THE BEGINNING OF FORMAL STUDY
The second half and particularly the last quarter of the nineteenth
century was a period of rapid development in the American educational
system. Even before the Civil War, ambitious young men, dissatisfied
with the rigid curricula of the American colleges, had begun to go to
Europe, chiefly to Germany, to study and secure the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy. To a large extent the German universities came to take the
place of even Oxford and Cambridge, the chief goals of the few pre-Civil
War students who had gone to Europe.
In the same way, foreign scholars began to come to America. Again these
were largely German or at least German-trained. Some of these men
received, through some chance contact, direct invitations. Others,
forced by the shifts of German politics and the Revolution of 1848, left
their homes and joined the mass emigration to America that was already
beginning. In either case, their influence was to the good.
In 1867, Johns Hopkins University was established as a definite
post-graduate school, granting the doctorate. It was the first such
establishment in the United States and President Gilman secured a
distinguished faculty including such foreign scholars as Paul Haupt in
Semitic Languages and Maurice Bloomfield in Indo-Iranian. Other
outstanding men were soon appointed and the ideals of German scholarship
were solidly established. Undergraduate work at Hopkins was regarded as
merely an incidental in the first years of the institution’s life.
The example of Johns Hopkins was not directly followed but it exerted a
marked influence upon some of the more important of the older
institutions. Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton and a few others began
to offer more advanced instruction and step by step the modern American
graduate school, with its special course of study, was evolved. This
process required some decades and each institution approached the
problem in its own way, integrating the new work in accordance with its
own traditions. As these developing universities broadened their
interests and the range of their activities, it was only natural that
sooner or later they would come to take into consideration the study of
the Slavic peoples and their culture, especially of Russia.[25]
The first step was taken at Harvard under the influence of Archibald
Cary Coolidge.[26] In a very real sense, Coolidge was typical of the men
whom we have considered in the preceding chapter. He was born in
Massachusetts in 1866 and graduated from Harvard in 1887. He then went
to the University of Freiburg for his doctorate, receiving it in 1892.
During these five years, however, he took time out from his actual
attendance at courses to serve as Acting Secretary of the United States
Legation in St. Petersburg in 1890–1891 and to act, in 1892, as private
secretary to his uncle, then United States Minister to France.
He returned to the United States in 1893 and took a position in the
Department of History at Harvard. The next year he introduced a course
on the history of northeastern Europe. This was, in other words, a
course in Russian and Polish history. It was the first time anyone had
offered a course covering Russia which did not view her history solely
in terms of contacts with the West, the Eastern Question, the fate of
the Ottoman Empire and the relations of Russia with the countries of
Western Europe.
Professor Coolidge was an enthusiast and was deeply convinced of an
American need to study the Slavic World. He expounded these views in a
paper delivered before the American Historical Association in 1895. By
the next year he had added a course at Harvard on the Eastern Question.
At about the same time he secured the appointment of Leo Wiener as
Professor of Russian Literature. This marked the actual beginning of
Slavic studies in an American university.
Professor Coolidge never gave up his interest in the work. In addition
to the courses that he gave, he superintended the building of the Slavic
collection in the Harvard Library and served constantly as an adviser to
the United States government on Slavic matters. He brought out, in 1915,
a volume on the _Origin of the Triple Alliance_ and during World War I
was one of the committee of scholars formed under the leadership of
Colonel House to prepare materials for the American Delegation at the
Peace Conference. In 1918 he served as a special representative of the
American government in Sweden and north Russia, and in 1921 he was sent
by the American Red Cross to negotiate with the Bolshevik government on
famine relief. In 1922 he founded _Foreign Affairs_, the organ of the
American Council on Foreign Relations and the leading journal in this
field. He personally acted as editor until 1927 when he relinquished the
task to Hamilton Fish Armstrong who had been in the American service in
Serbia during World War I. When Professor Coolidge died in 1928, he was
the undisputed dean of American Slavic historians and the inspiration
for a large part of the work that was then being done in the United
States. His influence on the development of studies in history was
greater than that of Leo Wiener on languages and literature.
