BORIS LARINAS

On March 26, 1964, after a long and serious illness, Boris Larinas died in Leningrad. He was a professor at Leningrad University, Doctor of Philology, an academician of the Lithuanian SSR Academy of Sciences, a corresponding member of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, and an Honored Scientist of the Russian SFSR. A talented scholar was lost to the ranks of Soviet philology. Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Latvian linguists lost a sincere friend, an energetic leader, and a caring teacher.

B. Larinas was born on January 17, 1893, in the city of Poltava, into a teacher’s family. After graduating in 1914 with a degree in philology from the Faculty of History and Philology at Kyiv University, he was sent to the foremost Russian center for the humanities of that time—the University of St. Petersburg—to prepare for a professorship. There B. Larinas received an excellent philological education: his Slavic studies were supervised by Professors J. Baudouin de Courtenay and L. Shcherba, his Sanskrit studies by Academicians S. Oldenburg and F. Shcherbatsky, his Iranian studies by Academician K. Zaleman, and his Romance studies by Professor D. Petrov.

In St. Petersburg, B. Larinas also found living traditions of Baltic studies. At the Academy of Sciences worked great friends of the Lithuanian people and world-renowned scholars, Academicians F. Fortunatov and A. Shakhmatov. A. Juška’s dictionary of the Lithuanian language was being published there. In 1912, at the University of St. Petersburg, J. Endzelīns defended his celebrated doctoral dissertation, “Slavic-Baltic Studies.” Baltic studies were taught at the university by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and E. Wolter, later a professor at Kaunas University. The renowned Lithuanian linguist K. Būga prepared for a professorship in J. Baudouin de Courtenay’s department. B. Larinas arrived in St. Petersburg already with a considerable grounding in Baltic studies. He especially strengthened the foundations in Lithuanian that he had acquired at Kyiv University during trips around Lithuania, while interacting with Dzūkija peasants and raftsmen on the Nemunas. At the University of St. Petersburg, B. Larinas continued to deepen his knowledge of Baltic philology under E. Wolter’s guidance. Alongside Slavic and Indo-European philology, Baltic philology became one of the principal fields of B. Larinas’s scholarly work.

After arriving in St. Petersburg, still the capital of tsarist Russia, B. Larinas maintained his ties with the city until the last day of his life. With only brief interruptions, the rest of his life passed there. Le-

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His finest years of creative and pedagogical work were spent in Leningrad’s higher-education institutions.

B. Larinas was a scholar of exceptionally broad outlook and profound erudition. He made his debut in philological publications as a young man of nineteen, and over a scholarly career lasting more than fifty years he published over a hundred works on a wide variety of questions in linguistics and literary studies. Looking through B. Larinas’s publication lists, one cannot help but marvel that all these works came from the same person.

An outstanding practitioner and profound theoretician, B. Larinas left a clear mark on Soviet lexicography. First of all, together with V. Vinogradov, G. Vinokur, S. Ozhegov, and B. Tomashevsky, he was one of the authors of a major work of Russian lexicography—the four-volume “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Literary Language,” edited by S. Ushakov¹. In its time, this dictionary was the greatest achievement of Soviet lexicography and influenced the entire subsequent development of lexicography.

B. Larinas undertook a tremendous amount of work in preparing a dictionary of the Old Russian language of the eleventh to seventeenth centuries. For several decades he headed the Old Russian Dictionary section of the Institute of Language and Thought of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which was preparing the dictionary. Under his direction, a vast card index was compiled, the first volumes of the dictionary were prepared, and a cadre of experienced lexicographers was trained. V. Vinogradov, who called the preparation of this dictionary “a grand collective undertaking of the USSR Academy of Sciences,” wrote in 1946: “The preparation and publication of the ‘Dictionary of the Old Russian Language’ will constitute an entire epoch in the history of Russian linguistics”². It is regrettable that later, for various reasons, work on the dictionary was suspended for a time, and to this day not a single volume of this work, so essential to linguistic science, has appeared. Let us hope that in the near future the difficult and complex work of preparing the “Dictionary of the Old Russian Language” will move forward, and that the dictionary’s new authors will duly acknowledge B. Larinas’s contributions to the creation of this major work of Russian lexicography. We must also remember that B. Larinas’s “Project for a Dictionary of the Old Russian Language,” prepared and published in 1936³, was an entirely new development in dictionary-making practice, and B. Larinas is rightly regarded as the creator of a new linguistic genre—lexicographic planning⁴.

