| 1 | Name: | Dr. Vyacheslav V. Ivanov | |
| Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles & Russian State University for the Humanities | ||
| Year Elected: | 1994 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1929 | ||
| Death Date: | October 7, 2017 | ||
Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov was born in 1929 in Moscow. Thanks to his parents (a well-known Russian writer and an actress of the Meyerhold avant-garde theatre) and their friends, he received a traditional Russian education and began writing poems, essays and prose works at an early age (most of which were never published). He continued his education at Moscow University (in the departments of Romance and Germanic philology and Sanskrit and Indo-European Studies) and received his Ph.D. in Hittite and Indo-European linguistics in 1955. He then taught comparative and general linguistics there, until he was dismissed in 1958 because of his friendship with Boris Pasternak. Due to political reasons, for thirty years he was unable to travel abroad as the government denied him an official travel visa. Fortunately, he was still able to continue his research work at the Institutes of the Academy of Sciences. In 1988 he was invited to return to Moscow University where he then became Chair of the new Department of the Theory and History of World Culture and Director of its affiliated Research Institute. Amidst the new political trends in Russia, he was elected to serve in the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, representing the researchers from the Institutes of the Academy. He has been appointed to several academies in Russia, Latvia, Great Britain, and the United States. With several Moscow and Tartu friends, he co-founded the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. In 1988, Professor Ivanov began teaching regularly at American universities - first at Yale University, then at Stanford University, and finally at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Indo-European Studies Program. Ivanov shared his time between Los Angeles and Moscow, where he taught in the Russian State University for the Humanities. He authored more than fifteen books and 1,000 journal articles. From 1992 on, he was editor-in-chief of a new journal in Slavic studies: Elementa. Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics, which continues the tradition of the Moscow-Tartu school. Professor Ivanov also directed the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow and played a central role in promoting the necessity of open access to information in the democratization of Russian society. In addition to his standing as one of the great minds in 20th century intellectual life, Professor Ivanov was one of the greatest defenders of human rights in his country. Vyacheslav Ivanov died on October 7, 2017 at the age of 88. | |||