Leo Wiener (1862–1939) published in 1902 and 1903 an _Anthology of
Russian Literature_. This incorporated almost all the translations
previously made, including excerpts from the greater Russian writers.
The first volume, which included Russian literature up to Karamzin,
still remains the best collection in English of the older literature.
Where translations were unavailable, Professor Wiener made his own in
prose. He also published in 1904 and 1905 a translation of the chief
works of Tolstoy. Unfortunately in his later years, he lost interest in
Russian and devoted his energies to studies of Ulfilas and the Gothic
texts and many other questions far removed from his original field.
A great many of the scholars who became prominent in Slavic history
before and during World War I were students of Professor Coolidge, who
thus became the dominant force in the development of historical studies
for many years. Among these was Frank A. Golder (1877–1929) who
developed Russian history at Stanford University. He stressed, as we
might expect, the American contact with Russia in the north Pacific and
the Russian explorations in that area. In 1914 he published _Russian
Expansion in the Pacific (1641–1850)_ and later edited the accounts of
Bering’s voyages.
Another of Coolidge’s students was Robert J. Kerner (1887–1956), born in
Chicago. Kerner took his A.B. at the University of Chicago and then
after study in Europe received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1913. He was at
first connected with the University of Missouri, but in 1928 went to the
University of California at Berkeley, where he spent the rest of his
life. He was made Sather Professor of European History in 1941. When he
retired, in 1954, he was also Director of the Slavic Institute of the
University of California. Professor Kerner, who was of Czech origin, did
most of his work in Czech history, especially the period following the
Battle of the White Mountain. In 1932, he published _Bohemia in the
Eighteenth Century: a Study in Political, Social and Economic History,
with Special Reference to the Reign of Leopold II (1790–1792)_. He
published other works on the Western Slavs and the Balkans. He was
recognized by the scientific societies of both Czechoslovakia and
Romania before World War II and was decorated Commander of the White
Lion of Czechoslovakia, and Officer of the Crown of Romania. Belgium
also honored him for his work at the Peace Conference of 1919 as well as
for later services.
Another pupil of Professor Coolidge, Robert Howard Lord (1885–1954) took
his degree in Harvard in 1910 and remained there on the faculty. In
1915, he published _The Second Division of Poland_. During and shortly
after World War I he was very active in Polish studies and served on the
House Commission of Scholars to prepare materials for the Peace
Conference in 1919. However, he suddenly gave up this field of
scholarship, resigned his post, completely withdrew from previous
scholarly contacts and began to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood.
Perhaps the most important of all of the Harvard students of this period
was George Rapall Noyes (1873–1952). A native of Massachusetts, he
studied with Professor Wiener. From 1898 to 1900, he held a Harvard
University Fellowship for study at St. Petersburg. Upon his return, he
spent a year as Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin and then went to the University of California as Assistant
Professor of English and Russian. In the first year of his work at
California he had only five students in Russian and one in Czech, but as
the numbers grew he gradually dropped his work in English and by World
War I he was able to devote himself entirely to Slavic studies.
During the War, he secured Alexander Kaun as his assistant. Kaun was
born in Russia in 1889 and studied from 1905 to 1907 in the Free
University of St. Petersburg. He then came to the United States and from
1909 to 1916 taught Hebrew in Chicago. He went to California and in 1917
became Assistant in Russian. He took his M.A. and Ph.D. there and
remained on the faculty, rising to the rank of Professor in 1943. Kaun
was decidedly leftist in his sympathies and was a typical member of the
Russian intelligentsia in its narrowest sense. He was one of that group
far more interested in theoretical than practical reforms. This brought
him very close to those members of the intelligentsia who were most
inclined to sympathize with Communism; it determined his views on Maxim
Gorky and Andreyev, the subject of two of his works. He also contributed
many articles on Soviet literature. Professor Kaun died in 1944.
