar letter to Professor Mykolas Biržiška, dean of the Faculty of Humanities6. At first, Leipzig, Königsberg, or Riga were considered. Leipzig was chosen. The choice was apparently determined by the fact that, since 1922, Professor Jurgis Gerulis (who signed his name Georg Gerullis in German), a good friend of K. Būga’s who had not long before been invited to teach in Kaunas, had been lecturing there. J. Gerulis, a graduate of the universities of Königsberg and Berlin and a student of A. Bezzenberger and V. Schulze, seems to have had a particularly strong influence on his students. It is true that J. Gerulis’s own university studies lasted only six semesters: in 1909 he graduated from the classical gymnasium in Tilsit, and by 1912 he had already received his doctorate for a dissertation in Latin on place names in Sambia. As an officer in the Crown Prince’s Guard, he took part in the First World War, was wounded several times, and was awarded Germany’s highest military decoration, the Iron Cross. At Leipzig University, in addition to linguistics courses, he also taught military training. Lithuanians who studied in Leipzig and later in Berlin remember him as an excellent teacher. In Leipzig, he taught the main Baltic studies courses to only two students, Pr. Skardžius and A. Salys. Other students would tease them, calling them “future professors of Lithuanian.” Not only were the students pleased with their professor, but the professor was delighted with his students (they certainly did not turn out to be flighty!), praised them everywhere, and especially emphasized Pr. Skardžius’s industriousness and A. Salys’s talent. Of course, neither was lacking in these qualities. Perhaps one detail would also attest to how J. Gerulis’s students regarded his pedagogical talent. After the Second World War, while in the United States and witnessing the sorry state of Lithuanian linguistics, Pr. Skardžius wrote in an article that “J. Žiugžda’s true teachers and friends quite needlessly did away with such a distinguished scholar, who, had he lived, could have trained serious dialectologists for Soviet Lithuania as well”7. The author of these lines has heard very warm accounts of J. Gerulis as an excellent teacher and an interesting personality from his former students at the University of Berlin, Elzbieta Mikalauskaitė and Jonas Kabelka, and from participants in the dialectology courses in Kaunas, Bronė Vosilytė, Jonas Kruopas, and Juozas Senkus. 5 Jono Jablonskio laiškai. Sud. A. Piročkinas. V., 1985. P. 165—166. 6 Jablonskis J. Straipsniai ir laiškai. Sud. A. Piročkinas. V., 1991. P. 225—227. 7 Skardžius Pr. Tarybinė kalbotyra Lietuvoje // Aidai, 1958. Nr. 10. P. 444—445. 33 A. Salys’s relationship with J. Gerulis was apparently especially warm. He took great care over A. Salys’s future. This even led to some conflicts in Kaunas8. During a visit to Lithuania in 1969, A. Salys recounted that, after the war, while living in the United States, he had supported J. Gerulis’s family, who had fallen into very difficult circumstances; he recalled how he had searched for shoes for J. Gerulis’s daughter using a drawing of her foot, as well as other things. When A. Salys and Pr. Skardžius returned to Kaunas after their studies in Leipzig, one could say that a renaissance in Lithuanian linguistics began. Salys’s lectures especially fascinated the students. Recalling his studies at Kaunas University, A. Salys said that “all that Vabalas-Gudaitis pedagogy and the like” had not interested him much. Yet he himself had an innate talent for teaching and devoted particular attention to pedagogical work. “I think, and am deeply convinced, that a university lecturer’s primary duty is to be a good lecturer,” Salys said in a conversation organized three weeks before his death, when a documentary film about him was being made9. It was not only future linguists who appreciated this. For instance, before her state examinations, Halina Korsakienė muses: “A. Salys is nothing to worry about either. I have good notes from his lectures, and the subject he teaches is clear and comprehensible, just like the professor’s lectures themselves.” And during the examination itself, “A. Salys, always smiling and looking fit, greets me.” “Still so young, energetic, and cheerful,” Salys also makes his way to the Saturdays for language enthusiasts held at Sofija Čiurlionienė’s home10. Pulgis Andriušis, having good-naturedly poked fun at all his distinguished professors, recalls the Humanities Society’s “boisterous annual balls at the Ateitininkai Hall,” where even Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas “would somewhat shed his innate shyness,” and does not forget our linguists: “The fast-talking, nimble P. Skardžius, after a drink, would not change; he would only talk even faster and move about even more nimbly [...] A. Salys spent most of his time in the dance hall”11. A. Salys was an honorary member of the celebrated student literary and arts society “Šatrija” and its patron at Vilnius University. In general, he was a man of action, by no means content with linguistics and teaching. His contemporaries also remember him as a renowned beekeeper, an excellent gardener and winemaker, and a member of the expert commission for exhibitions organized by the Chamber of Agriculture. Writing about their friendship with A. Salys, his friends (Vincas Maciūnas and Stasys Barzdukas) also recall mead—“I gladly drained a little glass of his homemade amber mead,” and “he treated me to his homemade mead (just one glass, no more, since it is such a rare delicacy!).” 