ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ

Vilnius University

Research interests: grammatical theory, the history of grammatical scholarship, and sociolinguistics.

Aldonas Pupkis

JUOZAS BALČIKONIS AND THE GREAT

DICTIONARY OF THE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE

Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2013, 478 p.

ISBN 978-609-411-3

We begin reading every scholarly work with its preface, because there the author states the aim of the work and the method chosen. Here we are told how the idea arose to undertake a broader, synthetic study of the history of Lithuanian lexicography. Nevertheless, the author admits that he was less concerned with synthesizing than with recounting the beginnings of the preparation of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language and other work related to Prof. Juozas Balčikonis’s lexicographical activities, as well as providing information about the people who assisted the dictionary’s editorial team in one way or another. He leaves it to the reader to judge how well he has succeeded. This is modesty taken a little too far: everyone writes as they think best, and reads as much as they are able to understand.

Balčikonis envisioned the dictionary as a monument to the nation, and that vision determined the type of dictionary. There are branches of linguistics that have no connection with national identity. I will not list them all here; comparative historical grammar will suffice, since this branch of linguistics was dominant at the outset of Lithuanian lexicography (in Lithuania, for too long), while the idea of general linguistics that emerged in France at the beginning of the 20th century—encouraging the separation of diachrony from synchrony and greater interest in language as a system—had not yet reached Lithuania. Consequently, following the view that had taken hold in Germany in the second half of the 19th century, that scientific linguistics could only be historical, Lithuanian linguists were for a long time divided into scholars and practitioners, and their work into scholarly and practical work, the latter having nothing to do with science. Thus Kazimieras Jaunius and Kazimieras Būga were true scholars, while Jonas Jablonskis and Juozas Balčikonis were practitioners, Balčikonis also being a stylist (p. 24). Dictionaries, too, were divided into scholarly and practical ones. This division of linguists and linguistic work was, and remains, fundamentally flawed.

Lithuanian scholars of the first half of the 20th century who had studied in Germany still did not understand that the bridle of historical-comparative linguistics would have severely constrained the dictionary. They thought that only the qualifications they had acquired were suitable for extensive scholarly work (p. 24).

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Juozas Balčikonis and the great Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language

But what was then considered scholarship? The etymologies of words are undoubtedly impressive scholarship, but they are easy to criticize: Būga criticized Preobrazhensky’s etymological dictionary, and much later Vincas Urbutis criticized Konstantīns Karulis’s etymological dictionary of the Latvian language, because even several etymologies of the same word can be equally convincing. For example, I know of four etymologies of the name Lithuania, and who can say which of them is correct? The history of grammatical forms, drawing on facts from various languages and seeking to reconstruct grammatical forms as far back as Proto-Indo-European, can also prove hypothetical in many respects. Let us think carefully about what would have happened if, by 2002, the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language had been compiled using the historical-comparative method, with word etymologies. Such a dictionary would have had neither practical nor scholarly value, because scholarship does not stand still over time, whereas the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language took decades to compile and was intended to last forever.

If we date the beginning of the dictionary not from Būga’s declaration that he was beginning to compile it (1212), but from Balčikonis’s request to appoint him its editor-in-chief (1930), compiling the dictionary took a little over seventy years. During that time, the country lived through war, occupation, and the cult of personality with all its consequences; editors and generations of dictionary compilers and word collectors changed, but work on the dictionary did not stop, even in the most difficult times. What would have become of that historical dictionary when historical-comparative linguistics itself had run its course, and how useful would it have been to the Lithuanian nation? Now, however, we have a twenty-volume “skyscraper” and have “outbuilt the Russians,” as our renowned compatriot Algirdas Julius Greimas once wrote, at the end of the 20th century, in Literature and Art (1991 VI 13).

During the Russian occupation, the dictionary’s scope was artificially restricted: it could not be larger than the Russian-language dictionary. The Russian-language dictionary was planned to have seventeen volumes, so heaven forbid you smaller nations should exceed that limit! Yet the richness of a language depends not on the size of its nation, but on its genius and on the ability of its industrious workers to gather more honey. After the twenty volumes were published, I have heard, the Institute still had about half a million cards, and a program to supplement the dictionary was already in place.

In the same article, Greimas wrote that the dictionary had not stood up to scholarly criticism, and that its editor, Balčikonis, was a man who loved work more than language. Even celebrities sometimes say the wrong thing. What does it mean to love a language separately from the people who speak it? All sciences, including the humanities, seek to understand the world and to use that understanding for human benefit. Scholarship for scholarship’s sake was brilliantly lampooned by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, where he showed how scholars try to extract sunlight from cucumbers. It must be said that the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language we have today withstands all criticism, because, although for objective reasons it could not avoid a considerable number of shortcomings, it provides enough factual material for various scholarly works, including specialized dictionaries.

From the account in Aldonas Pupkis’s monograph of Balčikonis’s appointment as editor-in-chief of the dictionary, one can infer that it was not the result of personal connections with

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the minister of education or the prime minister, but rather the judgment of an educated and influential person who knew Balčikonis well: that only Balčikonis, who followed in Jablonskis’s footsteps in linguistic scholarship, could properly lead such an extraordinary undertaking, so necessary for the nation.

