Vyacheslav Ivanov (philologist)

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (Вячесла́в Все́володович Ива́нов, 21 August 1929 – 7 October 2017) was a prominent Soviet/Russian philologist, semiotician and Indo-Europeanist probably best known for his glottalic theory of Indo-European consonantism and for placing the Indo-European urheimat in the area of the Armenian Highlands and Lake Urmia.

Vyacheslav Ivanov's father was Vsevolod Ivanov, one of the most prominent Soviet writers.

His mother was an actress who worked in the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

His childhood was clouded by disease and war, especially in Tashkent.

Ivanov was educated at Moscow University and worked there until 1958, when he was fired on account of his sympathy with Boris Pasternak and Roman Jakobson.

By that time, he had made some important contributions to Indo-European studies and became one of the leading authorities on the Hittite language.

The member of the academies of sciences and learned societies:

During the early 1960s, Ivanov was one of the first Soviet scholars to take a keen interest in the development of semiotics.

He worked with Vladimir Toporov on several linguistic monographs, including an outline of Sanskrit.

In 1962 he joined Toporov and Juri Lotman in establishing the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School.

In 1965 Ivanov edited, wrote extensive scholarly comments, and published the first Russian edition of previously unpublished "Psychology of Art" by Lev Vygotsky (the work written in the first half of the 1920s).

The second, extended and corrected edition of the book came out in 1968 and included another Vygotsky's unpublished work, his treatise on Shakespeare's Hamlet (written in 1915-1916).

During the 1970s Ivanov worked with Tamaz Gamkrelidze on a new theory about the Indo-European phonetic system: the famous Glottalic theory.

The first edition of the book was subsequently translated into English by Scripta Technica Inc. and released by MIT Press in 1971.

These two academics worked together also on a new theory of Indo-European migrations, during the 1980s, which was most recently advocated by them in Indo-European and Indo-Europeans (1995).

Also, in 1989 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of Russia, but left for the United States soon thereafter.

He was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2000, and he has been a Foreign Fellow of the British Academy since 1977.