Abstract
The case of Academician Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, whose ‘New Theory of Language’ dominated the humanities in the Soviet Union for more than two decades (approximately from 1929 until 1950), provides the best example of very close cooperation between a prerevolutionary scholar and the Bolshevik regime. Despite his rather conservative political views before 1917, after the October revolution Marr became the strongest supporter of the Bolsheviks in the old core of the Academy of Sciences.
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Notes
N. Ya. Marr, ‘Avtobiografiya,’ in Izbrannye raboty, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo GAIMK, 1933) p. 7.
See, V.A. Mikhan’kova, Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr. Ocherk ego zhisni i nauchnoi deyatel’nosti, 3rd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1949) p. 228.
The Leningrad philologist Olga Freidenberg recalled a conversation on this subject with Marr in one of her letters to Boris Pasternak: Elliott Mossman (ed.), The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg. 1910–1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982) p. 89.
The description of Marr’s linguistic theories is based on the detailed study by L.L. Thomas, The Linguistic Theories of N.Ya. Marr (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957).
Marr, Izbrannye raboty, vol. 1, pp. 79–124.
See B.V. Levshin (ed.), Dokumenty po istorii Akademii Nauk SSSR. 1917–1925 gg. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986) p. 30
See, for instance, Marr’s negative evaluation of the Tsarist policy in Georgia in his Istoriya Gruzii (Kul’turno istoricheskii nabrosok) (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo ‘Amiran’ Al. Arabidze, 1906).
On the Section of Scientific Workers see Loren R Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party. 1927–1932 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) pp. 93
Graham op. cit., pp. 89–119. See also A.E. Levin, ‘Expedient Catastrophe: A Reconsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’, Slavik Review, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 261–79.
See V.D. Esakov, Sovetskaya nauka v gody pervoi pyatiletki (Moscow: Nauka, 1971) p. 192.
Some of Polivanov’s letters to Marr are published in V.G. Lartsev, Evgenii Dmitrievich Polivanov. Stranitsy zhisni i deyatel’nosti (Moscow: Glavnaya redaktsiya vostochnoi literatury, 1988) pp. 280–1.
Marr, Izbrannye raboty, vol. I, p. 346
I.I. Meshchaninov, ‘O polozhenii v lingvistike,’ in Izvestia AN SSSR. Otdelenie yazyka i literatury, vol. 7, no. 6, 1948, pp. 473–85.
Articles by linguists, criticizing Marr, which appeared in response to Stalin’s attack on the ‘New Theory of Language,’ were published in the collection: V.V. Vinogradov (ed.), Protiv izvrashcheniya marksizma v yazukoznanii, vols 1 and 2 (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1951).
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© 1997 Vera Tolz
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Tolz, V. (1997). Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr: Communist Cooperator Extraordinaire. In: Russian Academicians and the Revolution. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25840-6_4
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