Jablonskis was a linguist with a sound theoretical grounding, but he did not think that the various (sometimes even contradictory) speculations of individual linguists about language could be of significance to the nation. What it needs is not theories, but concrete works (a grammar, a dictionary). That is why, in the preface to his 1922 grammar, he wrote: “One way or another, I am chiefly concerned with practical matters: at school, we must teach not so much grammatical terms and the various complexities of language as the living elements of language needed for the life of a cultured Lithuanian and for his work in Lithuanian society” (Jablonskis 1957: 183–184). This does not mean that Jablonskis’s grammar contains no theory. Attempts were made to criticize Jablonskis’s conception of verbal aspect, tenses, and moods, but in time it became clear that his grammatical theory was not so easily susceptible to criticism.

When Balčikonis, already advanced in years, was asked to review a candidate’s dissertation on verbal aspect, he, like Jablonskis, did not want to delve into “theoretical complexities.” His agreement to serve as opponent was expressed in these words: “If you had written about a dialect... I don’t understand those theories at all, but what can one do... I agree, because you need a professor, and where will you find one now?..” Such a remark, like Jablonskis’s admission, does not at all mean that Balčikonis was uninterested in linguistic scholarship. In his view, however, linguistic scholarship was not a matter of subjective theoretical speculation, but of direct, practical work. Descriptions of dialects are necessary because dialects are rapidly disappearing; how one understands those aspects is not very important.

On February 23, 1930, Jablonskis left this vale of tears, while Balčikonis was still young and energetic enough, and, as Greimas says, a man who loved work; only such a man could shoulder the immense burden of responsibility entrusted to him. Pupkis, having gathered everything he found in archives and the press and chosen an academic style of presentation, is very cautious throughout, and his explanations are very circumspect. Yet his monograph tells us that “Skardžius wrote bluntly in 1962 that the dictionary was headed by Balčikonis, appointed by Smetona” (p. 27). And here, with some regret, one pauses to reflect: why are there no people in the highest offices of government today who truly love Lithuania and the Lithuanian nation, not merely in grand words? Why, during these decades of independent Lithuania, have we failed to create a national school system? Why has students’ literacy declined, why has the prestige of teachers and schools fallen so low, and why do even linguists themselves betray the language?.. Many more such questions could be posed. In interwar Lithuania, the working conditions of linguists were by no means very comfortable or easy, but there was pride in their nation and its language. As a result, standard Lithuanian was codified before long, and a national school system was created that endured through the war and even the first, bloody postwar decade.

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What, then, did Balčikonis inherit from Būga, whom he so urged in his letters to go away even to the countryside and devote himself solely to the dictionary, while offering to take on all the worries associated with its financing, and whom he was even displeased with when he failed to receive the prompt answers he wanted from Būga (Balčikonis 1982: 256–258)? Balčikonis, who knew Būga and greatly respected him as a scholar, probably could not even imagine, when urging him in 1922 and 1923 to write the dictionary as soon as possible and offering to help him in every way, what kind of dictionary Būga had conceived and what opportunities he had at that time to bring it to print.

When he began writing the dictionary, Būga felt obliged to explain himself. Lietuvių kalbos žodyno In the preface to the first fascicle, he wrote that he had devoted himself to a dictionary in 1912. There he also indicated the circumstances in which the material had been collected, how much had been gathered, and where it came from. Būga had not counted the slips (small notes), but when he began writing the dictionary, he had 14–17 poods, of which 10–13 poods had been collected in Kaunas from 1921 through the first day of December 1923. However, the material he had was not yet sufficient to allow the dictionary to be printed, because he could see that it would be incomplete and imperfect.

“That I agreed to send the dictionary into the light of day in the state it is in today is the fault of our society and government, especially the latter, which has long been urging me, through the Minister of Education, to begin printing sooner.

“Here I must, on behalf of myself and other linguists, thank our government—the legislature (the Seimas) and the executive (the Cabinet of Ministers)—which spared no great expense for this work of culture and scholarship. Thanks also to all those who helped with the dictionary!” (Būga 1924: VI). [So... And we students were told lies at the university that the bourgeois government had not cared at all about the dictionary, and that Būga had fallen ill from poverty and died young. Yet Būga’s thanks to the government show that things had been quite different.] Būga goes on to write:

“A more appropriate name for my dictionary would be not a dictionary, but a collection of dictionary material. My dictionary is not even systematically compiled, since all its material was gathered intermittently and by chance. As I did not intend to print the collected dictionary material right away, I had not even made a plan for the dictionary” (1924: VI).

“The contents of the dictionary include all Lithuanian words, without distinction. It provides space not only for common nouns (appellativa) (...), but also for proper names (nomina propria) (...). The dictionary does not concern itself at all with whether a word is Lithuanian in origin or foreign, since all words are equal to it” (1924: VII).

“The language used for explanations of words in my dictionary is not uniform. Here the reader will find one word explained in Lithuanian, another in German, a third in Russian or Polish, a fourth in Latin or some other language. I could not avoid this mixture of languages (‘Babel’) because of the lack of time. Of course, it would have been possible, and even desirable, to use one language consistently throughout the dictionary, but the difficulty is that this task requires a great deal of time. Thus, in order to speed up the writing and printing of the dictionary, I had to leave the words explained in the language I found in the sources” (1924: VII).

