"Compiling a Dictionary Is Never Finished—It Can Only Be Abandoned"

She spoke with the HSE News Service about the lessons she learned from her family history, her linguistic expeditions, and Alaskan Russian.

Two Lessons from Family History

I was named after my grandmother, the journalist Mirra Zheleznova. I was born six years after she was executed. Hers was an extraordinary case for the mid-20th century, as at that time in the Soviet Union, women could be arrested—most often as the wives of 'enemies of the people'—but not executed. Officially, she was sentenced for her alleged involvement in an anti-Stalin conspiracy among engineers at the Stalin Auto Plant (ZIS), but the reality was clearly quite different.

Mirra Zheleznova was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Together with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, she investigated the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews. In 1947, she published official data in the newspaper Eynigkayt on the number of ethnic Jews awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The figure was substantial—135 individuals. In percentage terms, ethnic Jews ranked second only to ethnic Russians in holding this award. This publication caused a strong public reaction, which the authorities remembered, and a few years later, amid the Soviet campaign against 'cosmopolitanism,' Mirra Zheleznova was arrested. Those who viewed her case file after the archives were declassified say it contained only three pages: the record of her interrogation, the execution order, and the report confirming that the sentence had been carried out. The family was given a completely different account: that Mirra had been sentenced to ten years without the right of correspondence. A rehabilitation certificate issued to my mother shortly before my birth stated that my grandmother had died of pneumonia in a labour camp. My mother, Nadezhda Zheleznova, also a journalist, later wrote a book about the fate of this remarkable woman. We worked on it together, and I suggested the title: My Mother Was Killed in the Mid-Twentieth Century.

My family’s history taught me two lessons. The first I learned from my mother. Because of the circumstances I described above, she was for a long time denied admission to any university programme in the humanities. Instead, when she was young, she earned a degree from the Moscow Technological Institute of Light Industry. Later, already an adult with two daughters, she was finally able to enrol in the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University and become a journalist and writer. The lesson is that when a person truly wants something, they can achieve it. I learned my second lesson from my father, nuclear physicist Boris Bergelson. Although he had wanted to study philology, he realised that with this surname, the Faculty of Philology was effectively closed to him. So, in 1947, he enrolled at the newly established MEPhI. When the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign began in the Soviet Union and Jews were being expelled from institutions, my father—who was the great-nephew of the renowned Jewish novelist David Bergelson, by then already arrested as a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—would almost certainly have been expelled as well, but he was not. The reason was that he was part of MEPhI’s sports team at the Moscow Championship, and the administration quite literally said, ‘All right, let Bergelson run.’ My father’s career was difficult and full of obstacles, but he became an outstanding specialist, highly valued and respected by his colleagues. Hence the second lesson: if you are capable, level-headed, and willing to work hard, you can succeed in whatever you do.

Something of a Fronde

This was important knowledge for me, because by the time I finished high school, I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to do next. Then, by chance, friends invited me to take part in an olympiad organised by the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and I suddenly realised it combined everything I enjoyed. I was interested in foreign languages and loved solving puzzles—and here I truly had to use my brain. In the end, I became involved, won a prize at the olympiad, and after graduating from school I enrolled in what is now known as the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

It was an unusual place, very different from a typical Soviet institution. At the time, structural linguistics was a relatively new and fashionable field. By the time I joined the department, it had existed for just over a decade, and both staff and students were eager to embrace new, modern ideas. Within the broader Faculty of Philology, we were seen as something of a Fronde—dissidents in the academic world. Many of our lecturers were quite young, with views shaped during the Thaw of the 1960s, and the student–teacher relationship in the department was democratic in the best sense: free of hierarchy and servility.

While at university, I began taking part in field expeditions, and this shaped my lifestyle for years to come, brought many different people into my life, and gave me a wide range of topics to work on. In a sense, these expeditions, conducted by the department under the leadership of Alexander Kibrik, replaced many lectures and textbooks. During our trips, we students—whose primary task was to collect lexical and grammatical data—also had the opportunity to observe languages in real-life settings and began to understand that their functioning is a complex process unfolding in a rich and varied context. Indeed, my love of travel largely grew out of those university expeditions—and not only my love of travel. On one of them, I met my future husband, Andrej Kibrik, the son of Prof. Alexander Kibrik, an outstanding linguist who was both my teacher and academic supervisor.

These were the good experiences. But there were also not-so-good ones: another ‘witch hunt’ targeting Jews began during my studies, and as a result, I had to abandon the idea of entering doctoral school. Finding an academic position was also a challenge. Eventually, however, the remarkable Vladimir Zvegintsev, the founder and head of our department, helped me secure a job through an informal arrangement. On his desk lay a doctoral dissertation awaiting his review. The dissertation, written by the deputy director of a certain research centre, was hardly a brilliant one. Prof. Zvegintsev agreed to provide a positive review in exchange for a position for me. However, a doctoral programme at Moscow State University was still out of reach for me. A couple of years later, I therefore enrolled in a part-time doctoral programme at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and, after defending a dissertation on the grammar of Bamana, an African language, I began building my career in linguistics.

