Linguist, writer, literary critic AlexanderZholkovsky today in Russia is mainly known only to narrow specialists. Although his scientific ideas are still being actively developed and are striking in brightness and freshness. We will tell about how the life of this interesting person, and about his creative path.
Родился будущий ученый Александр Жолковский 8 September 1937 in Moscow in a very interesting family. His mother, Debora Semyonovna Rybakova, was a famous musicologist, Ph.D., she taught music history at the Moscow Conservatory and the music school. The father, Zholkovsky Konstantin Platonovich, died while participating in the kayak swim on the White Sea, when his son was only a few months old. And Alik’s father (as everyone still calls Zholkovsky) was replaced by his mother’s second husband, Lev Abramovich Mazel, a famous Soviet musicologist, professor at the Moscow Conservatory. During the war, the boy with his parents was evacuated to Sverdlovsk. But the maternal grandmother and grandfather, who lived in Kiev, fell into the German occupation and died at Babi Yar.
In 1944, the family returned to Moscow, and AlexanderZholkovsky went to school number 50, which he graduated with a gold medal in 1954. This allowed him without exams, but only after an interview to go to college. He chose the prestigious philological faculty, the Roman-Germanic branch of the Moscow State University. M. Lomonosov. His specialization language is English. As a student, Zholkovsky was diligent, he studied well, but he was ideologically too free. For that, at the graduation course he was summoned to the Komsomol meeting and was reprimanded, which in those times automatically blocked his distribution to any more or less decent institution.
After graduating from university, Alexander Zholkovsky,thanks to the intercession and recommendations of the teacher, a respected scientist Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, he went to work at the machine translation laboratory at the Institute of Foreign Languages. M. Toreza. It was the only scientific institution that was not afraid to take a free-thinker. He began as a senior engineer, then became a junior researcher and subsequently 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-Meaning” theory, which was later recognized as almost revolutionary. As a result of the collaboration, several publications on lexical functions and an experimental explanatory-combinatorial dictionary of the Russian language were published. The theory developed by the group in the USSR did not develop, the dictionary was published only in the 1980s in Vienna, after Melchuk emigrated. The laboratory was then a real team of free-thinkers, for which, in fact, everyone suffered.
В 1974 году Жолковского уволили из МГПИИЯ.This happened because after the expulsion of A. Solzhenitsyn from the country, the situation of the free-thinking intelligentsia became much more complicated, the real purge of scientific institutions began. Alexander hardly managed to get a job at the Informelektro Institute, where the group of Y. Apresyan worked under the cover of liberal director S. G. Malinin. The group developed the Melchuk model and was engaged in machine translation. Today, the work of this group is widely recognized and actively published throughout the world.
In parallel with the work in the group Melchuk AlexanderZholkovsky is studying in 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 out the abstract, but the leadership of the institute began to hinder the defense. 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 recalled from the dissertation council a characteristic for a graduate student of Zholkovsky. In the fall of 1968, the invasion of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia happened, and Alik again found himself among the protesters. The MGPII leadership decided to dismiss the dissident and not allow him to defend himself. But dismissal was prevented 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 procedure of protection and later receive the approval of HAC. This was the only case of successful defense of a dissident humanist.
Independent and smart Alexander Zholkovsky,whose biography is connected not only with science, but also with struggle, could not fit into Soviet reality and emigrated in 1979 - first to Vienna, and then to the USA, where he still lives today. 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, moves away from rigid structuralism, begins to write books about prominent Russian writers, is also being implemented in essays, short stories.
Writer Alexander Zholkovsky, whose bookstoday they have a steady circle of admirers, wrote over 30 scientific and memoirs, as well as almost 400 articles. His works in the genre of non-fictional prose invented by him were the most popular with the general public. The best-known books of Zholkovsky are “Stars and a little nervously,” “Vain perfections and other vignettes”, “The Poetics of Pasternak”, “Mikhail Zoshchenko. Poetics of distrust.