In 1920, George Z. Patrick was added to the University of California
staff. Born in Nizhny in 1883, Patrick traced his name and ancestry to
an Irishman who went to Russia after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Educated in the _Faculté de Droit_ in Paris and the Moscow Law School,
from which he was graduated in 1912, he came to America with one of the
Russian commissions sent by the Provisional government. After its fall,
he went to California and in 1920 was appointed Lecturer in French and
Russian. In 1923 he dropped his French work and devoted himself entirely
to Russian. In 1940 he was appointed to a full professorship. However,
his health was poor and after years of suffering and long periods of
inability to work, he died of tuberculosis in 1944. Patrick was
undoubtedly the best teacher of Russian that the American universities
have had. He was a charming and sincere man and was the best beloved
professor in the field.
The addition of Kaun and Patrick to the staff at the University of
California allowed Noyes to give up most of his Russian work and devote
himself primarily to Polish. He visited Poland in 1921 and was welcomed
at the University of Krakow where he stayed for some months. The Polish
government decorated him as Commander of _Polonia Restituta_ and several
Polish scholarly societies elected him to membership.
Even in his early days at California, Noyes commenced his work of
translation. Among the earliest was a collaboration, the _Heroic Poems
of Servia_, with Leonard Bacon of the English department. Later Noyes,
with the aid of numerous assistants, translated most of the important
works of Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski, and also many Russian
dramas including a volume, _Masterpieces of Russian Drama_, ranging from
Fonvizin to Mayakovsky. It was his practice to write out a very careful
prose translation and then have some of his students and associates set
them, when necessary, into verse. Noyes really founded a special school
of translation.
He was an earnest and sincere student, mild but demanding, especially of
himself. He carefully laid out his projected work for years in advance
and maintained a rigid schedule. Any pressure of university duties or
unforeseen calls upon his time he met by including in his work schedule
all those periods which he had left himself for vacations. When he died
in 1952, he was the last of the old generation. He left a gap in Slavic
scholarship that has not yet been filled.
The interest in Russian on the Pacific coast was reflected not only in
the appointment of Golder to Stanford’s history department. In 1918,
Henry Lanz was appointed Professor of Russian Literature and Philosophy
there. Lanz had been born in Moscow in 1886. He was not a very prolific
writer but one of his works on rhythm of language received a prize from
Sweden. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he made another trip
to Europe and stayed for some time in one of the monasteries on Mount
Athos. He died in 1945.
Another outstanding figure of the period was Samuel N. Harper
(1882–1943) of the University of Chicago. Harper was the son of the
first president of the University of Chicago. He studied in the _Ecole
des Langues Orientales_ in Paris and was closely associated with the
group of English Slavists who, under the leadership of Sir Bernard
Pares, K.B.E., gathered at the University of Liverpool and after the war
formed the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London.
Harper was in Russia with Pares during the Revolution of 1905 and was
very friendly with such liberal Russian leaders as Paul Milyukov. In
1906 he published an English translation of Boyer and Speranski’s
Russian Reader and in 1908 a volume on the _New Electoral Law for the
Duma_. Through his connections at the university and Charles R. Crane,
both Milyukov and Maxim Kovalevsky were brought to Chicago for lectures.
Harper was a constant adviser to the United States government on Russian
affairs. He was convinced that the Russian people, if they had the
power, would definitely accept the Anglo-Saxon theories of democracy, a
position which he maintained in his dealing with the Russian emigres
after the Revolution. He was solidly anti-Bolshevik but in the thirties
he accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, about the same time as Pares
did.
Harper had a wide knowledge of Russian history, and when he was not
traveling, lectured in Chicago and conducted courses in Russian. Yet he
did not build a department of Russian and, despite the large Slavic
population of the city, showed little interest in introducing other
Slavic languages or cultures.
Another important center, started just as World War I was beginning, was
at Columbia University. Although Dr. Judah A. Joffe had been appointed a
lecturer in Russian for one year, in 1909, to prepare some articles and
lectures on Russian literature for a volume on European literatures
which the university was publishing, the serious work was begun only
when John Dyneley Prince, then Professor of Semitic Languages and an
authority on Assyrian and Sumerian, offered courses in Russian and
Slavonic philology. Prince was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1868 and
was an 1888 graduate of Columbia. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins
in Semitic and conducted excavations in Mesopotamia. He was later Dean
of the graduate school of New York University and then was brought to
Columbia.