Not 'What,' but 'How' and 'Why'

At university, we were taught that linguistics should be scientific, precise, and based on a system of rigorous evidence. Andrey Zaliznyak, our outstanding teacher and guiding light, set an example of how linguistic facts can be handled with remarkable clarity and elegance. To be honest, however, I was more interested in things that are much harder to prove. For example, I wondered how we manage to understand and extract meanings that are not explicitly encoded in words, and how indirect meanings arise. This is what is now called linguistic pragmatics. In other words, I was interested in language not as a static object, but as a living, active, and autonomous force. Functional linguistics is not merely about description; it seeks to answer the questions 'how exactly?' and 'why?'

In fact, in my understanding, language can be imagined as a three-headed dragon. It is impossible to study only its lexical–grammatical aspect, or only its cognitive aspect, or only its communicative aspect. We need to consider all of these dimensions together, because they are what makes us both individuals with our own inner worlds, personal memories, associations, and worldviews, and at the same time members of a society—a discourse community that shares a language.

Today, as I look back on how my professional life unfolded, I can see that nothing in it was accidental. I was guided by my interests, which, like threads of different colours, eventually intertwined into a strong, multi-coloured rope. But this is how I understand it now. Back then, after I defended my dissertation and had my second daughter, I was able—thanks to political changes in the country—to take up a position at the Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language. It seemed that I simply seized the first opportunity that came my way. I worked in what was called the Sector of Russian as a Means of International Communication. During the four years I spent there, I discovered a perspective that later led me to sociolinguistic research. Then Andrej and I had our third daughter.

Santa Barbara, for Real

By 1991, academic life had changed dramatically. In the words of the wonderful linguist Nina Arutyunova, 'we were let out into the big world,' and my husband, a specialist in the Navajo language, was offered a research fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. That is how we, a young family of scholars with three children aged from five months to fifteen years, ended up in Santa Barbara. Andrej was working, and three weeks later I published my first column in the Santa Barbara News-Press. The column was titled From the Russian Perspective. In it, I wrote about how certain aspects of American life looked from the standpoint of a Russian observer. Russia was a hot topic at the time, and my column became a great success. In addition to being my first experience of intercultural communication, it brought us an extra $36 a week, which I contributed to our very modest family budget.

In 1992, we returned from the United States to a completely different country. While we were still in America, we watched on television the collapse of the USSR and the events that followed, and our American colleagues were surprised by our decision to go back. We spent a long time trying to find an explanation they would accept—having parents there, childhood memories, and places we loved did not seem convincing enough—and eventually said that it would simply be easier for us to pursue our careers at home. We belonged to the intellectual elite of Russian society, whereas in the United States we would have been just among hundreds of thousands of immigrants. But in reality, things at home were more complicated. We wanted a change. When I saw an advertisement in Izvestia stating that the US Embassy was looking for someone, preferably with a PhD, who was familiar with the university systems in both Russia and the United States, I immediately applied. I was exactly the right candidate for the position. In the Cultural Section of the American Embassy, we focused on academic exchange programmes: some had been revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but most were newly created. I wanted to ensure that as many scholars as possible—especially from the Russian provinces, who had never had such an opportunity—could see the world and return home with that experience. Indeed, internships at leading US universities became career springboards for many Russian scientists.

We also had other responsibilities. At that time, there were many high-level international visits: Clinton visited Yeltsin, Gore visited Chernomyrdin. The visiting officials were often accompanied by their spouses, who were not involved in discussions of politics or economics. On such occasions, our Cultural Section was responsible for the spouses’ programme, and we showed the wives of diplomats places such as Moscow State University, Sechenov Medical University, and the Centre for Curative Pedagogy. On one occasion, I remember driving the Deputy US Ambassador’s white Volvo through the gates of the Borovitskaya Tower in the Kremlin to urgently deliver journalists to the Assumption Cathedral. Gradually, the leaders of those high-level US delegations began to perceive me as not just an 'accompanying interpreter' but as an indispensable person who made sure that things worked in practice, enabling people to understand one another not merely formally but substantively. In fact, I was not simply interpreting but clarifying the intended meaning of what was being said—something interpreters are not supposed to do. However, I did not particularly care whether this was allowed; I wanted things to work, and I knew how to properly 'package' meanings for both sides. The Americans appreciated this. Each time a new visit was planned, they would immediately ask: 'We want Bergelson on the team.'

A New Chapter

Three years later, when my work at the embassy had become routine, I decided once again that it was time for a change and a return to research. My husband and I applied for different grant programmes. Andrej received a Fulbright scholarship and an invitation to study the Athabaskans in Alaska, while I was awarded a grant to study communication at the University of Oregon. Oregon was interesting and beautiful, but, for the most part, predictable. Alaska, however, was striking. We found ourselves in a world that was extremely far removed from anything we had ever seen before. The village of Nikolai, where we lived, could only be reached by two airplane flights (now only one). We arrived there with our two youngest daughters, who were immediately enrolled in a Native school—which, incidentally, helped save it from closure. I did not have a formal field research programme at the time. I was learning about the culture and history of the region and documenting this 'everyday anthropology' in English through letters to friends (which I later published in Russia in Itogi). Then, shortly before our departure, a letter arrived from the village of Ninilchik, founded in the mid-19th century by the Russian-American Company. The descendants of its settlers, who still spoke Russian—so-called Alaskan Russian—invited us to visit and document their language. Of course, we responded immediately, and this marked the beginning of a new major chapter in our lives, which continues to this day.