8 Cf. Pr. Skardžius’s letter to V. Krėvė-Mickevičius, February 10, 1930. See Literatūra ir kalba, 1981. Vol. 17. P. 195–196. 9 Cf. Gimtoji kalba, 1992. Issue 6. P. 23–29; Issue 7. P. 14–21 (reprinted from “Aidai,” 1974. No. 1. P. 14–20; No. 2. P. 75–82. Edited by K. Ostrauskas). 10 K o r s a k i e n ė H. Namas, kuriame gyvenome. V., 1991. P. 64, 66; K o r s a k i e n ė H. Susitikimai. V., 1977. P. 188. 11 A n d r i u š i s P. Rinktiniai raštai. T. 1. Bostonas, 1968. P. 93. 34 Finally, A. Salys also wrote the first Lithuanian motoring handbook (Automobilio ekonomija. Kaunas, 1932). He was also one of our first motorcyclists. A. Salys took an active part in Catholic academic activities and was an active member of the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Science. Together with J. Brazaitis (then Ambrazevičius), J. Grinius, J. Grušas, Z. Ivinskis, J. Keliuotis, A. Maceina, K. Pakštas, I. Skrupskis, A. Vaičiulaitis, and other young Catholic intellectuals, he signed the famous declaration “Toward the Creation of an Organic State,” published in Naujoji Romuva in 1936, which sought a way to restore a democratic system in Lithuania. A. Salys’s character and innate abilities helped him adapt easily to the new conditions of life and work in the United States of America. Here, his former professor at Kaunas University, the Swiss scholar Alfred Senn, played a very important role in his life. In general, people of other nationalities who worked at Kaunas University sincerely helped Lithuanians struck by misfortune on more than one occasion. Consider the Frenchman Raymond Schmittlein (Raimonas Šmitlenas), director of public education in the French occupation zone in Germany after the Second World War: how much good he did for Lithuanians! In the biography of our eminent artist Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, he is described as the third person encountered (after Adomas Galdikas and Paulius Galaunė) who “left a fateful mark” on his earthly journey12 In addition to R. Schmittlein’s many good deeds for Lithuanians, it should also be mentioned that, on learning that A. Salys and Pr. Skardžius were in Germany, he sought them out and invited them to teach subjects in Baltic studies at the University of Tübingen. For a time, students who had left Lithuania were also able to continue their studies there. Some, for example Domas Velicka, organizer of Lithuanian schools in America, also received a university diploma there. A. Senn, whom we have already mentioned, secured positions at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for A. Salys, as well as for Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius and Vincas Maciūnas. Having worked in Lithuania for nearly ten years and left Kaunas University in 1930 by no means of his own volition, he took a keen interest in Lithuanian affairs, participated in the activities of their organizations, and continued his Lithuanian studies. It was probably not so easy to admit such a group of Lithuanians to this university all at once, especially as there may have been difficulties concerning V. Krėvė-Mickevičius. In a despairing letter from Germany to A. Senn dated January 7, 1948, Professor Mykolas Biržiška wrote: “How you managed to get Krėvė into the university is hard for me to understand, knowing that neither the English nor the Americans, nor anyone else, wants to admit the elderly even to universities. Just now, an English professors’ commission that has arrived today is sitting with us, choosing specialists from among our professors up to the age of 50—people in their sixties (I am already 65!), like the three of us brothers, are of no interest to them at all, not to mention Vaclovas’s and my specialization in Lithuanian studies (if only it were language, but here it is literature!) [...] For some reason neither the English nor the Americans paid attention to the fact that he (Viktoras Biržiška. — 12 S a k a l a u s k a s T. Kelionė. V., 1991. P. 95—104, 110, 119, 126. 