History of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard University
Instruction in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard traces its beginnings to October 1, 1896, when Leo Wiener, a Russian-Jewish émigré who had worked as a free-lance translator and researcher in Boston, was hired to offer classes in Russian, Polish, and Old Church Slavonic. His appointment as Instructor in Slavic Languages was the first of its kind in the United States. He soon expanded his repertoire to include Russian and Polish literatures in translation, a survey of Slavic philology, and a course on Tolstoy. The emergence of Czechoslovakia after the war prompted him to introduce "Bohemian" in 1920. Reputed to speak thirty languages well, Wiener was an eccentric character remembered by one colleague as "an iconoclast spreading light and havoc." Nonetheless he served generations of American students by compiling his two-volume Anthology of Russian Literature in English translation (1902-03) and translating the complete works of Tolstoy in twenty-four volumes in two years (1904-05). He retired in 1930.
Wiener was succeeded by Samuel Hazzard Cross, his star pupil, a comparativist blessed with great energy, formidable linguistic skills, and strong discipline. Cross established the concentration in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1933 and introduced Serbo-Croatian in three-year rotation with Polish and Bohemian (now glossed as "Czechish"). Through the help of a constantly shifting, temporary faculty, he was able to introduce Ukrainian (called Ruthenian) in 1939. With the outbreak of World War II, Cross kept the Slavic program going, in part by employing East European scholars fleeing the Nazi onslaught.
Following Cross' untimely death in 1946, the program was maintained through the judicious hiring of visiting faculty. Renato Poggioli, himself a refugee from Fascist Italy, accepted a joint appointment in Comparative Literature and Slavic in 1947. Michael Karpovich, Harvard professor of Russian history, agreed to head the program in 1948 and help transform it into an active center of teaching and research. He was able to persuade Roman Jakobson, a brilliant émigré Russian philologist and linguist, to come to Harvard in the fall of 1949, following the official establishment of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Jakobson made arrangements to bring fourteen of his Columbia graduate students with him, together with the beginnings of a core faculty for the new Department: Horace G. Lunt (Slavic linguistics and philology), Svatava Pírková-Jakobson (Czech literature, Slavic folklore), and Dmitrij Ciževskij (medieval and comparative Slavic literature). By 1963, the Harvard Slavic Department had added Albert Lord (South Slavic languages and literatures, oral epic tradition), Wiktor Weintraub (Polish literature), Vsevolod Setchkarev (modern Russian prose), and Kiril Taranovsky (Russian poetry, metrics) to the ranks of its permanent faculty. With an emphasis on the structural interdependence of language and culture, the Harvard Slavic Department trained many generations of Slavic graduate students, who in turn founded and expanded new centers of Slavic studies across the country and contributed to the flourishing of Slavic studies in America.
Jakobson's retirement from Harvard in 1967 marked the end of one of the most remarkable periods of growth in the history of Slavic studies. Donald Fanger (1968) and Jurij Striedter (1977) accepted joint appointments in Slavic and Comparative Literature, and Stanislaw Baranczak (1981) an appointment in Polish literature. All three supplemented the Structuralist concerns of the past with a variety of fresh analytical approaches to language, literature, and culture.
The current faculty continues to represent the broad range of interests and interdisciplinary perspectives so closely associated with the Slavic tradition at Harvard. The faculty in literature and culture includes Svetlana Boym (modern and contemporary Russian literature, film, art), Julie Buckler (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, drama, opera), George Grabowicz (Ukrainian and Polish literatures), John Malmstad (nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry, Avant-Garde art and culture), Stephanie Sandler (modern and contemporary Russian poetry, gender studies), William Todd (nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, literary theory), and Justin Weir (nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose, film). Linguistics and philology are represented by Patricia Chaput (Russian linguistics, language pedagogy) and Michael Flier (Slavic linguistics, medieval Slavic culture).
First ensconced in two offices of old Holyoke House (razed in 1961), the Slavic Department moved to the third floor of Boylston Hall in 1958. It has occupied its present quarters on the third floor of the Barker Center since 1997.