B. Larinas led a large team of lexicographers from Leningrad University and the Pskov Pedagogical Institute who were preparing a regional dictionary of Pskov. This planned four-volume work (the first volume was expected to be written in 1964) will differ in many respects from earlier publications of a similar kind. Its sources include not only spoken language but also various

¹ Plg. Толковый словарь русского литературного языка под ред. проф. Д. Н. Ушакова, сост. проф. В. В. Виноградовым, проф. Г. О. Винокуром, проф. Б. А. Лариным, С. И. Ожеговым, Б. В. Томашевским, I—IV, М., 1934—1940.

² В. В. Виноградов, Русская наука о русском литературном языке, «Уч. зап. МГУ», т. 3, кн. 1, вып. 106, М., 1946, р. 138.

³ Б. А. Ларин, Проект древнерусского словаря (принципы, инструкции, источники), Л., 1936.

⁴ Г. В. Степанов, Б. А. Ларин, «Вестник ЛГУ», 1963, № 14, р. 149.

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over a period of time, lexical material selected from various subject dictionaries, manuscript and printed dialect descriptions, and historical documents. All this will enable users of the dictionary to form a historical perspective on the development of the vocabulary of the Pskov region. For the first time in the practice of regional lexicography, this dictionary will provide an emotional and stylistic characterization of words, as well as their functional and professional uses.⁵

At B. Larinas’s initiative, a group of young lexicographers at Leningrad University, under his leadership, prepared a dictionary of M. Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy (“Childhood,” “In the World,” “My Universities”). The first part of this dictionary is scheduled to go to press in 1964. The dictionary of M. Gorky’s trilogy is intended to be the beginning of a complete dictionary of M. Gorky’s works; its principles were prepared by Leningrad University lexicographers under B. Larinas’s direction. Other higher-education institutions also joined in preparing the dictionary (the universities of Saratov, Gorky, and the Far East), primarily those where B. Larinas’s students work. The Interdepartmental Dictionary Office, established at Leningrad University in 1960 at B. Larinas’s initiative, is of great importance for training lexicographical personnel.

B. Larinas also directed the preparation of dictionaries of certain monuments of Old Russian literature.

B. Larinas was not only a lexicographer; he did not confine himself to the consistent classification and systematization of words, but was concerned with the entire history of a word’s life, with all its nuances, from its very emergence to the present day. “A word, with the scars carved into it by time and its thousand-year memory,” B. Larinas wrote, “attracts our attention as a hero of the history of language and, at the same time, of the history of peoples.” In his lexicographical studies, B. Larinas always skillfully combined the history of a word with that of the society using it, relating each individual word to the corresponding system of words and seeking out its regularities. Particularly significant are B. Larinas’s studies in semantic analysis⁶, based chiefly on data from Slavic, Baltic, and Old Indic languages. B. Larinas’s phraseological research earned universal recognition.

B. Larinas made a major contribution to the science of Soviet dialectology. He was a pioneer of the Russian language atlas. B. Larinas was a member of the small group of linguists which, under the leadership of Academician L. Shcherba, began the monumental work of preparing an atlas of Russian dialects. B. Larinas compiled the vocabulary and syntax sections of the atlas program. He also prepared a program and instructions for compiling an atlas of Ukrainian dialects⁷. On the theoretical—

⁵ Plg. В. Н. Елина, О. И. Рак, В лаборатории исследования слов, «Вестник ЛГУ», 1963, № 14, р. 144.

⁶ Cf. Б. А. Ларин, Из истории слов (Лютый зверь. Семья. Кавардак), «Сб. памяти Л. В. Щербы», под ред. проф. Б. А. Ларина, Л. Р. Зиндера и М. И. Матусевич, Л, 1951, р. 190—200; Из славяно-балтийских лексикологических сопоставлений, «Вестник ЛГУ», 1958, № 14, 150—9; Об эвфемизмах, «Уч. зап. ЛГУ», 1961, № 301, р. 110—24 и kt.

⁷ Cf. Б. А. Ларин, Программа для збирания материалов до диалектологичного атласа украиньской мови (з інструкцією), Київ, 1948; II изд. 1949.

