Linguist, writer, literary critic Alexander Zholkovsky in Russia today is mostly known only to narrow specialists. Although his scientific ideas are still being actively developed and amaze with brightness and freshness. We will tell about how the life of this interesting person has developed, 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, Ph.D., she taught music history at the Moscow Conservatory and School of Music. Father, Zholkovsky Konstantin Platonovich, died while participating in a kayak swim in the White Sea, when his son was only a few months old. And Alika’s father (as everyone still calls Zholkovsky) was replaced by her mother’s second husband, Lev Abramovich Mazel, the famous Soviet musicologist, professor at the Moscow Conservatory. During the war, the boy and his parents were evacuated to Sverdlovsk. But the maternal grandparents who lived in Kiev fell into 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 to go to college without examinations, but only through an interview. He chose the prestigious philological faculty, the Romano-Germanic branch of Moscow State University. M. Lomonosov. His specialization language was English. Zholkovsky was a diligent student, he studied well, but ideologically he was too free. For what he was summoned to the Komsomol meeting at the graduation course and received a reprimand, which at that time automatically closed his distribution to any more or less decent institution.
The path of the Soviet scientist
After graduation, Alexander Zholkovsky, thanks to the intercession and recommendation of a teacher, respected scientist Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, joined the machine translation laboratory at the Institute of Foreign Languages named after M. Toreza. It was the only scientific institution that was not afraid to take a freethinker. He began as a senior engineer, then became a junior researcher and later grew to a senior researcher. Zholkovsky was engaged in structural semantics, and his articles were noted by the outstanding linguist Igor Aleksandrovich Melchuk. He invited the young scientist to his working group, which then developed the “Text-Sense” theory, which was later recognized as almost revolutionary. As a result of cooperation, several publications on lexical functions and an experimental explanatory-combinatorial dictionary of the Russian language saw the light of day. 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 team of freethinkers, for which, in fact, everyone suffered.
In 1974, Zholkovsky was fired from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. This happened because after the deportation of A. Solzhenitsyn from the country, the situation of free-thinking intelligentsia was greatly complicated, and a real purge of scientific institutions began. Alexander hardly managed to get a job at the Institute “Informelectro”, where the group of Y. Apresyan worked under the guise of the liberal director S. G. Malinin. The group developed the Melchuk model and was engaged in machine translation. Today, the work of this group has been widely recognized and is actively published worldwide.
Defense of the thesis
In parallel with working in the Melchuk group, Alexander Zholkovsky is studying at the graduate school of the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University. The theme of the work was the exotic Somali language. In 1968, the dissertation was ready, Alik had already sent an abstract, but the institute's leadership began to impede the defense. The reason for this is a 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 dissertation council a characteristic for graduate student Zholkovsky. In the fall of 1968, the Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, and Alik was again among the protesters. The leadership of MGPII decided to dismiss the dissident and prevent him from defending himself. But dismissal was hindered by the public of the institute, which openly defended Zholkovsky. As a result, in the spring of 1969, he managed to brilliantly go through the defense procedure and later received the approval of the Higher Attestation Commission. This was the only case of successful defense of a dissident humanitarian.
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 emigrated in 1979 - first to Vienna, and then to the USA, 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 prominent Russian writers, and is also realized in essay writing, a short story.
Books
The writer Alexander Zholkovsky, whose books today have a steady circle of admirers, has written more than 30 scientific and memoirs, as well as almost 400 articles. The most popular among the general public were his works in the genre of non-fiction prose he invented. The most famous books of Zholkovsky are “Stars and a little nervous”, “Vain perfection and other vignettes”, “Pasternak's Poetics”, “Mikhail Zoshchenko. The poetics of distrust. "