Viktor Markovich Zhivov (1945-2013)

On 17 April, Viktor Zhivov died in Berkeley, California, just a few weeks after having been diagnosed with lung cancer at age 68. He was one of the most engaged scholars of Russian language, culture, history, and religion. An immensely generous human being and a genuine polymath, he had a deep influence, both personal and intellectual, on virtually everyone with the good fortune to have made his acquaintance.

Born in Moscow into an intelligentsia family (his father was a translator of Polish literature and a confidant of Maksim Gor´kii), Viktor Markovich—Vitia to his many friends—pursued the study of Russian language and linguistics, receiving both his candidate's and doctoral degrees (1977 and 1992) from the Kafedra of Applied and Theoretical Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, at Moscow State University. He taught there for several years before moving on to the Institute of Russian Language at the Academy of Sciences and, beginning in 1993, teaching every spring semester in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He was fond of saying that his first love had been mathematics, at which he excelled. But when he realized that he would have to learn physics, a subject less dear to his heart, he chose to abandon a career in mathematics for the study of language. All of us in the field are exceedingly grateful to physics for having pushed Viktor Markovich in our direction.¹

Viktor Markovich's initial publications concentrated on the structure of Russian language, morphology, syntax, and spelling. He continued writing in this area throughout his professional life and had only recently completed the draft of yet another magnum opus, a two-volume history of the Russian literary language, as he put it during our last conversation in late March, "from Saint Vladimir to Putin." Before that, he had produced numerous articles and at least two books on Russian language and linguistics, most notably Iazyk i kul´tura v Rossii XVIII veka.² Iazyk i kul´tura almost immediately began to draw the attention of scholars in multiple disciplines, and it marked Zhivov's emergence as a defining and boundary-crossing thinker at the intersection of language, culture, and history. His studies of Russian literature, written throughout his career, also have had a major influence on scholarship, especially his articles on the 18th-century discovery of classics and the emergence of a Russian Classicism; his extensive work on the poetry of Aleksandr Sumarokov; and other studies of Mikhail Lomonosov, Vasilii Trediakovskii, and Alexander Herzen.³

As has been widely noted in the many tributes already published and posted on the Internet, Zhivov was deeply influenced by formalist and structural semiotic approaches to language and culture, most prominently the "dual models" paradigm of the Moscow-Tartu school of Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, the latter as his mentor. This influence comes through clearly in his writings through the mid- to late 1980s, including some of his early essays on religion, most obviously the groundbreaking article "Tsar´ i Bog," which he wrote with Uspenskii.⁴ Zhivov gradually came to consider binary models, for all their interpretive power, to be too rigid and over-determined. In a series of gentle manifestos—invitations to debate might be a better term—he declared his independence from the Tartu model, most famously in his 1997 essay coauthored with Alan Timberlake, "Rasstavaias´ so strukturalizmom (tezisy dlia diskussii)" (Parting Ways with Structuralism: Theses for a Discussion) and then in "Moskovsko-Tartuskaia semiotika: Ee dostizheniia i ee ogranicheniia."⁵ Iazyk i kul´tura, published a year earlier, had already reflected this change in his thinking, most markedly in its discussion of the evolving literary language and its continued connection to and dependence on elements of Church Slavonic.

For historians, especially those like myself with an interest in the social history of language and the circulation of texts, the evolution of Viktor Markovich's scholarship constituted an act of liminality twice over, one that made his work accessible to an ever-widening audience. Epistemologically, he positioned himself at the intersection of the formal study of language and the emerging field of...