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On the theoretical and practical questions of compiling the atlas, B. Larinas published valuable works in print⁸. B. Larinas regarded the compilation of dialect atlases of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian as the first stage in preparing a general atlas of the Slavic languages.

B. Larinas’s studies of specific dialects stand out for their great innovativeness. Unlike traditional dialectology, which chiefly studied the speech of elderly villagers, B. Larinas paid equal attention to linguistic data from representatives of different generations and professions. Among B. Larinas’s dialectological studies, works devoted to problems of urban speech are particularly notable. B. Larinas highlighted the theoretical significance of studying urban speech for linguistics, viewing it as a link between two extremes—the speech of the “old men” and “old women” in the countryside and literary language. B. Larinas did not shy away from such “dialectological” problems as the study of the urban underworld’s argot⁹. It is interesting that these works from the early period of B. Larinas’s scholarly activity are receiving particular recognition today: young Soviet structuralists are simply fascinated by them¹⁰.

B. Larinas must also be mentioned as an enthusiastic organizer and participant in dialectological expeditions, meetings, and conferences. He skillfully combined his scholarly research with the “drudge work” of a dialectologist—the collecting of linguistic data.

B. Larinas is regarded as the founder of an entirely new topic in the history of the Russian language: the spoken language of Muscovite Rus’ in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Considering it the basis of the Russian national language, B. Larinas undertook to overcome the enormous difficulties arising from the scarcity of spoken-language elements in the written texts of that period, which were strongly influenced by Old Russian. He was the first to study the records made by foreigners who visited Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—records that are difficult to decipher, obscure, and often inaccurate, but which reflect many authentic facts about spoken language. After many years of meticulous work, B. Larinas deciphered and published, with extensive introductions, commentaries, and textual studies, the three most important descriptions of spoken Russian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made by foreigners: Ludolf’s 1696 grammar, the 1586 Muscovite Dictionary, and James’s 1618–1619 dictionary-diary¹¹. These monographs, which constituted B. Larinas’s doctoral dissertation, received high praise from Slavists in the Soviet Union and abroad. Muscovite Rus’—

⁸ Cf. Б. А. Ларин, Об Атласе русского языка и современной диалектологии, «Уч. зап. Ростовского-на-Дону пед. ин-та», т. I, 105—16, Ростов н/Д, 1938; О принципах составления атласа славянских языков, «Сборник памяти Л. П. Якубинского», Л., 1949, р. 23—37; Про методологію радянської лінгвістичної географії, «Діалектологічний бюлетень АН УРСР», Київ, 1949, № 1, р. 6—15.

⁹ Cf. Б. А. Ларин, Западноевропейские элементы русского воровского арго. «Язык и литература», т. 7, Л., 1931, р. 1—20.

¹⁰ Plg. Симпозиум по структурному изучению знаковых систем, М., 1962, р. 36.

¹¹ Б. А. Ларин, «Русская грамматика Людольфа 1696 года», Л., 1937; Парижский словарь московитов 1586 года, Рига, 1948; Русско-английский словарь — дневник Ричарда Джемса (1618—1619 г.), Л., 1959.

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B. Larinas also explored the problem of this spoken language in other works¹².

B. Larinas’s Lithuanian studies have particularly attracted the attention of Lithuanian linguists. As already mentioned, B. Larinas became interested in Lithuanian linguistics while still a student. Not content with written sources, he resolved to learn Lithuanian from the people themselves. In the summers of 1913 and 1914, he visited Lithuania twice and traveled on foot through many villages in the then districts of Raseiniai, Telšiai, Panevėžys, Ukmergė, and Trakai. There he collected words related to folk life and culture, studied dialects, and recorded their distinctive features. The fruit of these journeys was the work “Materials on Lithuanian Dialectology”¹³, published much later, which consists of a description of the Nemunaitis dialect, a glossary of words collected from various dialects with historical and etymological notes, and examples of dialect texts.

