Rise and Fall of Master Arthur Gleye (From the History of Linguistic Studies at Tomsk University)

The name of Tomsk linguist Arthur Wilhelm Gleye is almost completely forgotten. Meanwhile, this scholar was educated by major linguists and such classics as Karl Brugmann, August Leskien, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, and others. All activities of Gleye date back to the 1890s-1930s, and some of his hypotheses about the ancient contacts between Uralic, Kartvelian, Semitic, and Indo-European languages, about the relationship of the Hurro-Urartian with the East Caucasian etc., even anticipated the research and conclusions of scholars of subsequent generations. However, his other works, especially in the field of Finno-Ugric studies, sharply diverge methodologically from academic comparative studies, which was the reason for the linguist’s criticism by authoritative specialists of his time, for example, Paul Ariste, who called Gleye’s activities “pseudo-linguistics.” Many of the breaks in Gleye’s career are explained by his origins from a family of Baltic Germans and the difficult times in which he lived (anti-German sentiment in the First World War, Fennomania in the Baltic countries, etc.). The article is the first to attempt to reconstruct a complete biography of the researcher from scattered fragments. The most important sources were eyewitness accounts (Kai Donner, Friedrich Knauer), as well as correspondence, including unpublished letters from Arthur Gleye addressed to Nikolai Marr, which are stored in the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The author declares no conflict of interests.

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