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General Information
Application
Previous Prize Recipients
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I remember, at the age of six, being told about the fall of the
Soviet Union, as my father pointed to an enormous country on the
family globe. I found the Cyrillic characters shown on news reports
to be absolutely fascinating, but it wasn't until my junior year of
high school that I learned to decipher them. My high school
exposure to the Russian language not only laid the foundation for
my current professional pursuit of Russian linguistics, but it also
opened doors for me in relation to other, vastly different
languages of the former USSR. Many of these languages have very
little written about them, and what work has been done is available
almost exclusively in Russian.
A majority of the books in my collection were acquired used. To my
mind, this is an important aspect. Owning these books that other
scholars in this specialized field once owned, I feel a connection
with those who have studied this discipline before me. I will never
meet most of the original owners, but the occasional bent page or
stray pencil mark point towards someone who once cared enough about
a book to buy it and bring it home-even if money was tight or
"home" was on the other side of the world.
The book that started my collection was Townsend's Russian
Word-Formation, found in a cramped used bookstore near the
University of Washington campus in Seattle, where I was
participating in a summer Russian program. I had just graduated
from high school (2002), and in my 17 years growing up in the
suburbs, I had never set foot in a bookstore with a book on Russian
linguistics. I was enchanted to discover that such books existed,
but this particular title was made all the more irresistible by the
fact that it was signed by the author, and made out to a University
of Washington PhD student. As I carried the book back to my dorm
room, I was excited to have the opportunity to begin the journey
with this book that the PhD student had already completed. In the
suburbs, I was the only person I knew who was interested in Russian
linguistics; reading a used copy of Russian Word-Formation made me
feel less alone.
That summer, I spent hours wandering through the stacks of the
University of Washington library, and likely gave myself future
back problems by lugging books back to my dorm room. It was then
that I was first exposed to the languages of the Caucasus, an
extremely diverse group of particularly interesting languages from
a linguistic point of view. The Caucasian languages are unrelated
to Russian, and largely unrelated to one another. I didn't expect
my linguistic study of them to get very far, however, due to the
paucity of materials even available in Russian used bookstores, not
to mention the United States.
A visit to the Slavic Department during O-Week (2002) changed that.
As it turns out, Professor Howie Aronson had just retired, and left
a large number of books stacked in boxes for anyone to take. I
began to poke through the book out of idle curiosity, but soon I
was ravenously filling my backpack and arms with the boxes'
contents, some of which were extremely rare grammars of Caucasian
languages. These cast-offs left by Prof. Aronson laid the
foundation for the Caucasian side of my collection, which I have
subsequently been able to build upon on a trip to St. Petersburg.
Almost all of my Caucasian books are long out of print, and were
only printed in very limited quantities in the first place (2,200
to 650 copies). Two years passed before I met Prof. Aronson for the
first time, and when we did meet, he didn't seem like such a
stranger, thanks to the common bond we shared through these
books.
My collection grew steadily over my first three years of college,
specifically in the category of contemporary Russian language and
linguistics, but few of the books were rare or exceptional enough
to be included in the attached bibliography. Notably, however,
Zaliznjak's Drevnenovgorodskij dialekt (ordered by mail through a
small importer/reseller of Slavic books, out of California) has
provided me with much of the material for my B.A. paper, dealing
with a feature of the historical phonology of the unique Russian
dialect in question.
My trip to St. Petersburg last summer provided my collection with a
quantum leap forward. I made a point of stopping in every bookstore
I saw, to inquire about books on Russian linguistics, and minority
languages of the former USSR. I did purchase some books new: on a
side trip to the nearby city of Novgorod, I purchased the two books
by Janin about ancient personal documents in the very museum where
many of those fragile documents are housed. However, once again a
used bookstore provided me with the most precious additions to my
collection.
From the outside, Akademkniga ("AcademyBook") is just another
nondescript bookstore right off Nevskij Prospekt, the main street
running through downtown St. Petersburg. Inside, however, there are
three long shelves running floor to ceiling filled with exactly the
books I was hoping to find. I became a regular customer during the
month I was in St. Petersburg, going almost daily to hungrily
eyeball the shelves for anything new, and buy books until my
backpack was full or I ran out of roubles. One particular gem was
Vinogradov's Russkij jazyk: grammati?eskoe u?enie o slove (1947). I
was told that had that book been just a few years older, it would
be considered a Russian historic object and illegal to take
overseas.
I also had the opportunity to develop my collection of other
languages of the former USSR, both those with their own modern
nation-state (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian) and those that
remain minority ethnic and linguistic groups in the Russian
Federation (Yenesei, Yakut, Udykhei, Evenki, Nanaj, and Romani).
The grammars and dictionaries I have from the latter group of
languages are similar to my Caucasian collection, in the sense that
these languages are sparsely studied and books about them are
inherently rare.
I asked the attendant at Akademkniga where all the books came from.
She mentioned the large university in St. Petersburg, and said that
many of the books are sold to the store in bulk when a professor
dies and his children don't understand the topics of his books-or
their value. Once again, I felt as though I were participating in a
dialogue of sorts with the older scholars in my field. The worth of
these books was a secret shared between us. In purchasing these
books, I became their caretaker, with an unspoken duty to pass them
on someday.
This process of inheritance has continued recently as Prof. Victor
Friedman has been cleaning out his office. He has contributed
greatly to my collection of general pedagogical grammars for
Russian (not listed here), but particularly worth mention is the
collected works of Alexander Pushkin. Published in 1887, these
volumes have been inherited multiple times and are, sadly, rather
worse for wear. Nonetheless, Prof. Friedman impressed upon me the
value of these books to him, and as their latest caretaker, I share
that sentiment.
This summer I plan another trip to Russia, in which I plan to once
again test the limits of the maximum baggage weight for
international travel, while simultaneously holding my breath that
the multiple packages shipped through international mail make it to
Chicago safely. While all of my books are of use to me as a Slavic
linguist, my current scholarly focus is on the history of the
Russian language, so I will be particularly keeping an eye out for
books on that general topic. At the same time, I do hope to
continue to expand all aspects of my collection, and I can never
say no to a used book on an obscure language-particularly if it
looks like it's been loved.
Ms. Carey won the 4th-year prize in 2006
for the
collection described in the preceding essay.
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