Although Lithuanian dialectological research has become more precise and its methods have greatly improved since this work was written, some of the author’s observations and lexical data—and especially his theoretical generalizations—remain significant today. Probably for the first time in Lithuanian dialectology, we find here the view of a dialect not as a complex of features that distinguish it from the written language, but as a distinct linguistic system. B. Larinas emphasizes that a dialectologist’s task is to discern and describe the dialectal norm, which governs communication among speakers of the dialect, although pure forms of this norm rarely occur in their customary speech¹⁴. The author’s comments on bilingualism are interesting, particularly his explanation of the different fate of Polish and Russian elements in the Nemunaitis dialect¹⁵. B. Larinas also used lexical material from Lithuanian dialects repeatedly in many later studies and articles.

B. Larinas published most of his works related to Lithuanian studies during the last two decades, when, following the establishment of the socialist system in Lithuania, his ties with philologists in our republic were renewed and then continued uninterrupted until his death. In the linguistic studies of this period, he delved into the problem of relations between the Baltic and Slavic languages and examined specific lexical and grammatical correspondences among Lithuanian, Latvian, and Old Russian, making extensive use also of material from non-Indo-European languages, especially Finno-Ugric. Among B. Larinas’s works of this kind is the article “On the word янтарь”¹⁶. Having analyzed Slavic-language data in detail, B. Larinas—

¹² B. A. Larin, “On the Notes of Foreigners as a Source for the History of the Russian Language,” *Proceedings of the Jubilee Scientific Session of Leningrad State University*, Philological Sciences Section, L., 1946, pp. 71—85; *The Colloquial Language of Muscovite Rus’*, in: *The Initial Stage in the Formation of the Russian National Language*, L., 1961, pp. 22—34, etc.

¹³ B. A. Larin, “Materials on Lithuanian Dialectology,” *Language and Literature*, vol. 1, L., 1926, pp. 93—170.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 93—94, 98.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 101—104.

¹⁶ B. A. Larin, “On the Word янтарь,” in: *A Collection of Papers Dedicated to Academician, Professor Dr. J. Endzelīns*, Riga, 1959, pp. 149—162.

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This indicates that the Slavs borrowed this word from the Balts, who were already using it before the 12th century. However, the Baltic word amber too, because of its semantic isolation and its lack of productive and etymological connections, is supposedly to be regarded as a loanword. Drawing on the Hungarian words gyenta and gyentár, which have three related meanings, “pine resin; amber; glaze,” the author concludes that the word amber was adopted by the Balts from the earliest inhabitants of the Baltic coast, either via the Ugrian tribes or directly; in the article these people are provisionally called “Pomors” (“поморы”) and are classified as neither Indo-European nor Finno-Ugric.

The article “From Slavic-Baltic Lexicological Comparisons”¹⁷ identifies genetic links between Old Church Slavonic sramъ “shame” and Lithuanian šarma, šerkšnas, Latvian serksnes, serns, sersna. These Baltic words and their Slavic equivalents (Russian сереньй “light gray,” Russian серён, “hoarfrost”) allow the author to infer that the original meaning of the word sramъ was also connected with the sensation of cold. Thus, on the basis of Baltic-language material, an analogy is established between the semantic development of the words stydъ, studъ (and, in part, derivatives of the root merz-/morz-) and sramъ (cold → sensation of cold → affect → feeling of shame). It is worth noting that in other works devoted to word history, too, B. Larinas is not content with the etymology of individual words, but above all seeks to establish general semantic principles characteristic of a particular area of the lexical system.

B. Larinas investigated not only lexical but also grammatical commonalities between the Baltic and Slavic languages. In the article “From Notes on Russian-Lithuanian Correspondences”¹⁸, he compared the present-tense passive participles of Old Russian with the corresponding Lithuanian participles and noted their similarity in meaning. The last work published during the author’s lifetime, “On a Slavic-Baltic-Finnic Isogloss”¹⁹, was also devoted to questions of Baltic and Slavic syntax. It analyzes the use of the direct-object nominative in Baltic, Slavic, and Baltic-Finnic languages. The author discusses at length infinitive and participial constructions with the nominative, still almost unstudied in Lithuanian linguistics (e.g.: Rugeliai piauti labai nusibosta; Linai raunant, reikia šiltai apsivilkti); he demonstrates their archaic character and their connection with corresponding Latvian, Russian, and Finnish constructions. The article advances the idea that in all these languages the direct-object nominative may have been inherited from the substrate of the tribal dialects of the earliest inhabitants of the Baltic region.