In addition to his academic work, Prince was greatly interested in
conservative New Jersey Republican politics. He served as both Speaker
of the House and President of the New Jersey Senate when Woodrow Wilson
was Governor. In 1921, President Harding appointed him United States
Minister to Denmark and President Coolidge in 1926 transferred him to
Yugoslavia. He was absent from the university therefore from 1921 to
1933, when as an ardent Republican he retired from the diplomatic
service after the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Prince was an unusually talented linguist who fluently spoke nearly all
European languages, including Hungarian and Turkish. He was also a
master of several Algonquin Indian dialects and a masterly singer of
folksongs. He had previously turned this unusual ability to good use in
his political campaigns among the New Jersey voters of various foreign
nationalities. When he turned to Slavic, he easily mastered nearly all
the languages and soon was able to speak them readily. In addition, he
was an excellent philologist and it was in this field that he most
enjoyed himself. He published a _Russian Grammar_ in 1919 under great
difficulties because of the general lack of proper type. Later he
published grammars of both Latvian and Serbo-Croatian. He was also a
great friend of Professor Michael I. Pupin, the distinguished Serb
professor of electricity.
All these abilities made him determined not to allow the department, at
Columbia, to be limited only to Russian. He offered courses in 1914 on a
graduate level with Ivan S. Andreyevsky as assistant. At the same time,
through University Extension, he started credit courses in Polish with
Dr. Albert Morawski-Nawench as instructor. Dr. Morawski-Nawench was a
Polish journalist and editor who had received his doctorate at the
University of Vienna. Czech was offered by Alois Koukol, a Presbyterian
minister, born in Kutna Hora and educated in Prague.
In addition to these courses, Prince opened in Columbia University
Extension a special school of spoken languages. These were non-credit
courses and Prince hoped to develop them, in time, into something like
the _Ecole des Langues Orientales_. Courses were offered in some twenty
languages. This undertaking was nipped in its infancy by Prince’s
appointment to Denmark, for after his departure the original program was
abandoned. It had considerable effect for some years, however, both upon
the Department of Slavonic Languages and several others.
In 1917, Prince invited Clarence A. Manning to be Lecturer in Slavonic
languages. Manning had received his doctorate in Greek and Latin at
Columbia in 1915 and had become interested in Russian while on a Cutting
Fellowship, traveling in Europe at the outbreak of World War I. He was
on leave of absence from the university in 1918–1919 while serving in
the Corps of Intelligence Police and the Translation section (M.I. 6) of
the United States Army War College. During Prince’s absence, he served
as acting executive officer of the department.
On his return to Columbia, in 1933 Prince resumed his professorship but
because of failing health and eyesight he retired in 1937. He died in
1945. In this early period, two doctorates were conferred. One was
conferred on Mr. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Director of the Slavic department
of the New York Public Library, for a study of Dostoyevsky’s ideology;
the other on Milivoy S. Stanoyevich, for a work on early Yugoslav
literature.
In addition to these main centers, there were several other developments
worthy of mention. Professor William Lyon Phelps, the distinguished
professor of English at Yale University, published in 1911 a popular
work, _Essays on the Russian Novelists_. He was assisted in preparing
this by Max S. Mandell who for a decade continued to give courses in the
Russian language. Mandell also published a translation of the plays of
Turgenev and several other works.
Professor Clarence L. Meader of the Department of Classics at the
University of Michigan also introduced courses in Russian and published
a translation of the plays of Andreyev. Professor Harold H. Bender of
Princeton, starting from a study of linguistics, came to stress the
influence of the Baltic and Slavic languages, especially Lithuanian. In
neither case was there a department definitely established at this time.
There were also a great many professors in various other fields who did
valuable work on Slavic subjects. It would be impossible to list all of
these works though some should be mentioned.
Professor Vladimir Simkhovich was appointed a professor of Economic
History at Columbia in 1904. There he continued work which he had
started at the University of Jena in 1899 on _Die Feldgemeinschaft in
Russland_ and, in 1908, _Die Bauernbefreiung in Russland_. Several
dissertations on Slavic subjects were accepted by the faculty of
political science at Columbia, such as the _Eastern Question_ by
Professor Stephan Duggan in 1902 and the _Making of the Balkan States_
by W. S. Murray in 1910.
