Zenkovsky Obituary 1991 Russian Review

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The Editors and oard of Trustees of the Russian Review

Obituary: Serge A. Zenkovsky (1907-1990)Author(s): Ralph T. FisherSource: Russian Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 121-123Published by: Wileyon behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

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OBITUARYSERGE A. ZENKOVSKY (1907-1990)Serge Zenkovsky, since 1959 a member of the editorial board of The RussianReview, died on March 31, 1990. From 1986 onward he had struggled againstserious eye, intestinal, and other ailments in order to continue editing and translat-ing The Nikonian Chronicle, in cooperation with his wife, Betty Jean. He was happyto have completed its fifth and final volume in time to celebrate the thousandthanniversary (1988) of the adoption of Christianity in Kievan Russia.Serge was born June 16 (n.s.), 1907, in Kiev. (For information on the periodbefore 1950, when he entered American academic life, I am dependent on materi-als he himself prepared and on what has been told me by Betty Jean and by hissister's daughter, Natasha Bauer.) His father Aleksandr (1878-1966) was the son ofVasilii Zenkovskii, a school superintendent in the Ukraine. Aleksandr was aneconomist and later professor of economics at the Kievskii Kommercheskii Institut.His involvement in zemstvo and other affairs brought him into contact withStolypin, and the notes he smuggled out after the Revolution served as the basis forhis subsequent book, Pravda o Stolypine. Serge's mother, Elena (1884-1954), wasthe daughter of a physician and professor of surgery in Kiev, Mikhail Studenkov (asgiven by Serge in his naturalization papers) or Studenko (as Natasha remembers it).Although many of Serge's forebears lived in the Ukraine, the family spoke Russian,and Serge was not a Ukrainian nationalist. Serge's interest in the Moslem regions ofthe Russian Empire went back to his childhood, when two Tatarboys of about hisage lived several summers with the Zenkovskys in order to learn Russian, andbecame close friends of his.With the Revolution, Aleksandr fled to Constantinople with his wife and histwo children. After brief attempts to establish himself there and in Berlin, whereSerge attended secondary school, Aleksandr moved in 1922 to Prague to join thefaculty of the Russkii Sel'skokhoziaistvennyi Institut, where he received his diplomain economic history. In 1927, leaving his parents and sister Nadezhda in Prague, hemoved to Paris, where his father's brother, the philosopher Vasilii VasilievichZenkovsky, was establishing himself. In 1930 Serge earned his licence es lettres inEast European and modern history from the University of Paris. Meanwhile, as amember of the Russian Student Christian Movement interested in cooperation withthe Anglican Church, he had begun to learn English.As a noncitizen in the depressed France of 1930, he was fortunate to be hired bya French firm, Jupiter Radio. Over the next nine years he was a business managerwith that company and with Prozen, an importer and exporter of machinery.By 1939 he was ready to see what his future might hold in the United States.American visa in hand, he went to say a quick goodbye to his parents and sister inPrague. But Hitler's occupation of that city caught him there. Unable to leave, helectured at the Slavonic Commercial Academy in Prague during the period 1939-44and continued his studies, this time at Charles University. By 1942 he had earnedhis Ph.D. in Russian and modern history. His dissertation, in German, was onRussian policies in Sinkiang from 1856 to 1914.

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122 ObituaryAfter a series of narrow escapes from the Nazis and from Czech Communists,as well as from the Red Army, in 1945 he and his parents (but not his sister) ended

up in the American Zone of Occupation. There he taught at the PolytechnicalSchool of the International Refugee Organization in Munich. Finally, in 1949, hisparents and he were able to come to the United States. Serge's first year here wasspent cleaning shrimp for Schrafft's Restaurant in New York. As of 1950 he wasforty-three, and hardly the most obvious candidate for a distinguished academiccareer.From then on, however, in the period familiar to many of his Americanfriends, Fortune smiled. In 1950 Michael Ginsburg hired him to teach a variety ofcourses in Slavic studies at Indiana University. He survived an initially heavy teach-ing load, despite an illness that left him deaf in one ear. Soon he met the person whowas thenceforth central to both his personal and professional life, Betty JeanBubbers. From South Dakota she had come, after a B.A. in Russian from theUniversity of Michigan, to Indiana, and was employed as a secretary on campuswhile studying for her M.A. They were married in 1952. The partnership couldhardly have been better. Serge was eager to make up for lost years. He was brim-ming with ideas for scholarly research, and he had the energy and knowledge topursue them efficiently. Betty Jean (who modestly and insistently minimizes herprofessional contributions) could add what was needed: she could compensate forhis imperfect knowledge of English; she was an excellent typist and was talented asan editor and preparer of manuscripts for publication; she was determined toexpand her knowledge of the Russian language and of Russian literature; and shewould keep on adding or improving other skills needed to complement his work,including a reading knowledge of French, German, Serbo-Croatian, and OldChurch Slavonic.

Serge's first American publication came in 1953, in the American Slavic andEast European Review. Others followed quickly. Meanwhile, Michael Karpovichhad been impressed by a paper he heard Serge read on the Old Believers, andarranged to have him invited in 1954 to a post at Harvard as a visiting lecturer inRussian and associate of the Russian Research Center. Betty Jean, having receivedher M.A. in Russian at Indiana, was able to complete her course work for thePh.D. at Radcliffe. And with her assistance, Serge was showing what he could do:in those four years at Harvard, he published or prepared for publication somethirteen scholarly articles, a fifty-page monograph on Avvakum, and the manu-script of his first full-size book, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia, drafted in Rus-sian, translated by Betty Jean, and subsequently published by the Harvard Univer-sity Press.Further recognition came swiftly. On the recommendation of William L.Langer, in 1958, Serge was attracted to a new post in history at Stetson University.(There was also a job for Betty Jean as a teacher of Russian.) In 1960, S. HarrisonThomson lured him to the University of Colorado (again along with a job for BettyJean). The president of Stetson, not to be outdone, drew them back in 1962 so thatSerge could head up Stetson's new program in Russian studies, financed by theDanforth Foundation. Serge's steady flow of publications, including Medieval Rus-sia's Epics, Chronicles and Tales (E.P. Dutton, 1963), earned him a GuggenheimFellowship in 1965-66. Competition for Serge among several universities led to hismove in 1967 to Vanderbilt, where the Zenkovskys stayed until Serge received



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Serge A. Zenkovsky 123emeritus status in 1977. In that decade appeared, among many other things, theRussian version of his five-hundred-page study of Russia's Old Believers (Munich:Wilhelm Fink, 1970).Although the Zenkovskys then retired to Florida, Serge's scholarly activity inpartnership with Betty Jean continued at full steam, aided by a grant from theNational Endowment for the Humanities for their new edition and joint translationof The Nikonian Chronicle (5 vols.; Darwin Press, 1984-89). At the time of hisdeath, Serge's publications numbered over two hundred.Among Serge's many honors, some of which have been listed in the newspapernotices of his death, perhaps the one that pleased him most was that accorded by hiscolleagues in the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies when, in 1974, they singledhim out for a special award for his numerous contributions as teacher, scholar, andhumanist. Many scholars in other parts of the country and abroad joined then inapplause for that recognition, and join now in treasuring his memory.

Ralph T. Fisher, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


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Zenkovsky Obituary 1991 Russian Review