The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

Obituary: Serge A. Zenkovsky (1907-1990)

Author(s): Ralph T. Fisher
Source: Russian Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 121-123
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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OBITUARY
SERGE A. ZENKOVSKY
(1907-1990)
Serge Zenkovsky,
since 1959 a member of the editorial board of The Russian
Review,
died on March
31,
1990. From 1986 onward he had
struggled against
serious
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
happy
to have
completed
its fifth and final volume in time to celebrate the thousandth
anniversary (1988)
of the
adoption
of
Christianity
in Kievan Russia.
Serge
was born June 16
(n.s.),
1907,
in Kiev.
(For
information on the
period
before
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
his
sister's
daughter,
Natasha
Bauer.)
His father Aleksandr
(1878-1966)
was the son of
Vasilii
Zenkovskii,
a school
superintendent
in the Ukraine. Aleksandr was an
economist and later
professor
of economics at the Kievskii Kommercheskii Institut.
His involvement in zemstvo and other affairs
brought
him into contact with
Stolypin,
and the notes he
smuggled
out after the Revolution served as the basis for
his
subsequent
book,
Pravda o
Stolypine. Serge's
mother,
Elena
(1884-1954),
was
the
daughter
of a
physician
and
professor
of
surgery
in
Kiev,
Mikhail Studenkov
(as
given 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
of
the Russian
Empire
went back to his
childhood,
when two Tatar
boys
of about his
age
lived several summers with the
Zenkovskys
in order to learn
Russian,
and
became close friends of his.
With the
Revolution,
Aleksandr fled to
Constantinople
with his wife and his
two children. After brief
attempts
to establish himself there and in
Berlin,
where
Serge
attended
secondary
school,
Aleksandr moved in 1922 to
Prague
to
join
the
faculty
of the Russkii
Sel'skokhoziaistvennyi
Institut,
where he received his
diploma
in economic
history.
In
1927, leaving
his
parents
and sister Nadezhda in
Prague,
he
moved to
Paris,
where his father's
brother,
the
philosopher
Vasilii Vasilievich
Zenkovsky,
was
establishing
himself. In 1930
Serge
earned his licence es lettres in
East
European
and modern
history
from the
University
of Paris.
Meanwhile,
as a
member of the Russian Student Christian Movement interested in
cooperation
with
the
Anglican
Church,
he had
begun
to learn
English.
As a noncitizen in the
depressed
France of
1930,
he was fortunate to be hired
by
a French
firm, Jupiter
Radio. Over the next nine
years
he was a business
manager
with 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 in
Prague.
But Hitler's
occupation
of that
city caught
him there. Unable to
leave,
he
lectured at the Slavonic Commercial
Academy
in
Prague during
the
period
1939-44
and continued his
studies,
this time at Charles
University. By
1942 he had earned
his Ph.D. in Russian and modern
history.
His
dissertation,
in
German,
was on
Russian
policies
in
Sinkiang
from 1856 to 1914.
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122
Obituary
After 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
Polytechnical
School of the International
Refugee Organization
in Munich.
Finally,
in
1949,
his
parents
and he were able to come to the United States.
Serge's
first
year
here was
spent cleaning shrimp
for Schrafft's Restaurant in New York. As of 1950 he was
forty-three,
and
hardly
the most obvious candidate for a
distinguished
academic
career.
From then
on, however,
in the
period
familiar to
many
of his American
friends,
Fortune smiled. In 1950 Michael
Ginsburg
hired him to teach a
variety
of
courses 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
who
was thenceforth central to both his
personal
and
professional life,
Betty
Jean
Bubbers. From South Dakota she had
come,
after a B.A. in Russian from the
University
of
Michigan,
to
Indiana,
and was
employed
as a
secretary
on
campus
while
studying
for her M.A.
They
were married in 1952. The
partnership
could
hardly
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
to
pursue
them
efficiently. Betty
Jean
(who modestly
and
insistently
minimizes her
professional contributions)
could add what was needed: she could
compensate
for
his
imperfect knowledge
of
English;
she was an excellent
typist
and was talented as
an editor and
preparer
of
manuscripts
for
publication;
she was determined to
expand
her
knowledge
of the Russian
language
and of Russian
literature; and she
would
keep
on
adding
or
improving
other skills needed to
complement
his work,
including
a
reading knowledge
of French, German, Serbo-Croatian, and Old
Church Slavonic.
Serge's
first American
publication
came in
1953,
in the American Slavic and
East
European
Review. Others followed
quickly. Meanwhile, Michael
Karpovich
had been
impressed by
a
paper
he heard
Serge
read on the Old
Believers,
and
arranged
to have him invited in 1954 to a
post
at Harvard as a
visiting
lecturer in
Russian and associate of the Russian Research Center.
Betty Jean, having
received
her M.A. in Russian at
Indiana, was able to
complete
her course work for the
Ph.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
some
thirteen
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. Harrison
Thomson lured him to the
University
of Colorado
(again along
with a
job
for
Betty
Jean).
The
president
of
Stetson, not to be outdone, drew them back in 1962 so that
Serge
could head
up
Stetson's new
program
in Russian
studies, financed
by
the
Danforth Foundation.
Serge's steady
flow of
publications, including
Medieval Rus-
sia's
Epics,
Chronicles and Tales
(E.P. Dutton, 1963),
earned him a
Guggenheim
Fellowship
in 1965-66.
Competition
for
Serge among
several universities led to his
move in 1967 to
Vanderbilt, where the
Zenkovskys stayed
until
Serge
received
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Serge
A.
Zenkovsky
123
emeritus status in 1977. In that decade
appeared, among many
other
things,
the
Russian 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
in
partnership
with
Betty
Jean continued at full
steam,
aided
by
a
grant
from the
National Endowment for the Humanities for their new edition and
joint
translation
of The Nikonian Chronicle
(5 vols.;
Darwin
Press, 1984-89).
At the time of his
death, Serge's publications
numbered over two hundred.
Among Serge's many honors,
some of which have been listed in the
newspaper
notices of his
death, perhaps
the one that
pleased
him most was that accorded
by
his
colleagues
in the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies
when,
in
1974, they singled
him out for a
special
award for his numerous contributions "as
teacher, scholar,
and
humanist."
Many
scholars in other
parts
of the
country
and abroad
joined
then in
applause
for that
recognition,
and
join
now in
treasuring
his
memory.
Ralph
T.
Fisher, University
of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
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