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To find out what Būga did and how he did it, one must read the dictionary text. Here I will give just one example. Since the standard language had not yet taken shape, alongside akmuo we also find dialectal forms akmenas, akminas, and their diminutive forms, too, appear as headwords: akmenelis and akminelis. And under the entry for the word akmuo itself, all its cases are described, along with their history and dialectology, to use Būga’s terms, as well as its etymology. No individual—not even Būga—and no collective could have written a dictionary of this kind. Yet, pressed by everyone, Būga pledged: “From the second semester I could leave the university for a year, provided I had time to prepare at least Volume I (about 900–1000 pages) for printing. But I will be able to do this once I have firm guarantees that my living expenses will be covered without the university and other work” (1924: 14).

Suppose Fate had not arranged things differently and Būga had written the kind of dictionary we see in the first fascicles; it is doubtful that it would have retained its scholarly value for very long, since no field of scholarship, including linguistics, ever reaches an end, nor can it. Therefore, the appointment as chief editor of the dictionary of Balčikonis, who did not strive too hard to embrace the historicism fashionable in Lithuania at the time, was well considered. Pranas Skardžius, of course, could not help feeling offended that it was not he, the scholar, but the practitioner Balčikonis who was appointed chief editor.

By agreeing to serve as chief editor of the dictionary, Balčikonis assumed not only the legal and moral rights that his opponents were so concerned about, but also all the responsibilities, which few others could have carried out so conscientiously. He would not have taken on such responsibility had he not been confident in his scholarly competence and administrative abilities. “Once the work began, the editor had to attend to many matters: arranging premises, selecting employees, reviewing the card files, and planning and organizing the work ahead” (32).

I am reading this monograph, and much of it is already familiar to me from the Rinktinių raštų of Balčikonis, compiled and published by Pupkis, as well as from the memoirs of Balčikonis’s relatives, colleagues, and students, published through his efforts under the title Dek žodį prie žodžio – turėsi žodyną, and from what I experienced in my dealings with Balčikonis—not only in lectures, but also in conversations with Brone Vosylyte and Antane Kučinskaite, who had worked in the dictionary editorial office almost from its very beginning; with my fellow student and devoted pupil of Balčikonis, Vytautas Vitkauskas, who beautifully completed the work begun by his teacher; and at home, where I lived with Jonas Paulauskas, whose surname can be found in every volume of the Lietuvių kalbos žodyno published under the new instructions.

From 1956 to 1960, Vosylyte and I lived in the same dormitory, in adjacent rooms. When, because of a serious illness, she was unable to go to the Institute but could still write and edit the dictionary, our rooms became one apartment: Paulauskas would bring card-file boxes and dictionary texts home from the Institute, while I helped with household tasks. Along with the work, the dictionary’s problems also came home with us, and Balčikonis often visited Vosylyte while she worked at home (bringing little honeycombs).

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Under these circumstances, I heard their conversations and saw how the dictionary was written and edited, what its proofs and checks looked like, since the dictionary entries often lay on Paulauskas’s desk as well. The dictionary’s writers and editors were people who spared neither time nor effort for the work they had taken on: they worked even when ill at home, during their hours and days of rest, and during vacations. They had been taught to behave this way by Balčikonis, who loved his work.

The archival material used by Pupkis adds to our knowledge of Balčikonis’s work and ideas, and of the natural, gradual emergence of instructions for compiling the dictionary; in this way, the monograph’s text comes to resemble a history of the dictionary’s compilation. Perhaps that is precisely why some of the author’s colleagues and acquaintances might have thought that “The History of the Great ‘Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language’” would also have been a suitable title for the monograph. But that is not the whole story. The title the author chose better reflects the monograph’s content, because Balčikonis worked in such a way that, even after he left the dictionary and passed away, despite all the debates, changing times, and ideological trials, his spirit remained and guided the work on the dictionary. Only the colleagues and pupils he had trained could continue the work Balčikonis had begun so well.

Once all twenty volumes had been published and the idea arose to produce an electronic version of the dictionary, it became possible to improve things that previously could not or had not been done. Vytautas Vitkauskas read the entire dictionary and, having catalogued errors in the transposition of dialect words and forms, published them in a separate book in 2006, Corrections to the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language. The author writes: “In the autumn of 1964, I was transferred from the Institute’s Department of Dialectology to the Dictionary Department, where I was mainly interested in the transposition of dialect words and forms. I was not the only one to notice questionable items; we also talked with lexicographers and dialectologists.”

That is how it all began. Toward the end of my service, I wrote everything down in a little book. My greatest teacher, Prof. Z. Zinkevičius, Associate Prof. A. Laigonaitė, and my colleagues E. Grinaveckienė, A. Jonait y tė, D. Garg asaitė, J. Paulauskas, Ž. Urbanavičiūtė-Mark evičienė, and others encouraged me, as did Prof. Balčikonis’s teaching to avoid mistakes” (Vitkauskas 2006: 7).

It would have been very good if errors in determining the hierarchy of words’ grammatical characteristics and lexical meanings had also been catalogued and explained. But the sciences of Lithuanian grammar and lexicology were incomparably weaker than dialectology, and no specialist in these fields had the same connection with the dictionary as the dialectologist Vytautas Vitkauskas.

I will not discuss here matters of morality, the authorities’ concern for national culture, or the prestige of the school and teacher. These can be understood both from Balčikonis’s Selected Works and from the monograph under review, which states that Balčikonis chose the teacher Napalys Grigas as his right-hand man (secretary) and, in general, formed the entire dictionary editorial team from teachers with a feel for living speech. After all, all our great linguists had been teachers at the beginning of their careers, later becoming distinguished scholars.

