Alexander Zholkovsky: the way of life and creativity

Linguist, writer, literary critic Alexander Zholkovsky today in Russia is mostly known only to narrow specialists. Although his scientific ideas are still actively developed and amaze with brightness and freshness. Let's talk about the life of this interesting person, and about his creative path.

Childhood and origin

The future scientist Alexander Zholkovsky was born on September 8, 1937 in Moscow in a very interesting family. His mother, Deborah Semenovna Rybakova, was a well-known musicologist, candidate of science, she taught music history at the Moscow Conservatory and a music school. Father, Zholkovsky Konstantin Platonovich, was killed while taking part in a kayak swim in the White Sea when his son was only a few months old. And father Alik (as everyone still calls Zholkovsky) was replaced by his second husband, Lev Abramovich Mazel, a famous Soviet musicologist, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. During the war, the boy and his parents were in evacuation in Sverdlovsk. But the grandmother and grandfather on the maternal line, who lived in Kiev, fell into the German occupation and died in Babi Yar.

Education

In 1944, the family returned to Moscow, and Alexander Zholkovsky went to school number 50, which he graduated with a gold medal in 1954. This allowed him without exams, but only in an interview to enter the institute. He chose the prestigious philological faculty, the Roman-German branch of the Moscow State University. M. Lomonosov. His language of specialization became English. Student Zholkovsky was diligent, he studied well, but ideologically he was too free. For which he was summoned to the Komsomol meeting on the graduation course and was reprimanded that for those times he automatically closed the distribution to any more or less decent institution.

The way of the Soviet scientist

At the end of the university, Alexander Zholkovsky, thanks to the intercession and recommendations of the teacher, respected scientist Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, went to work in the machine translation laboratory at the Institute of Foreign Languages. M. Thorez. This was the only scientific institution that was not afraid to take a freethinker. He began as a senior engineer, then became a junior research fellow and subsequently grew to a senior research fellow. Zholkovsky was engaged in structural semantics, and his articles were noticed by the outstanding linguist Igor A. Melchuk. He invited the young scientist to his working group, which then developed the theory of "Text-Sense", later recognized as almost revolutionary. As a result of cooperation, the light saw several publications on lexical functions and an experimental explanatory-combinatorial dictionary of the Russian language. The theory developed by the group in the USSR was not developed, the dictionary was published only in the 80s in Vienna, after Melchuk emigrated. The laboratory was then a real collective of freethinkers, for which, in fact, all suffered.

In 1974, Zholkovsky was dismissed from the Moscow State Pedagogical University. This happened because after the expulsion from the country of A. Solzhenitsyn, the position of the free-thinking intelligentsia became very complicated, a real purge of scientific institutions began. Alexander hardly managed to get a job in the institute "Informelektro", where the group worked Yu. Apresyan under the guise of the liberal director S. G. Malinin. The group developed Melchuk's model and was engaged in machine translation. Today, the work of this group has received wide recognition and is actively published all over the world.

Defense of the thesis

In parallel with work in Melchuk's group, Alexander Zholkovsky studies in the graduate school of the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University. The theme of the work was the exotic language of Somalia. In 1968, the thesis was ready, Alik had already sent out an abstract, but the institute's leadership began to obstruct protection. The reason for this is the letter signed by Zholkovsky in support of the arrested dissidents of Ginzburg and Galansky, accused of creating and distributing samizdat. The Institute withdrew from the dissertational council the characteristics of the post-graduate student Zholkovsky. In the fall of 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, and Alik was again among the protesters. The leadership of MGPIYA decided to dismiss the dissident and prevent him from defending himself. But the dismissal was obstructed by the public of the institute, which openly rose to defend Zholkovsky. As a result, in the spring of 1969 he succeeded brilliantly to undergo the procedure of protection and later obtain the approval of the VAK. This was the only case of successful protection of a dissident-humanist.

Years of emigration

Independent and intelligent Alexander Zholkovsky, whose biography is connected not only with science but also with the struggle, could not fit into Soviet reality and in 1979 he emigrated - first to Vienna, and then to the United States, where he still lives. For several years he worked at Cornell University, and since 1983 - at the University of Southern California. Gradually Alexander Zholkovsky, whose photo is in any linguistic encyclopedia, departs from rigid structuralism, begins to write books about outstanding Russian writers, is also realized in essays and novellas.

Books

The writer Alexander Zholkovsky, whose books have a steady circle of admirers today, wrote more than 30 scientific and memoir works, as well as nearly 400 articles. The greatest popularity among the general public was received by his works in the genre of non-prose prose invented by him. The most famous books by Zholkovsky are "Stars and a little nervously", "Vain perfection and other vignettes", "Poetics of Pasternak", "Mikhail Zoshchenko. Poetics of distrust. "