Edward Stankiewicz In Memoriam

Abstract

Professor Edward Stankiewicz (1920-2013) was the B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University from 1971 until he retired in 1991. Thereafter, he remained an active scholar as Professor Emeritus for nearly twenty years. His continued active pursuit of scholarship reflected his unparalleled dedication to the field. Edward passed away on January 31, 2013, and as Harvey Goldblatt noted in his message to the Yale community, that day we lost one of the world's leading Slavists. Indeed, I can think of few others who were so passionate about Slavic linguistics; he was fluent in many languages, including at least six Slavic languages, and was keenly interested in the diachronic and synchronic state of all Slavic languages and dialects. Born in Warsaw on November 17, 1920, Edward was also a talented artist and poet, who on occasion would entertain guests by playing his mandolin and singing his favorite songs in Yiddish. A Holocaust survivor, Edward immigrated to the United States after being liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War II. He frequently spoke of his time in transit through Italy, where he developed a love of the Italian language and culture. A student of Roman Jakobson, Edward received his PhD from Harvard in 1954, and taught at Indiana University and the University of Chicago before joining Yale.