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The authorities spared no money for the dictionary, but archival documents show that care was taken not to abuse this, and to economize. Moreover, considering life in agrarian Lithuania at the time, when 100 litas could buy a good cow, the editor’s salary of 1,000 litas was, of course, very high. The teacher Pranas Gailiūnas, later a school inspector and associate professor at Vilnius University, recounted that after graduating from university he found a job at a primary school. There was not all that much work, and he earned 300 litas. For 100 litas, he rented a room with meals and service included. He still had 200 litas left in his pocket, and as a bachelor he did not know how to spend it.

Farmers lived quite differently, because what they grew on their land was very cheap, while what they had to buy in town was expensive. You could not buy a pair of shoes for a centner of rye. But let us not delve into the economy of the country, although those archival sources invite us to reflect on it too—especially if, from childhood, you still remember your mother splitting a thick Swedish match in half to light the stove, your father driving with leather reins only to church or town, men keeping their wedding clothes for funerals (they could not grow fat under the burden of hard farm work and worries), and everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, otherwise wearing homespun clothes and going barefoot or in wooden clogs—and perhaps being happier than today’s rich.

The monograph’s author’s work in preparing Balčikonis’s Selected Works, the recollections of the dictionary’s collaborators, and archival material presented in chronological order provide a true picture of the dictionary’s creation from the very beginning: in independent Lithuania, during the war years, and amid the hardships of the postwar period, when people searched for Sali’s hidden card index. However, one would have preferred a somewhat different account in the section “In the Clutches of Bolshevik Censorship,” so that younger linguists who were not yet alive in those times would not get the impression that “our own people shot their own” for no reason. They were forced to do so.

The unimaginably brutal ideological coercion of the VKP(b) first manifested itself at the very center of the empire and spread from there throughout its entire expanse. The dictionary headed by Balčikonis did not fall into the clutches of Bolshevik censorship because of Žiugžda’s rampaging (Kostas Korsakas, Genrikas Zimanas, and the linguist and publishing-house editor Jonas Kabelka were also rampaging). They would not have done so had the “atomic bomb” not exploded over Russian literature and art in 1946. No one would have demanded that works on linguistics and other sciences be written in the light of Stalin’s language science had there not been a highly ideologized debate between linguists and the Marrists in Pravda in 1950; it was brought to an end by a prominent Georgian linguist, who requested an interview with Stalin, formulated the questions himself, answered them on Stalin’s behalf, and published them in the same Pravda (of course, paying certain obeisances to Great Russian chauvinism as well; otherwise Stalin would not have allowed the “brilliant” work to be published under his name).

In 1946, the VKP(b) Central Committee considered the journals Leningrad and Zvezda, Muradeli’s opera The Great Life, the works of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, and very strictly

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condemned them for their apoliticism. The main speaker was Andrei Zhdanov. It was said that after that discussion Zoshchenko’s mental health was even impaired.

Pupkis used the collection of documents published in 1991 Rašytojas pokario metais and probably remembered that immediately afterward the Lithuanian Writers’ Congress took place, at which the functions of A. Zhdanov were performed by Kazys Preikšas, secretary of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). At this Writers’ Union congress, both the Writers’ Union chairman Petras Cvirka and Eduardas Mieželaitis, a prewar Young Communist, had to beat their breasts. The most terrible accusation was made against Balys Sruoga, who, having returned from one camp, realized that he could easily end up in another and, barely able to stand, delivered a long “confessional” speech, not a word of which he himself believed (Rašytojas pokario metais 1991: 72). Not understanding the madness of communist politics, after returning from that horrific meeting Sruoga wrote a letter to Cvirka, thinking that the Writers’ Union chairman must have had some power.

Neither Cvirka nor Žiugžda had any power. Balčikonis therefore saw the futility of making excuses and promising to mend one’s ways. In the postwar years, Balčikonis was given a great deal, not without Žiugžda’s initiative. “From 1944 to 1959 Balčikonis worked at Vilnius University; in 1948 he was awarded the title of professor. From 1944 to 1950 he headed the Department of Lithuanian Language. From 1945 to 1952 Balčikonis was director of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR; in 1946 he was elected an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR, and in 1945 he was awarded the honorary title of Merited Scientist of the Lithuanian SSR” (Sabaliauskas 1982: 38).

Sudėliokime Balčikonio paaukštinimų metus iš eilės: 1944, 1945, 1946 ir 1948 (inirtingiausių žodyno svarstymų ir kritikos) metai, ir dar pridurkime, kad Balčikonis buvo aprūpintas puikiu butu mokslininkų namuose, tai ir suprasime santūrų Balčikonio elgesį žiaurių žodyno svarstymų ir neteisingų jo darbo vertinimų metu, suprasime ir Vitkausko parašymą, kad „Tarybinė vyriausybė gražiai įvertino jo nuopelnus“ (Vitkauskas 1985: 60). O kodėl Žiugžda šėliojo, pats pasikvietęs Balčikonį dirbti į Lietuvos aukščiausias mokslo įstaigas, taip pat bus suprantama, jei kam pavyks aprašyti tuos baisius stalinizmo laikus. 1948 m. gegužės 21 d. LTSR MA Visuomeninių mokslų skyriaus išplėstiniame biuro posėdyje buvo svarstomas Lietuvių kalbos žodyno II tomas. Jame Balčikonis kalbėjo apie žodyno pobūdį, darbo eigą, apimtį ir tikslą. Ir paskui turėjo išklausyti tų, kurie išsijuosę kritikavo žodyną ir gal net patys netikėjo tuo, ką sako.

