Aleksandr Issatschenko Czechoslovakian and Austrian linguist Date of Birth: 08.12.1910 Country: Austria

Biography of Alexander Isachenko

Alexander Isachenko was a Czechoslovak and Austrian linguist of Russian origin. He was born into a family of lawyers, with his grandfather, Vasily Lavrentievich Isachenko, being a renowned Russian jurist and author, and his uncle, Boris Lavrentievich Isachenko, an academic and well-known Russian microbiologist.

After the revolution, Isachenko's family emigrated and settled in Klagenfurt, Austria. He completed his studies at the University of Vienna in 1933 and then pursued internships in Paris and Prague. Isachenko became one of the closest students of N.S. Trubetskoy, who later became his father-in-law.

Isachenko taught at various universities and institutes in Vienna, Ljubljana, and Czechoslovakia until 1968. After the events in Prague in 1968, he made the decision not to return to Czechoslovakia. He taught in the United States at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1968 to 1971, and then returned to Austria to teach in Klagenfurt from 1971 to 1978.

During this time, his name was banned in the countries of the Soviet bloc. Isachenko left behind memoirs of his life, which were published in German translation in 2003. His main area of interest was the synchronic and diachronic morphology of the Russian language. He also studied the history of Russian literature, including the language features of "The Lay of Igor's Campaign."

Isachenko attempted to apply the ideas of the older generation of structuralists from the Prague School to the description of Russian morphology. Later, he also incorporated some ideas from transformational grammar. He authored several grammatical descriptions of modern Russian, with his two-volume monograph "The Grammatical Structure of the Russian Language in Comparison with Slovak" being the most well-known.

Isachenko introduced the term "completivity" (corresponding to the German term "Aktionsart") to describe the peculiarities of prefixal word formation in Russian verbs, which gained popularity in the 1960s to 1980s. He was well-versed in contemporary European and American linguistic theories and often acted as a perceptive critic of the works of traditional Russian linguists of the "Vinogradov School," including academic grammars of the Russian language.

Isachenko was the founder of the journal "Russian Linguistics" in 1974, the first specialized international journal on the Russian language.