Since Alaska is a vast territory with a very low population density, we were provided with a motorhome to travel around. It was an exact replica of the RV from the TV series Breaking Bad—even the same colours. Within two weeks, we visited 15–20 families who spoke Alaskan Russian. For us, this was not just a linguistic project. Meeting these people offered insight into how Russians settled Alaska, what colonisation brought with it, what it meant to be a minority, and how differently people relate to their past—all through the lived stories of real individuals. Some people were immediately friendly, while others were cautious at first, assuming we were 'from the KGB.' Even setting aside the natural distrust of outsiders, many of these people carried deep personal traumas. In the eyes of mainstream American society, they were often regarded as mixed-race, second-class citizens, and the attitude toward them was frequently harsh. In American schools, they were forbidden to speak their native language, Russian, and were punished for doing so: beaten and forced to wash their mouths out with soap. During that trip, I learned a great deal about the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian missionaries in Alaska. Dictionaries, schools, Bible translations into local languages, and, more generally, the opportunity for Creoles to receive an education were largely their contribution. Had we not ended up in Ninilchik, I might never have learned this. For us, it was an experience that, in part, changed the way we see the history of our own country.

A Dictionary, Like a Work of Art, Is Never Finished

Within two weeks, we compiled a basic dictionary of about a thousand entries. More importantly, we gained an understanding of the phonological system and developed a transcription method that preserved the distinctions between this language variety and standard Russian. At the time, the press reported: ‘Russian linguists discover the Russian language in Alaska.’ Of course, we did not discover it—just as Columbus did not discover America. We documented it. The first data on Alaskan Russian had been collected in 1985 by Conor Daly, a student of our colleague and friend Johanna Nichols. However, he did not publish his findings. Drawing on both his data and our own, we made this unique linguistic and cultural heritage accessible to the wider public.

As with the saying about art, compiling a dictionary is never truly finished—it can only be abandoned. We also realised that the speakers of Alaskan Russian were a vanishing generation, literally passing away from old age. Therefore, beginning in 2009, we started travelling to Alaska regularly to fulfil what we saw as our duty: to compile a dictionary and document the language. In 2017, we published a printed version of the dictionary in Alaska at our own expense. Alaskan Russian is presented there in Latin script so that it can be read by our audience. Two years later, we produced an interactive version of the dictionary. Since then, together with my co-authors, and with the help of students from HSE University and Moscow State University, as well as colleagues from our Centre for Sociocultural and Ethnolinguistic Studies, I have continued this research. We are updating the dictionary, describing the grammar, and studying the functioning of Alaskan Russian across three centuries of the history of this vanishing fragment of the Russian linguistic and cultural ecumene.

The centre occupies a major place in my life. It began with the idea that communication shapes all social practices, including professional and multilingual ones. In 2020, I applied to a university competition. The topic was approved, and over the next four years we carried out a major project titled ‘Discourse Practices of Russian Society.’ When the project ended, we were supported by Prof. Felix Azhimov, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, in establishing a centre at the faculty dedicated to the study of communities in which multilingual discourse practices take place. It is crucial that our research focuses on communities. A language does not exist in a vacuum; its fate is inseparable from that of the people who speak it—especially when it comes to minority languages that are threatened or already destined to disappear in our globalised world. As for the mission of the centre, I see it in preserving linguistic and cultural diversity. It is a deeply humanistic idea—one that combines humanism and, if you will, patriotism—because it concerns the diversity of our country and the preservation of social harmony in a multi-ethnic society, especially given that the country has adopted a policy of unity and support for the languages and cultures of the peoples of Russia.

The centre employs, among others, graduates of our Master's Programme Language Policy in the Context of Ethnocultural Diversity, as well as our doctoral students. For me, it is especially important that the centre, by its very existence, adds further meaning to our educational programme. Our staff includes linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists. The study of language requires an interdisciplinary approach, given the very complexity of language that I mentioned earlier. We collaborate with computational linguists, specialists in intelligent technologies, language activists, and regional administrators.

P.S.

I began my story with the lessons I learned from my parents, and I would like to end with a thought that I formulated for myself and often share with my students: effort invested is never wasted. If you have put a great deal of effort into something, but then moved on to other things, or if it feels as though something did not work out, that you did not have time to finish it, that your article was not published, or that a project did not produce the expected results, the effort you invested will not simply disappear without a trace. I sincerely believe that.

April 01

HSE University Life

'Compiling a Dictionary Is Never Finished—It Can Only Be Abandoned'