At the 4th Party Conference of the Dzerzhinsky District of the Lithuanian Communist Party, held on June 3–4, 1950, Pušinis harshly criticized Žiugžda, saying that at a time when “Bolshevism and Soviet power are sweeping from their path not only the bourgeois order but also the pitiful remnants of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties [...], he began gathering into the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR a pair from every species, so to speak; that is, representatives of every bourgeois party were admitted to the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR. The Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR now has among its members former scouts, nationalists, Christian Demo-

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crats, maximalists, or simply terrorists, chauvinists, or simply capitalists, theologians, and even the head of the Universal Church” (Rašytojas pokario metais 1991: 251–252).

Pušinis then lashed out at the economist Petras Šalčius, the poet, writer, and literary scholar Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, the doctor of philology and orientalist Seraja Šapšalas, and the oncologist Viktor Kutorga. And this is what he said about Balčikonis:

“The fact is that Balčikonis, an activist in the Christian Democratic Party, former head of the Theology Department at Kaunas University, former theologian and professor of theology, is now working at the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR as director of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature.

Allow me to ask Comrade Žiugžda, secretary of the Party organization of the Academy of Sciences, what theologian Balčikonis can contribute to Soviet science, having so readily been elevated to the rank of academician and professor of Lithuanian language and literature?” (1991: 251–253).

What, then, could Žiugžda do, if “The Conference demands that the Party organization of the Academy of Sciences and its secretary, Comrade J. Žiugžda, resolutely put an end to liberalism in their work and to the so-called scholars—former members of bourgeois parties—take account of the criticism of shortcomings in their work voiced at the conference, and organize their work in accordance with the tasks of socialist construction” (1991: 253). Žiugžda asked the new district Party committee to examine Pušinis’s remarks and help the Academy of Sciences resolve the problems that had arisen. He dared only to say that Balčikonis was not a theologian but a philologist, but claimed that he “had not rid himself of the bourgeois stench; his entire attitude toward work, its content and organization, and the training of personnel—all of this is permeated with bourgeois individualism; bourgeois objectivism and apoliticism are evident everywhere. And the Institute’s work has gone unfinished year after year, with no leadership whatsoever. As has already been said, the question of replacing the leadership of the Institute of Language is now arising” (1991: 255).

I read about this terrible time and wonder whether it will ever be properly understood and assessed; I think about Balčikonis’s dignified bearing and about the communist Žiugžda, who destroyed the linguist Žiugžda. I have written a book, Svarbesniosios XX a. lietuvių kalbos gramatikos (it has not been published, and I do not know whether I will be able to publish it). I studied twentieth-century grammatical scholarship and saw that the most accomplished grammar, and the one best suited to a national school, is the 1937 Lietuvių kalbos gramatika by Jurgis Ambraška and Juozas Žiugžda (incidentally, it was also the first work to use the term kirčiuotė). It is an excellent systematic description of the grammatical structure of the language, undiluted by all sorts of exercises. These are placed at the end of the grammar so that teachers can select them according to the topic at hand. And naturally the question arose: what was each author’s contribution to this grammar? In the Lietuviškoje tarybinėje enciklopedijoje, one can find only that, in Lithuanian studies, Žiugžda published two works: the 1935 Žemaitės kūryba and the 1937 Lietuvių kalbos gramatiką, with Ambraška. And that is all! In the Lietuvių kalbos enciklopedijoje, we find an entry about Jurgis Ambraška, but not a word about Juozas Žiugžda. Ambraška wrote various textbooks for primary schools and died in 1945, while Žiugžda lived a long life, and his alone

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Lithuanian Grammar had as many as 18 editions. (If it essentially shaped our academic grammarians’ understanding of language structure, since more than one generation of linguists grew up with Žiugžda’s grammar.) The theoretical part grew stronger for a time, and nowhere did it contradict the teachings of Jablonskis’s grammar; only the examples illustrating the rules glorified the Red Army and the Soviet system, condemned bourgeois nationalists, and spat on God’s altar in the verses of Teofilis Tilvytis.

Of course, Žiugžda’s grammar also included many excellent examples and texts for exercises drawn from classical Lithuanian literature, especially Žemaitė’s writings, but those examples of communist ideology were unacceptable to many and spoiled the entire grammar. Perhaps because of them, Balčikonis, too, suggested studying only from Jablonskis, but he never noticed if students had also learned from Žiugžda. Knowing Balčikonis, students chose politically neutral examples to illustrate the grammar rules (although Balčikonis did not ask about the rules very much). So I searched for some source describing Žiugžda as a linguist. It was only in Pupkis’s monograph on Andrius Ašmantas that I came across archival excerpts about Žiugžda the Lithuanian studies scholar, as one of the most active workers in the teachers’ union. It says that, thanks to his efforts, gatherings of the Lithuanian studies teachers’ union were organized at the

Aušra girls’ gymnasium, where “He himself actively took part in them, delivered papers, and was elected to the board” (Pupkis 2010: 202). Moreover, we ourselves remember Žiugžda as a supervisor and opponent of dissertations in Lithuanian studies.

