Notes on the Shevelov-

Jakobson Controversy
George Shevelov 1908-2002 Roman Jakobson 1896-1982
George Shevelov and Roman Jakobson represent two of the best known American
Slavic linguists of the 20th century; the former a Ukrainian-American and the latter
a Russian-American, although each was a native speaker of Russian and Shevelov
only mastered Ukrainian as a second language, according to his own writings.

Shevelov is best known as a professor of Slavic linguistics at Columbia University for

most of his career, while Jakobson is best know as a professor at Harvard, and later
MIT.

In 1994, 12 years after the death of Jakobson, Shevelov wrote 35-page Ukrainian
article on his interactions with Jakobson and the origins of a huge feud that arose
between them. Horace Lunt, a close associate of Jakobson at Harvard, wrote a reply
to Shevelov’s article shortly after its appearance in 1994, but it was only discovered
around five years later by George Grabowicz, Lunt’s Harvard colleague, and it
remained unpublished for a long time. Grabowicz eventually had it translated into
Ukrainian and published it in 2010. Apparently, the English original was never
published.
Both the Shevelov article and the Lunt rejoinder give us a very informative
glimpse into some very serious disagreements, scholarly, political, and personal
between the two parties. However, due to the fact that both were published
only in Ukrainian, they are most likely not well known among many Slavists and
others who would be very interested in their contents.

My report will discuss the contents and background of Shevelov’s article and
the Lunt paper which followed it.

Let’s start by taking a look at the Ukrainian publications where the two papers
appeared.

Shevelov’s paper appeared in Сучасність (‘Modernity’), a journal which

Shevelov later headed as editor-in-chief, four years after the article appeared.
Lunt’s translated paper was published in Критика (‘Criticism’), shortly after his
death in 2010, accompanied by an obituary and articles about him.
Lunt’s paper divides the Shevelov article into its main topics, as follows:

1. Chronology of how Shevelov came to Harvard from a teaching position

in Sweden, which followed evacuation to Germany at the end of World
War II.
2. All-powerful Jakobson.
3. The Reisinger matter.
4. Jakobson’s incorrect ideas.
5. Jakobson’s anti-Ukrainian views.
6. Shevelov’s interaction with Lunt.
7. Soviet accusations against Shevelov for the 1963 Congress of Slavists.
8. Conclusions.
Before getting into specific details, let’s take a look at some ostensible
contradictions in Shevelov’s article about Jakobson and the reasons behind
them.

Jakobson was the major Slavic linguist at Harvard in the early 1950’s, where the
Slavic Department needed an additional lecturer. Dmitry Cizevsky, also in the
department at the time, had correspondence with George Shevelov, who was
teaching in Sweden and interested in emigrating to the United States. Shevelov’s
native Russian and linguistic training matched Harvard’s needs and he received
an offer, finally arriving there in the Fall, 1952 semester.

Jakobson offered Shevelov assistance after he arrived in the U.S. He helped him
obtain funding for the translation and publication of his Ukrainian-language
book on the history of Belarusian. He also included Shevelov in his grant for the
study of Russian, which provided some additional funding to Shevelov.
However, Shevelov’s piece starts with an extremely negative portrayal of Jakobson. He
goes into excruciating detail on Jakobson’s physical appearance, his handshake, and his
personality. He enumerates Jakobson’s major contributions to linguistics and says negative
things about every one of them! He even criticizes Jakobson for a supposedly inebriated
statement that Jakobson, Shevelov, and Francis Whitfield represented the “Big 3” in the
Slavic field.

What could be the reason for such an attack? The reason can be seen by understanding
the two periods of relations between Shevelov and Jakobson. The earlier period dates
from the beginning in the early 1950’s, when they first made contact and Shevelov came to
Harvard for two years, then moving on to Columbia University. Jakobson apparently had no
antipathy towards Shevelov in this period and there was no basis for Shevelov’s negative
treatment of Jakobson.

The second period explains the negative tone that Shevelov later displayed towards
Jakobson. It started in 1962, when preparations began for the 1963 International Congress
of Slavists, to be held in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was to be the first post-war Congress.
The American committee (Jakobson, William Edgerton, and Dean Worth) had a meeting
with the Soviet delegation to approve the papers and participants at the 1963 Congress.

Ivan Bilodid, a Ukrainian Slavist, played a major role in the Soviet delegation and he
rejected Shevelov as a participant, later giving the American committee the reasons for
this. The reasons had nothing to do with scholarship, but related to the fact that
Shevelov was accused of being a Nazi collaborator during World War II.

