Felix Johannes Oinas (1911-2004)

In March 1997, I interviewed Professor Felix Oinas in his Bloomington home for a class project. He greeted me graciously, gave me a pile of his papers to read, and spoke enthusiastically about his work and life. He was particularly happy on that day for two reasons. Not only was it his eighty-sixth birthday, but he also had just received notification that Estonian President Lennart Meri had awarded him the Order of the State Coat of Arms, II class—the highest Estonian civil honor. Only months before, he had been presented with the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. By the end of our time together that day, I was moved by his overall energy and genuine friendliness, but most of all, by his commitment to scholarship, different cultures, colleagues around the world, and family.

Born in Tartu, Estonia, in 1911, Oinas had an early interest in literature, writing, and languages. As his research developed in school, he turned his attention to Finno-Ugric and Slavic folklore and languages. In the 1930s, he began pursuing his doctorate, studying and teaching in Estonia and Hungary. With war everywhere, Oinas and his family managed to leave Estonia ahead of the Russians, only to later be a witness and survivor of the blitz on Berlin, the Allied bombing of Berlin that immediately preceded Germany's surrender.

After World War II, he continued his research at Heidelberg University. Leaving an unstable postwar Germany, he accepted an offer in 1949 to be a research assistant in the Slavic department at Wayne University in Detroit. As he wrote in the manuscript of his memoirs, translated by his children in 1997, "I was one of the lucky ones who was able to escape to the West with my family before the Russians and to continue my life and work abroad. Although refugee life has been full of hardships, I have been able to live in freedom and to strive to reach my goals and aspirations."

Oinas and his family moved to Bloomington, Indiana, in 1950. He was particularly drawn to Indiana University because of the offerings in folklore and Finno-Ugric languages. While a Russian instructor, he worked with the Folklore Institute and continued his studies in linguistics, completing his doctorate in 1952 and becoming a full professor in 1965. He remained at Indiana, making significant contributions to the university's programs in Baltic and Finnic studies, Slavic languages and literatures, and folklore, as well as to national and international scholarship.

At international conferences during the cold war, Oinas's Soviet colleagues were critical of his work, but he seemed to take it in stride. This was rooted in more than just accepting different approaches to scholarship; it showed an understanding of the political situation his colleagues in communist countries were facing. "Everybody understood," Oinas said. "They didn't say they had to [harshly criticize western scholarship], of course, but it was clear that everybody had to . . . what else could they do?" Since the end of the Soviet Union, however, he has received praise from his colleagues there, even from those who had previously criticized his work.

Oinas's retirement in 1981 did not seem to slow him down. He continued to research and write. At our interview, he handed me some recent articles and mentioned working on several other studies at the time. "I'm constantly working," he said with a grin.

An elected fellow of several scholarly organizations, including the American Folklore Society, Felix Oinas's career accomplishments were many, including working as an active researcher, educator, administrator, editor, and writer. His extensive bibliography is one I think few can rival—more than 400 books, articles, reviews, and other contributions on folklore, literature, and linguistics. Of particular interest to folklorists are Studies in Finnic-Slavic Folklore Relations (1991), Studies in Finnic Folklore: Homage to the Kalevala (1985), Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology (1985), Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World's Great Epics (1978), and Folklore, Nationalism and Politics (1978). In 1982, Egle Zygas and Peter Voorheis published a...