B. Larinas’s “A Brief Historical Survey of Lithuanian Lexicography”²⁰ is significant for the history of the Lithuanian language; it discusses Lithuanian lexicogra-

¹⁷ Б. А. Ларин, Из славяно-балтийских лексикологических сопоставлений, «Вестник ЛГУ», 1958, № 14, р. 150—158.

¹⁸ Б. А. Ларин, Из заметок о русско-литовских соответствиях, «Научный бюллетень Ленинградского гос. университета». Л., 1946, № 11—12, р. 30—31.

¹⁹ Б. А. Ларин, Об одной славяно-балто-финской изоглоссе, „Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai“, т. 6, Vilnius, 1963, р. 87—107.

²⁰ Б. А. Ларин, Краткий исторический обзор литовской лексикографии, «Лексикографический сборник», вып. 2, М., 1957, р. 119—144.

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the development of lexicography from the very first dictionaries of the 17th century to the present day. Having described K. Sirvydas’s dictionary in detail and highlighted its originality and its relationship to the sources used, the author shows how later authors of Lithuanian dictionaries, drawing on K. Sirvydas’s tradition, continued to improve lexicographic methods and to expand and diversify the range of words included. The author singles out D. Poška’s manuscript dictionary, written “for the glory and pride of the nation, for future scholars and poets”²¹, as one of the most important monuments of 19th-century lexicography, one that has hitherto received little study. The article presents many interesting excerpts from various Lithuanian dictionaries, comparing them with one another and with the sources used. The chapter on compiling the great “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” is written with considerable polemical fervor. While evaluating the first two volumes of the great “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” critically (and in places even excessively negatively), B. Larinas sets out here the methodological principles for editing the Dictionary, some of which were used in preparing the instructions for editing subsequent volumes.

In 1940, B. Larinas edited the Russian-Lithuanian dictionary compiled by S. Rozėnas. This was the first Russian-Lithuanian dictionary published during the years of Soviet rule²².

B. Larinas was not only the author of works on Lithuanian studies, but also an organizer and leader of research in the field. “B. Larinas actively contributed to organizing and carrying out the most important work of our Soviet philology,” emphasizes Academician K. Korsakas²³. When the need arose in 1951 to improve the compilation of the great “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language,” B. Larinas actively participated in drawing up a new set of editing instructions for the Dictionary. The lexicographers at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature well remember the zeal with which B. Larinas worked to refine the methodological principles for compiling the “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” and give them a firmer scholarly foundation. At his suggestion, it was decided that prefixed verbs should be listed as separate words in the Dictionary, that phraseological expressions should be separated from illustrative examples, and that word meanings should be differentiated more precisely, among other changes. The methodological principles introduced by B. Larinas were implemented in the third and subsequent volumes of the “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language”; our lexicographers continue to follow them.

B. Larinas was one of the most active pioneers and organizers of the Atlas of Lithuanian Language Dialects. He supported the systematic study of dialects, contributed to drawing up the program for collecting material for the Atlas of the Lithuanian Language, and took part in the first dialectological expedition, to the Prienai district, in the summer of 1951. This expedition began the large-scale collection and systematization of dialectological material, which B. Larinas continued to encourage in every way. In papers delivered at dialectological conferences, in reviews of dialect descriptions, and on other occasions, B. Larinas sought to trans-

²¹ Ibid., p. 132.

²² С. Я. Розен, Русско-литовский словарь, под ред. проф. Б. А. Ларина, М., 1941.

²³ K. Korsakas, Įžymaus kalbininko netekus, „Literatūra ir menas“, 1961, Nr. 14(908), p. 7.

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mit his extensive experience in dialectological work to young researchers of Lithuanian dialects and direct their attention to the key problems of historical dialectology. In 1963, on his initiative, a dialectological expedition of staff from the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature was organized to Saratov Oblast to describe the speech of descendants of the insurgents of 1863, exiled by the tsarist authorities. B. Larinas himself planned to join the expedition, but a serious illness that began on its eve and later proved fatal prevented him from taking part in its work.