The monograph under review prompts us to pause once more over the role of Boris Larin. It was fortunate that it was Larin in particular who was sent to Lithuania at that time. He gave all the speeches he was required to give, while doing the work he needed to do himself (in accordance with his conscience): he took care of the dictionary project, encouraged the writing of a grammar, and trained qualified linguists for Lithuania. I believe I know this period very well, not from archives but from life itself. In 1955 I heard Larin review Kazys Ulvydas’s candidate dissertation; he supervised the dissertations of Birutė Tolutienė and Jonas Paulauskas. The credit for listing prefixed verbs as headwords and establishing their grammatical characteristics and meanings throughout all twenty volumes belongs to the joint work of Larin and Paulauskas. I think what Larin said at the time matters less than what he did. Vytautas Vitkauskas, too, vilified Larin for his reproach that the dictionary had been filled with all sorts of everyday-speech rubbish, claiming that Larin had called rubbish the most precious treasure of living speech. This is a highly impulsive reaction, made without considering the circumstances in which the remark was made.

“In discussions, Balčikonis said that he believed changing the dictionary’s editorial system would not alter its scholarly value. There was supposedly no point in changing anything about the presentation of verbs, since the entire card file was now arranged that way” (p. 256). But is the way the card file is arranged really a scholarly justification? In the volumes edited by Balčikonis, prefixed verbs are also listed under unprefixed-verb entries, but without any

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explanations of their meanings or grammatical characterization—the usage examples simply follow the colon. And, at the time, not very many such examples had been collected in the card file. That is why there were difficulties explaining the meanings of verbs and distinguishing transitive from intransitive verbs. For example, the verbs augti, bėgti, bristi are intransitive, whereas išaugti, praaugti, apibėgti, perbristi can also be transitive, since, compared with the simple verbs, they acquire additional meanings through word formation (the child outgrew a little jacket, the dog ran around the homestead and around the house, he easily waded across the stream and waded through the stream). Paulauskas’s collection of prefixed verbs from belles-lettres substantially augmented the dictionary’s card file.

Quoting the text of an informational article in the 15 November 1950 issue of Tiesa, which stated that “The Institute of Language and its leaders have not drawn, and are not drawing, the necessary conclusions from Comrade Stalin’s genius work Marxism and Questions of Linguistics (p. 249),” and citing the title of Larin’s paper, delivered at a conference in 1952, “The Tasks of Lithuanian Lexicology in the Light of J. V. Stalin’s Science of Language” (p. 250), Pupkis, in my view, should certainly have explained what this work was and why and how it came about. I have already mentioned that in 1950 there was a debate between linguists and Marr’s followers in Pravda, and that the so-called work by Stalin was published in the same Pravda.

In the days of the personality cult, that was enough. Everything printed in Stalin’s name in Pravda was immediately published as a separate pamphlet, translated into all the languages of the USSR, and for a time was probably issued every year in hundreds of thousands of copies. Here I have in my hands the 1954 edition: a small-format pamphlet of just over 46 pages in all. I do not think the Lithuanians would have delayed publishing that “genius work.” They probably published it every year. The 1954 edition was printed in a run of 20,000 copies and cost 50 kopecks in the old currency (after the 1961 currency reform it would have cost only 5 kopecks).

Today we see what a personality cult is in North Korea. During the Stalin cult, not only scholars in the humanities but also representatives of the so-called exact sciences wrote their works in the light of Stalin’s science of language. Scholars in the humanities could not even defend their dissertations without citing something from this “work.” Thus the topic of Larin’s paper should not cast him in a bad light. The Czech dissident writer Milan Kundera rightly said of those times: We marched in demonstrations with flags, banners, and lots of artificial flowers, shouting “Long live the First of May!” while thinking “Long live life!” If we remember that Lithuania was more subjugated than Czechoslovakia, we will understand why the first two volumes of the dictionary were criticized in precisely this way and later rewritten from scratch. Larin allowed himself to be included in the list of compilers of the new dictionary guidelines, but he did not write them himself.

Although the language of Pupkis’s monograph as a whole is very academic, there are occasional lapses; for example, he writes that, in response to all of Balčikonis’s arguments, Larin shot back (256). The verb shot back is not stylistically neutral, so it is unsuitable for academic writing. As for Larin as a scholar and a person, and as a friend of the Lithuanians, I would suggest

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read about it in the second volume of Antanas Sabaliauskas’s History of the Study of the Lithuanian Language (Sabaliauskas 1982: 114–117).

Pupkis could compare the first and second editions of the first two dictionary volumes and judge for himself, on the basis of evidence rather than others’ arguments, whether the dictionary’s scholarly value had deteriorated or improved after it was rewritten according to the new instructions.

When, after the third volume, the material published under Balčikonis was rewritten, I heard Jonas Paulauskas talking with Bronė Vosylyte, sometimes with Balčikonis himself present. Additions to the illustrative material from Tiesa and the press of that period in general are accompanied by source references that prevent dictionary readers from being misled. Not all those examples praise the Soviet system; very many entirely neutral examples of good language are included, while sentences additionally collected from literary works written in good Lithuanian by Julius Janonis, Petras Cvirka, Salomėja Nėris, Kazys Boruta, Juozas Baltušis, and others merely show the beauty of the Lithuanian language and make it possible to determine word meanings more accurately. The rewritten first volume grew by 221 pages (the format remained the same). Each year, Institute staff and university students went on dialectological expeditions; individual word collectors were also active, and dissertation authors contributed the material they had collected to the dictionary’s storehouse. In this way, the dictionary’s card file was continually enriched with new linguistic treasures, its authors’ resources grew, and the work consequently expanded to as many as twenty volumes.