Shevelov’s wartime activities are not a secret. He himself has detailed his actions. As
the German troops were advancing on Kharkiv, Shevelov was not drafted into the Soviet
army, but was given an order to evacuate and aid in certain military preparations to the
east of Kharkiv, beyond the reach of the advancing German troops.

Shevelov’s writings show that he had equal contempt for the dictators Stalin and Hitler
and that he did not want to actively support either one. Based on the rapid Nazi
conquest of many European countries, he felt sure that the Nazis would conquer the
Soviet Union.
So, he preferred to remain in the Nazi controlled part of Ukraine and was soon given the
task of writing articles for the Nazi Ukrainian newspaper, called Nova Ukrajina (Нова
Україна). Most of his articles were on cultural topics and many expressed his hatred for
the Bolshevik regime of Stalin. When the Nazis said that the term “Bolshevik” must be
written as “Jewish-Bolshevik”, Shevelov writes that he refused to state it that way. This
was apparently meant to show that he did not totally embrace Nazi policy.

However, he received one of the newly empty apartments in Kharkiv, which became
available due to the huge number of Jews who were being exterminated. He also wrote
that he did not care for Hitler, but he still welcomed the German army, which he praised
in spite of their murderous acts against the entire Jewish population in nearby Baby Yar
and other Ukrainian areas.

For example, in one of his articles about a performance of a Wagner opera, he contrasts
the poor behavior of the local Soviet population that stamps its feet and leaves early,
with the model behavior of the Nazi soldiers who attended.
Для вояка німецького Вагнер--цілий світ. Бо вояк цей, ідейний и
культурний, пізнав світ, його принаду и його суворість, вигартував у собі
мужність и виховав змістовність. А що знають вони, ці плоди
большевицького світу.

For the German soldier, Wagner is an entire world. Because this soldier,
ideological and cultured, has gotten to know the world, its charms and its
harshness, and has hardened his courage and developed real content. But
what do they know, these fruits of the Bolshevik world?
Із плетива сталінославної поетичної традиції і моїх справжніх сподівань
визволення від німецького походу виросла моя, з дозволу сказати, поезія, в
якій я оспівував — ні, хвалити Бога, не Гітлера, але марш німецького
війська на Схід.

Out of... my true hopes for liberation from the German campaign...my poetry
grew, in which I sang not of Hitler, by God, but the march of the German army
to the East.

From Юрій Шевельов (Юрій Шерех) Я, мені, мене ... (і довкруги) Спогади.
Page 285
Lunt and others addressed the question of whether any crime was committed by
Shevelov’s actions. The consensus is that there was no physical activity or actual
crime here, other than a violation of the Soviet law for desertion, due to Shevelov’s
failure to obey an order to move eastwards and render aid to the Soviet troops.
However, he stayed behind and worked with a Nazi newspaper. The American
Committee of Slavists was shocked at the pro-Nazi evidence and this gave rise to a
feeling of enmity between Shevelov and many American Slavists, especially
Jakobson. His anger at Jakobson was much greater due to Jakobson’s meetings with
the Soviet Bilodid, who was considered to be a member of the KGB within the circle
of Ukrainian Slavists.

Obviously, Shevelov had legitimate grievances as a result of Stalin’s murderous

repression in Ukraine, including the holodomor starvation and purges of the 1930’s.
However, his embrace of the German army during the Nazi occupation was still
shocking to many.
Even recently, there has been great controversy about an honorific plaque that
was placed on the apartment where Shevelov lived in Kharkiv. Supporters who
emphasized his promotion of the Ukrainian language and anti-Stalinist views
were opposed by those who emphasized his wartime desertion and pro-
German articles in the Nazi press of occupied Ukraine. The first plaque was
smashed and later a new one was placed. This appears to be a continuing
controversy, perhaps made even worse by the Russian invasion of 2022. Here
is a photo of the plaque being smashed by demonstrators.
Time would not permit a full examination of Shevelov’s angry essay about
Jakobson. However, it might be more instructive to consider Shevelov’s specific
criticisms of Jakobson’s major linguistic works.

