A. MEILLET ABOUT N. YA. MARR: AN OVERLOOK

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the French Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) and the Soviet Nikolaj Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934) were probably the most prominent linguists in their respective “worlds”: Meillet, in Western Europe, as the chief of the Indo-European comparative linguistics, and, in the Soviet Union, Marr as the herald of the so-called Marxist Soviet linguistics. These two approaches generally considered antagonistic, but that did not prevent Marr and Meillet from maintaining contacts, corresponding with each other for many years and knowing about their respective research. First, this paper aims to present the contacts these two linguists had, focusing on the correspondence between Meillet and Marr. Secondly, the paper examines what Meillet thought about Marr and his theories, on the basis, in particular, of the numerous reviews that Meillet wrote about Marr’s works. Refs 11.