B. Larinas’s creative work was not confined to purely linguistic research. He was also interested in questions of literary style, to which he devoted a number of articles and papers. B. Larinas’s scholarly interests in this field were equally broad, ranging from the latest works of Russian fiction to the oldest monuments of Indian literature. In polemicizing with philologists who regarded the masterpieces of ancient literature merely as sources of linguistic and historical material foreign to the present day, B. Larinas himself translated hymns from the Rigveda into Russian and published them in 1924²⁴. This was the first literary translation of the Rigveda into Russian, combining philological analysis of the text being translated with a subtle stylist’s intuition and an ability to convey nuances of the original’s style that are difficult to express. B. Larinas is also well known as a researcher and translator of works on Sanskrit poetics and as an editor of a translation of the Mahabharata. Having taken up Lithuanian studies, B. Larinas likewise did not content himself with theoretical work in this field. In 1941–1943 he produced a masterful Russian translation of P. Cvirka’s novel “The Earth Feeds Us.” This translation, favorably assessed by the author himself, has since been published in several editions.

The stylist’s hand is evident not only in B. Larinas’s studies of poetics and translations, but also in his linguistic works. “Among the many writers, B. Larinas,” notes his biographer G. Stepanov, “stands out for the exceptional elegance of his writing. His studies in the history of words [...] in their appeal and polished style resemble skillfully written short stories with unexpected endings; his translations from the Rigveda convey to the reader the subtlest shades of style and the barely perceptible emotional tension of Aryan hymns; his remarks on Gorky and Sholokhov equal the finest examples of Russian literary journalism”²⁵.

B. Larinas’s works are marked by flexibility of thought, original digressions, and generalizations that sometimes seem unexpected at first glance, but are always grounded in a high level of intellectual culture and erudition, which enabled the author to draw freely on material from many languages and literatures²⁶. In this respect, B. Larinas’s works recall those of the finest representatives of the French philological school.

²⁴ From the field of Vedic poetry (verse translations from the Vedas with an introductory article). “Vostok,” L., 1924, No. 4, pp. 46–57.

²⁵ Г. В. Степанов, Борис Александрович Ларин, «Нева», 1963, № 6, р. 163.

²⁶ It was no coincidence that V. Krževskis called B. Larinas “our most learned philologist”; see Г. В. Степанов, Б. А. Ларин, «Вестник ЛГУ», 1963, № 14, р. 147.

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Possessing a rare talent for organization and teaching, B. Larinas was also an exceptionally unassuming and approachable person. In their teacher, B. Larinas’s students saw not only a demanding mentor but also a sincere friend. With his infectious optimism and ability to empathize with others, B. Larinas could always encourage a colleague or student struck by misfortune. Without imposing fussy supervision, B. Larinas sought to guide his students along the path of original creative inquiry, and fought against routine and conformity in scholarship. He had countless students and friends. Were we to try to list the cities whose academic institutions employ B. Larinas’s students, we would compile a long list whose geographical coordinates would span almost the entire territory of the Soviet Union. The linguistic conferences organized at Leningrad University sometimes seemed like periodic reunions of B. Larinas’s students.

B. Larinas also left a considerable group of students in our republic. Several dozen lecturers and research associates who had been B. Larinas’s students work successfully at the Lithuanian SSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature, Vilnius State University named after V. Kapsukas, and Vilnius State Pedagogical Institute.

B. Larinas also made a significant contribution to the development of Baltic studies personnel in the sister republic of Latvia. B. Larinas was almost the only Russian linguistics professor able to read and assess works written in Latvian²⁷.

B. Larinas’s ability to encompass such broad fields of scholarly activity stemmed not only from his immense erudition and talent as a scholar and organizer, but also from his great creative enthusiasm and conviction in the importance of philological research for our society’s culture. Everyone who had the opportunity to know B. Larinas remembers him as always full of new plans, thoughts, and ideas, which he shared with his students and colleagues at every opportunity—in private conversations, meetings, discussions of work, or dissertation defenses (which he invariably called disputations). Convinced of the correctness of a particular view, B. Larinas defended it passionately and unconditionally, regardless of who was involved and without fear of suffering for his opinion. Scholarly integrity, grounded in a high intellectual culture, is one of B. Larinas’s most striking and admirable qualities, and one that will long remain in the memory of all the colleagues and students who knew him.

V. Ambrazas and A. Sabaliauskas

²⁷ Plg. Valodnieka Borisa Larina piemiņai, „Literatūra un Māksla“, 1964.IV.4, Nr. 14(1012), p. 6.