35 A.S.) not only a mathematician (they had no need of such people) and not only an engineer, but also a former director of two military ammunition factories in Petrograd”13. A. Salys was, of course, very much needed by A. Senn, and to complete the “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Written Language” that he had begun back in Lithuania together with Max Niedermann and Franz Brender. A. Salys arrived in the United States without knowing English, and after six months he was already teaching an elementary Russian-language course in English. At the University of Pennsylvania, A. Salys taught courses in Slavic and Baltic studies. During his time there, this university became the leading center for Lithuanian and Baltic studies in the United States. The University of Pennsylvania Library amassed the richest collection of Lithuanian studies materials outside Lithuania (probably due in large part to A. Senn). During A. Salys’s time there, Vladas Jaskevičius, Kostas Ostrauskas, Bronius Vaškelis, Antanas Klimas, and William R. Schmalstieg earned doctoral degrees for dissertations in Lithuanian studies. And here, too, A. Salys was a professor much loved by his students. “I think no student was ever afraid when he had to enter Prof. A. Salys’s office: all the students were received warmly and cheerfully, and scholarly problems were resolved without difficulty,” recalls W. R. Schmalstieg14. In general, according to W. R. Schmalstieg, he was “a man with a smile on his face”. A. Salys was more fortunate than many of his colleagues who had left their homeland: he was able to return to it once more, at least briefly. More than one person in Lithuania was stunned in the summer of 1969 to hear that A. Salys was coming. In his homeland, he was awaited almost as if he were an “agent of imperialism.” By no means was everyone in the United States pleased with the trip, either. But how warmly A. Salys was welcomed in Lithuania by his former students and by linguists of the younger generation who had never met him! Even the cautious Kostas Korsakas was apparently sometimes quite candid when speaking with A. Salys, for on one occasion A. Salys let slip that “I now think differently about your director, too, than I did before.” I am especially glad that I was able to introduce Vladimir Toporov to A. Salys. He was greatly impressed by A. Salys’s beautiful Russian. Several decades later, Ringaila Šalytė successfully brought volumes of her father’s “Writings” to V. Toporov in Moscow. She, a scholar of Boris Pasternak’s works, left a very warm impression on V. Toporov, just as her father had once done. Latvian linguist Elfrīda Šmite, who met A. Salys in Vilnius, could not get over how correct his Latvian was. Not all the meetings in Lithuania were pleasant for Professor A. Salys at that time. Probably the most painful meeting was with his ruined family homestead, 13 Kultūros barai, 1992. Nr. 7—8. P. 100—102; A. Sennas organizavo net komitetą, kuris turėjo paruošti pasiūlymą pristatyti V. Krėvę-Mickevičių Nobelio premijai. V. Krėvė-Mickevičius rusų kalbą dėstė ir A. Senno sūnui, būsimajam Lietuvos istorijos tyrinėtojui Alfredui Erikui Sennui. 14 S c h m a l s t i e g a s W. R. A. Salys — profesorius Amerikoje // Aidai, 1972. Nr. 8. P. 363. 36 with its almost vanished orchard, planted by his own hands. During his visit, A. Salys became convinced that our linguists work “with great enthusiasm and zeal,” yet are rightly worried that “this zeal and enthusiasm might not be quenched by the northeast wind.” Antanas Salys was determined to visit Lithuania once more. But, alas, this dream was not to come true. Instead of flowers and wreaths at his funeral, he asked that donations be made to the Lithuanian studies scholarship fund. Named after Antanas Salys, this fund was transferred in 1984 to the Department of Lithuanian Studies established at the University of Illinois Chicago. When I first met Professor A. Salys, there was little to add to the portrait of him I had formed from the accounts of my teachers Jonas Kabelka and Jonas Kvederaitis. Alongside Pranas Skardžius’s substantial books on Lithuanian linguistics, the works of his scholarly friend Antanas Salys did not seem quite so impressive to us. Today, leafing through the four huge volumes of his collected writings, we realize how much this excellent researcher and nurturer of his native language also contributed to the study of Lithuanian. We must all also be very grateful to the professor’s wife, Sofija Salienė, without whose efforts and financial support those four volumes probably would not exist even to this day15. 15 Incidentally, S. Salienė took care not only of publishing her husband’s writings, but also of their “smuggling” into Lithuania. For instance, in a letter dated 1986. II. 16 to V. R. Schmalstieg, she writes: “Prof. P. Jonikas wrote to me that you might be going to Lithuania. It would be good if you could take two of his books; perhaps you’ll manage to get them through. If you lose them, it doesn’t matter. The linguists are eagerly awaiting A. Salys’s writings [...] I wish you a safe journey.” 37