Professor Ales Hrdlicka, the distinguished Czech anthropologist and
authority on the population of the Aleutian Islands, published several
works on the Czechs and on the _Races of Russia_ for the Smithsonian
Miscellaneous Collection for 1919.
Professor E. A. Ross, a sociologist of the University of Wisconsin, was
in Russia during the Revolution and published _Russia in Upheaval_ in
1918, _Russian Bolshevik Revolution_ in 1921, and _Russian Soviet
Republics_ in 1924.
Paul R. Radosavljevich, Professor of Experimental Psychology at New York
University, published in 1919 the two volume work, _Who are the Slavs?_
This was a serious attempt to study Slavic psychology and to identify,
if possible, features common to all Slavic nations.
A psychology professor, Will S. Monroe of the New Jersey State Normal
School in Montclair, traveled extensively in both Czechoslovakia and
Bulgaria and published _Bohemians and Czechs_ in 1910 and _Bulgaria and
its People_ in 1914.
Other men who were active, some of them students of Professor Coolidge,
were: Professor Arthur I. Andrews, Tufts College; Professor A. J.
Shipman, Princeton; Professor Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Smith College, and
Professor Bernadotte Schmitt, University of Chicago. Most of these knew
Russian or one of the Slavic languages but at this period there was no
generally accepted rule that the students of Slavic themes had to be
familiar with the original sources and many of the dissertations and
books published were by men who used materials available in French,
German, or rarely, Latin.
There were also many scholarly books by persons who had little or no
university connections. Included in these are the translations of
_Russian Poetry_ by Babette Deutsch, the wife of Dr. Yarmolinsky, and
the volumes by Julius F. Hecker.
America’s entrance into World War I revealed the American people’s need
for more accurate knowledge of Slavic affairs. This was especially shown
by the confusion which prevailed, even in official circles, concerning
the Russian Revolution and the rise of Bolshevism.[27] It became still
more apparent when the committee, brought together through the efforts
of Col. Edward M. House, to consider the effect of the peace found
themselves hampered by lack of material on the non-Russian peoples of
the Russian Empire. The German materials on these people were suspect,
and the Russian a sealed book to all except a very few of the committee
members, and there was almost no one to deal with materials in the
native languages, especially when the material was not Slavic.
Before the War, German had been the chief foreign language taught in the
American schools and universities. However, hostilities brought general
anger against the Germans and also against certain German professors who
placed themselves all too readily at the service of the German
government. This resulted in widespread opposition to the use of German
and, in fact, to any foreign language. Some states, such as Nebraska,
where there was a large population of German origin, went so far as to
forbid the teaching of any foreign language within the limits of the
state, a ban which was later overruled by the United States Supreme
Court. Even where this extreme was not reached, the number of students
of German declined almost to nothing and many members of the university
faculties either were dropped from their posts or were faced with that
possibility.
In this crisis, and in the hope that the Russian Revolution would
promote democratic contacts and trade with the United States, some of
these former German professors announced courses in Russian. There was
often something humorous and grotesque about this, for there were few if
any textbooks and the professors themselves had little knowledge of the
language. The situation in some cases was scandalous. There is little
reason to do more than mention the existence of this situation. Even
well-known scholars lent themselves to it, only to report a few years
later that there was no call for Russian. As a result, the sudden flurry
of Russian courses was without result and in the years after the War,
they were more or less quietly abandoned. It accentuated the common
notion that Russian could not be learned, an idea energetically fostered
for various reasons. No one took the trouble to realize that the
necessary preliminaries, such as the publication of grammars, were yet
to be done. There were no books available, save a few published in
England, and no real teachers, save some chance immigrants who owed
their opportunities more to good fortune than to ability or training.
Yet the war period did serve to strengthen those departments which had
been previously established. It brought a few new individuals into the
picture and above all it aroused a sense of need that was slowly to be
satisfied.