In the preface to the first dictionary volume, Balčikonis notes that the work was done to the best of their ability, when their resources were still limited, and that the editorial board could see the shortcomings. “For example, at present the editorial board itself feels that the number of pages in the first volume is greatly increased by an excessive abundance of phraseology. Having such fine sentences at its disposal, the editorial board often could not resist the temptation to include as many of them as possible” (Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language 1941: III). But this is no flaw at all. Since there were many fine sentences, it was later possible to write a substantial Dictionary of Phraseology, which received the State Prize. If sentences are drawn from various parts of Lithuania and from different sources, one can infer the geographical distribution of a word’s use and the history of its forms.

Perhaps some case was being concocted against Balčikonis, but when he left the university in 1959 (or was asked to retire), he was already 74. The university’s current statute permits professors, with very few exceptions, to work only until the age of 70 (an exception was made only for Jonas Kubilius, the university’s long-serving rector). And I would not say that Balčikonis lived poorly as a pensioner: he could still afford a fine apartment and a housekeeper who prepared his meals; he had a Pobeda, and, no longer daring to drive himself, he would hire a driver on Saturdays (Saturday was a working day) and travel around Lithuania and the Lithuanian villages of Belarus, collecting and checking recorded words, taking an interest in folklore, and visiting friends. He would take Paulauskas and me on these trips, too. He never went alone.

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From 1956, Balčikonis undertook to translate the third volume of Jan Otrębski’s (Otrębski) Grammar of the Lithuanian Language. They had probably agreed that the planned five-volume grammar would begin with Volume III (morphology), that is, with the course taught in schools. Both scholars were concerned to some extent with revising Žiugžda’s grammar, which was used in schools. They would not have revised it completely, but at least they would have put it into the hands of teachers and university students, since it is in fact an excellent grammar (a synchronic description of parts of speech and their forms, with historical commentary). Only linguists of the younger generation, with insufficient training, regarded it as purely historical and decided not to allow the translation to be published: many copies had been brought from Warsaw, all the scholars had one and could read Polish, while for pupils it would be too difficult and even unnecessary, since practical work did not require scholarship. This was not politics, and no one from above dictated it. We did ourselves a disservice.

After the first two volumes of the dictionary edited by Balčikonis were withdrawn from circulation, much was still written in the press about Balčikonis’s “bad” language corrections, and his teaching of students was criticized in the department, but Balčikonis understood that this had to be done. If we do not criticize ourselves, they will devour us all. The Soviets valued criticism and self-criticism highly. He was deeply distressed by just one thing: despite being earnestly asked, Jonas Kabelka had not removed his name from the editorial board of the Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian (1954). Since Balčikonis was the only one known abroad, everyone called that dictionary Balčikonis’s dictionary, and he could not accept Lithuanian being “enriched” in this way; he felt deeply ashamed of it. But, again, one must understand the times. Much later, when “the weather had warmed,” after the two-volume Selected Works of Jonas Jablonskis had been published (1957, 1958), and two issues of Language Culture had begun appearing every year from 1961, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature published a booklet in 1964 entitled The Enrichment of the Lithuanian Language During the Years of the Soviet System. Its preface boasted, and what followed was written as required. What more is there to say! In 1976, when correcting derivatives with the suffix –iškas in Advice on Language Usage, instead of Balčikonis’s corrected phrase German occupiers, I was forced by the editorial board to insert invented sentences containing the phrases Swedish athletes, Turkish marauders. Even then, people were still afraid of their own shadows.

In my view, the most problematic chapter of the monograph is “Theoretical Issues of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” (pp. 261–302). It rightly states: “It must be said that, to date, we have neither comprehensive studies nor syntheses of this work, and this is a considerable gap in our linguistics and lexicography” (p. 266). If there is a gap, it cannot be filled with mutually contradictory quotations and archival data. The theoretical aspects of dictionary writing should be determined by the achievements of general linguistics and the ability to make use of them.

Lexicography is the writing of dictionaries, and its beginnings date back to antiquity. The Alexandrian scholars transcribed all the words from the manuscripts collected in the library and first compiled a list of them in alphabetical order. In this way, they produced a dictionary. Having arranged those words

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according to general grammatical features, became parts of speech, that is, grammar. Arranging words alphabetically is not such a difficult task. But this task raises a fundamental problem: is everything that can be arranged alphabetically really a word? The science of language has still not answered the question of what a word is. It has established only that the concept of a word depends on the type of language. For example, Tatjana Bulygina argued that a Lithuanian word is a structure consisting of at least two parts, one of which must be a root and the other a grammatical morpheme (Булыкина Т. В. Морфологическая структура слова в современном литовском языке (в его письменной форме) – Морфологическая структура слова в индоевропейских языках. Москва, 1970). However, the adverb vakar has a root and belongs to a group of related words (vakaras, vakarėlis, vakarìnis, vakarienė), but it is not a structure. In this case, it is proposed that a zero ending be introduced. And what should be done with prepositions and conjunctions, which do not belong to groups of words with corresponding roots? A preposition is proposed to be treated as a case morpheme which, together with the case ending, indicates relations between words in a sentence. Consequently, if a preposition is part of a composite grammatical case morpheme, it cannot possibly have lexical meaning or be a word. Anyone interested in the history of the contentious assessment of prepositions might read my study (Paulauskienė A. Gramatinės lietuvių kalbos vardžodžių kategorijos. Vilnius, Mokslas, 1989, p. 24–147).

