Gyvenimas kaip krintanti rugpjūčio žvaigždė

P E R S O N A L I T I E S JUOZAS KARACIEJUS Institute of the Lithuanian Language LIFE LIKE A FALLING AUGUST STAR In memory of Saulius Ambrazas It is difficult, very difficult to write about a colleague and coworker (to this day, I still cannot bring myself to write “former”), whose life was consumed along with the stars of the last nights of August, falling and vanishing into nothingness. It is difficult also because it seemed to all of us that Saulius was at the peak of his powers, not only intellectually and creatively but physically as well—he never complained to anyone of any ailment and was never ill. And then... on August 30, an unexpected message appeared in our email inbox, saying that our colleague Saulius Ambrazas was no more, that the star of his life had gone out before he could celebrate his fifty-third birthday. At first, we did not want to believe it; somewhere deep in our hearts, hope kept stirring that perhaps this was a mistake, that it could not be so, because on that very day colleague Saulius Ambrazas was supposed to return to work after his regular annual vacation, sit down as usual at his desk piled high with books and, taking from his drawer the manuscript of the third monograph he was finishing, devoted to the history of Lithuanian adjective formation, continue explaining on a clean sheet, in his upright handwriting, the history of the still-unsolved riddles of word formation in this part of Lithuanian grammar to future readers. Sadly... Today, we can only speculate about what our colleague Saulius did not have time to tell us, his coworkers, or all future readers. J. KARACIEJUS. Gyvenimas kaip krintanti rugpjūčio žvaigždė 363 It cannot be, for on that very day, after his usual annual vacation, our colleague Saulius Ambrazas was due to come to work, sit down as usual at his desk piled high with books, take from the drawer the manuscript of the third monograph he was finishing, devoted to the development of Lithuanian adjective formation, and, on a clean sheet, in his upright handwriting, continue explaining to the future reader the history of the still-unsolved riddles of word formation in this part of Lithuanian. Alas... Today we can only speculate about what our colleague Saulius did not live to tell us, his coworkers, and all future readers. I remember well November 14, 1984, when a young man with an elegant little beard came to the Department of Language History and Dialectology at the then Institute of the Lithuanian Language and Literature and, having greeted his future colleagues with restraint (perhaps a little shyly), immediately sat down at the desk assigned to him. In fact, Saulius Ambrazas did not come straight from a university lecture-hall seat, as did many young people who joined the Institute at that time, but had already completed postgraduate studies at Vilnius University and, in that same year, 1984, had written and defended his doctoral dissertation (then a Candidate of Philological Sciences), Verbal abstracts (nomina actionis) in Old Lithuanian. We, the staff of the Department of Language History and Dialectology, knew that Saulius Ambrazas was a very well-prepared researcher, thoroughly familiar with both older and the most recent linguistic literature of the time, because he had grown up and matured among books in the humanities. From his very first days, junior research fellow Saulius Ambrazas became involved in preparing the third volume of the department’s principal collective project at the time, the Atlas of Lithuanian Dialects. For this volume, devoted to the morphology of Lithuanian dialects, he prepared 20 maps and wrote fairly extensive commentaries to accompany them. In the time left over from this work, which demanded great effort and meticulousness, Saulius Ambrazas not only wrote scholarly articles for Lithuanian and foreign linguistic journals, but also began preparing the first part of the major work The Development of Noun Formation, Lithuanian Verbal Derivatives, which was published in Lithuania, by then an independent country, in 1993. Two years later, in 1995, our colleague Saulius, having successfully defended his habilitation thesis, continued his intensive historical research into Lithuanian noun formation, summarizing it in the sequel to his first monograph, published five years later (2000), The Development of Noun Formation. II. In this book, drawing on extensive material collected from various sources, he described the development of Lithuanian nominal derivatives from the earliest times to the present day. Alongside this work, Saulius Ambrazas’s positions also changed. Having started, as already mentioned, as a junior research fellow at the Institute, in 1985, 364 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 83 was reappointed as a research fellow; in 1991, as a senior research fellow; and from 1995, as a chief research fellow. But colleague Saulius was not inclined to talk either about his duties or about his academic degrees. He much preferred to talk about the latest books on linguistics and the questions they explored, and if the conversation unexpectedly turned to the problems of our country’s domestic life, he always argued passionately that we should not react too pessimistically to the difficulties that still arose, that all the ills would disappear in time; we only needed to be patient. Saulius Ambrazas devoted much attention and time not only to his own scholarly work, but also to all the work being done and discussed in the department. He read every work under discussion carefully, and not only noted his observations on a separate sheet so that he could voice them during the discussion, but also wrote them in the margins of the work he had read—several times, and occasionally (especially in dissertations) dozens of times over—with his characteristically blunt pencil. For Saulius Ambrazas always required everyone to ensure that the claims made in the work under discussion were clear and supported by linguistic data that left no room for doubt. This attitude of our colleague Saulius, which perhaps frightened some young researchers a little, seems to have been a secret methodological device peculiar to him alone: it strongly encouraged the author of every work under discussion to prepare well, to learn not to be afraid to defend their claims, and at the same time to learn the fundamentals of serious scholarly discussion. For a young person taking their first steps in research, this was undoubtedly an excellent school; the comments, expressed tactfully (along with those in the margins of the work), were also encouragement not to be daunted, and always to believe in one’s own abilities. Of course, one could write and write about our colleague Saulius Ambrazas, as a scholar and as a person with all the human weaknesses characteristic of each of us: list dozens of his scholarly articles and edited works, and the editorial boards of Lithuanian and foreign scholarly journals on which he served. But those words, those lists will change nothing now, and sometimes perhaps they are not even needed, because it is not always easy to express our loss in the Lithuanian words so beloved by Saulius Ambrazas—especially when, having come to an ordinary department meeting where the assembled colleagues do not hurry to begin, as if still waiting for something, you find yourself thinking that the door will open and colleague Saulius will walk through it... But the meeting begins, the illusion of that moment fades, and then you understand that it will never be so again. It is unclear, though, why the merciless fates, the weaver maidens of destiny, begrudged You, Colleague, a longer thread of life, why they cut it short too soon... So may the soil of your native Lithuania lie lightly upon you... J. KARACIEJUS. Gyvenimas kaip krintanti rugpjūčio žvaigždė 365