1. Criticism of remarks on Russian phonology in relation to other Slavic

languages.
Accusation that it only recognizes innovations in Serbo-Croatian and Russian and
all other Slavic languages are secondary.
2. Criticism of the one-stem verb system.
Accusation that the older two-stem system is easier and does not require a body
of complex rules.
3. Criticism of phonological distinctive features beyond the phoneme.
Accusation that Jakobson was trying to follow the latest trends in physics about
splitting the atom and that his goal was self-aggrandizement.
4. Criticism of metrical analysis of Old Church Slavonic texts.
In the case of all of these accomplishment of Jakobson, Shevelov accuses him of doing this
to make an impression on others. He refers to Jakobson as a “mirror man”, who saw his
value in how others received his work.

It would seem that Shevelov is being incredibly unfair here. I would assume that the reason
behind this is the exclusion from the Congress of Slavists and other activities as a sanction
against Shevelov’s behavior during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

Each of these achievements of Jakobson is significant in the history of linguistics. Shevelov

totally distorts Jakobson’s work on the relation between the Slavic languages. The only
point about Jakobson’s focus on Slovene and Serbo-Croatian is that it located at the
extreme southwest and that jer-fall started in this zone, leading to phonemic tone
distinctions. Conversely, Russian is not a favored language for Jakobson, but it is at the
extreme northeast, where jers were last to drop and consonants took on the tonality
feature. This goes back to work by Trubetzkoy and is definitely not a case of Jakobson
discriminating against certain Slavic languages other than Serbian and Russian! This
criticism is just as unfair as blaming Jakobson for his physical appearance, which Shevelov
also does.
Jakobson’s proposal of a one-stem verb system for Russian is in the tradition of
Leonard Bloomfield’s morphophonemics and sets up a single form when the
morphophonemic environment permits all other forms to be derived from the basic
form. Can it be that Shevelov is not familiar with the concept of predictability in
linguistics? His criticism of the one-stem system is simply based on a preference for
tradition. Entire new schools of linguistics were developed on the basis of this work
by Jakobson and it has been one of the most fertile linguistic ideas of the twentieth
century.

One might make the same claim about distinctive feature theory. If individual
phonetic or acoustic features comprise the definition of a phonemic complex, what
is the argument against using them? If Shevelov prefers a conservative approach,
that does not negate the value of a more radical revision of old methods, as we find
in Jakobson’s work.
Characteristically, Shevelov’s books are huge tomes, filled with old ideas and exhaustive lists
of examples. Jakobson’s work tends to be shorter, more concise, and full of new approaches
to the data, with only the necessary examples listed. I have found that the main value of
Shevelov’s work (e.g., A Prehistory of Slavic) is the listing of examples and the repetition of
older views on many subjects. Jakobson’s work is totally different. It is often necessary to
study a pattern of completely new ideas and relationships to derive benefit from many
Jakobsonian works. Thus, Jakobson’s work is more rewarding and interesting in moving
scholarship forward.

Lunt wrote a scathing review of Shevelov’s major book in 1966. Shevelov blamed him for
doing this as part of Jakobson’s scheme to ruin his reputation. Lunt’s review said the
following:
“The long labor of reading it is essentially lost, for Shevelov offers nothing of value which
not been better said elsewhere. It is sad that the author has expended such effort with so
little positive result.”
Unfortunately, Shevelov let the quarrel over his past completely distort his view of
Jakobson. One can sympathize with a Ukrainian who suffered a lack of freedom under
years of Stalinist repression, but it is no excuse for praising the actions of the invading
Nazi army, which exceeded Stalinist cruelty in its brutal murder of civilians on
Ukrainian territory and elsewhere.

This conflict may be instructive for shedding light on how some Russians feel about
Ukraine, although the Shevelov generation of Nazi sympathizers is no longer a
presence in today’s Ukraine. There is a history of anger and misunderstanding and the
Shevelov-Jakobson controversy can be viewed in this context, although it played out
far from Russia and Ukraine many decades ago.
Besides publishing Lunt’s response to Shevelov’s memoir, George Grabowicz published
a comment of his own, giving some perspective on the angry confrontation of
Shevelov, Jakobson, and Lunt. Since it only appeared in Ukrainian, in Krytyka, it is
probably known only to those who read Ukrainian.

Grabowicz writes that Lunt “did not understand - probably no one from the "normal"
world is really prepared for such a task - the whole depth of traumas that were
programmed by totalitarianism and the horror of war, which then inevitably emerged
in surprising guises. Also, that Lunt “underestimates the irrational core of Shevelov's
memory.”

In weighing the reactions to the terrible events of Ukraine under Stalin, then Hitler,
the Shevelov-Jakobson confrontation is reflective of struggles that are still being
played out in that country at this moment.