Prepositions connect words through subordination, while conjunctions connect words through coordination and sentences through both coordination and subordination; they are all indivisible and have no root (and therefore no lexical meaning either). Each has a clearly defined function, so talk about the faded lexical meaning of prepositions, conjunctions, and particles is entirely empty (p. 297).

Pronouns and numerals occupy a special place among content words. Personal pronouns differ not only from other parts of speech, but also from other pronouns. For example, the pronouns aš and tu directly indicate the participants in an act of communication (deixis); third-person pronouns are substitutes that refer to people and things already mentioned (anaphora), but all of them can also serve as grammatical markers of person in verbs. This is particularly evident when a language has no personal endings. In that case, only personal pronouns indicate the person of the verb. Examples could be given from various languages, but it is enough to consider the third person in Baltic languages, which has no personal ending, and the Russian past tense, where pronouns alone mark verbal person (я делал, ты делал, он делал...).

If a personal pronoun marks the person of a verb, how can it have lexical meaning and be a word equivalent to a noun or a verb? That is why Jānis Endzelīns was wrong to reproach Balčikonis for not defining the meanings of the words aš and aštuoni in the dictionary (p. 297). How can one define what cannot be defined?

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It is impossible to explain the lexical meaning of a word if it has none (pronouns) or has a very precise, definite meaning (numerals). Traditionally, therefore, such words are simply entered in dictionaries with grammatical information, while their usage is illustrated by linguistic examples (phraseology). Although various linguistic problems requiring solutions constantly arise when a dictionary is being written, for some reason dictionary writing has not even been considered a science. It is probably impossible to speak of lexicographic theory alone, but I would also disagree with Vilma Zubaitienė that lexicography can be merely a technique for describing vocabulary (p. 263), or with Evalda Jakaitienė that lexicography is only the practical branch of lexicology and that it would be difficult to conceive of lexicography without the concepts and definitions of lexicology. It is not difficult at all, because 1) dictionaries contain not only words that can be called lexemes, and 2) the practice of writing dictionaries predates the science of lexicology. When Balčikonis set about writing the dictionary, he could know nothing about the methods of modern lexicology. I do not believe lexicology could manage in practice without dictionaries. In that case, one would need to compile corpora of texts covering the entire language, since texts from a single field may simply fail to encompass a large part of a word’s lexical meanings.

Larin is again brought up: he claimed that Balčikonis’s dictionary was a step backward compared with Būga’s dictionary (p. 264). It is hard to understand why he said this, why he compared things that are not even comparable—dictionaries of different types. It cannot be that a linguist who had himself studied the history of Lithuanian lexicography had not read Būga’s dictionary, which clearly states that its “Babel” of languages resulted from a lack of time and that the explanations of words were taken exactly as they had been found in the available sources. Perhaps here, too, someone had ordered Balčikonis to be “chewed over” some more?

All Balčikonis could have taken from Būga was a pood of index cards and the conviction that it was impossible to write a dictionary that way. And Balčikonis knew perfectly well, even without Būga, that only reliable, authentic material should be included in a dictionary. In choosing the type of explanatory monolingual dictionary, Balčikonis was probably influenced most by Vladimir Dal’s “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” (Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка. СПб, 1863–1866). I leafed through it long ago (all four volumes were reissued in 1955), so I trust what I read in Pupkis’s monograph (p. 269).

The monograph’s chapter “The editorial staff and contributors of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language” is very interesting to read. Information about the better-known staff members can be found in encyclopedias and in Sabaliauskas’s three-volume Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorijoje, while the information about contributors and word collectors is entirely new and not readily accessible to everyone. Here, too, one can see the author’s very demanding work.

Without a doubt, it must be acknowledged that not everyone could write so broadly and in such detail about Balčikonis’s toil and hardships in laying the foundations of Lithuanian lexicography, especially in the context of his extensive lexicographic work. Aldonas Pupkis has also demonstrated Juozas Balčikonis’s contributions to Lithuanian linguistics and culture in his other works. Therefore, one can now proudly say: Feci, quod potui, faciant meliora potentes.

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LITERATŪRA

Balčikonis Juozas 1982: Rinktiniai raštai 2, sud. Aldonas Pupkis. Vilnius: Mokslas.

Būga Kazimieras 1924: Lietuvių kalbos žodynas I ir II sąs. Kaunas: Švietimo ministerija.

Greimas Algirdas J. 1991: [Baltos lankos]. – Literatūra ir menas, 1991-VI-13.

Jablonskis Jonas 1957: Rinktiniai raštai 1, sud. Jonas Palionis. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla.

Lietuvių kalbos žodynas I, red. Juozas Balčikonis. Vilnius: Lietuvos Mokslų Akademija, Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 1941.

Pupkis Aldonas 2010: Andrius Ašmantas: gyvenimas ir kūryba. Vilnius: Trys žvaigždutės.

Vitkauskas Vytautas 1985: Juozas Balčikonis. Vilnius: Mokslas.

Vitkauskas Vytautas 2006: Lietuvių kalbos žodyno taisymai. Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas.

Įteikta 2014 m. gegužės 2 d.

ALDONA PAULAUSKIENĖ

Vilniaus universitetas

Balio Sruogos g. 8-1, LT-10220 Vilnius, Lietuva

[email protected]

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