Nicholas Jakovlevich Marr (Russian: Никола́й Я́ковлевич Марр, Nikolay Jakovlevich Marr; Georgian: ნიკოლოზ იაკობის ძე მარი, Nikoloz Iak'obis dze Mari; 6 January 1865 [O.S. 25 December], Georgia in Kutaisi – 20 December 1934, Leningrad) was a Georgia-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before developing his linguistic "Japhetic theory" on the origin of language (from 1924) and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.
Marr's hypotheses were used as a rationale for the campaign during the 1920s and '30s in the USSR for introduction of Latin alphabets for the smaller ethnicities of the country. In 1950, the "Japhetic theory" became disfavoured after Marr’s teachings were declared anti-Marxist in an article published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda under the signature of Joseph Stalin.
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Marr was born in Kutaisi, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), in the family of the Scot James Marr (aged more than 80 years) who initiated the botanical garden of the city, and a young Georgian woman named Agrippina Magularia. His parents spoke different languages, and neither of them understood Russian.
Marr attended the gymnasium in Kutaisi, and became a student of the Department of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University in 1884. His student years were devoted to the study of the languages of the Caucasus and the Near East. He graduated with a silver medal in 1888, passed his Master’s examinations in 1891, and was appointed a Lecturer of Armenian Studies of St. Petersburg University the same year. [1] He became dean of the Oriental faculty in 1911, and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1912.[2]
The early part of Marr’s career was dedicated to Armenian and Kartvelian(Georgian) studies. The most significant part of his scholarly legacy is his editions of Georgian, Armenian, and Arab manuscripts, some of which he discovered during expeditions to the monastery of Aphon (Mt. Athos) in 1898, and to Sinai and Jerusalem in 1902. Additionally, he directed archaeological excavations of the medieval Armenian capital Ani in 1892–93 and 1904–17, of the Armenian Hellenistic temple in Garni (1909–10), and of the Urartean fortress Toprakkale (1916). His linguistic works include grammars of the Old Armenian (1903), Laz (1910), and Old Georgian (1925) languages, as well as an Abkhazian–Russian dictionary. Most of Marr’s works were written in Russian, but some are in Georgian or Armenian.
Marr also contributed, directly or indirectly, to certain aspects of Iranian studies. In 1890, while still a student, he was able to discover the Georgian version of the “Legend of Varlaam and Ioasaf” (see BARLAAM AND YOSAPH), a Buddhist-derived text, which, as we now know, was transmitted to the Caucasus and then to the Byzantines through Middle Iranian mediation. Being well versed in Classical Persian and Avestan, as well as Sanskrit, he studied Iranian influence on medieval Georgian literature, and, in particular, was able to demonstrate the Persian origin of many proper names occurring in medieval Georgian courtly novels. Marr’s article about the Kurdish word čalabī “noble” and its Caucasian cognates (1911) is suspect methodologically, but includes abundant lexical and historical material. Finally, Marr contributed to the study of the Ossetic lexicon, especially in association with those of the neighboring languages (Ossetica-Yaphetica, 1918, 1919).
The work of N. J. Marr as a Caucasologist gained him widespread scholarly recognition. He was awarded an associate professorship in 1900, and his Habilitation in 1901; he became a full Professor of Armenian and Georgian literatures in 1902. In 1909, he was elected an adjunct of the Historical-Philological Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and only three years later, in 1912, he became a full member of the Academy. Between 1911 and 1917, Marr served as the Dean of the Department of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University. In 1915, he received the Uvarov Prize, the supreme award of the Russian Archeological Society.
Emboldened by his success, Marr gradually began to shift the emphasis of his research to comparative linguistics, a topic in which he had been interested since his student years, but never trained adequately. In 1908, he published "A Preliminary Report about the Genetic Relationship between Georgian and Semitic" (in Russian, IR I, pp. 23–38). Although this work was written with blatant disregard for the comparative method, the complacent attitude of Marr’s colleagues, both in and outside Russia, did not allow him to realize his mistakes. During subsequent years, Marr dedicated increasing efforts to proving the relationship of “Japhetic” (originally synonymous with Kartvelian) languages with Armenian (1910), Abkhazian (1912), Elamite (1914), Urartian (1915), Burushaski (1916), Basque (1920), Etruscan (1921), Pelasgian (1921), Sumerian (1921), Dravidian (1922), Chuvash (1924), and others. In a 1922 article, he tried to prove the “Japhetic” origin of the ethnonym “Scythian” (IR V, pp. 1–43).
Marr did not attempt to provide scholars with the refutation of the comparative method of historical linguistics, nor did he try to justify formally an alternative method. It is fair to say that by 1923 Marr stopped being a scientist and started being the creator of a myth. The official name of this myth was the “New Linguistic Doctrine,” which was translated into English as “New Linguistics” or “New Studies of Language.”
Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he claimed that all the languages of the world descend from a single proto-language which had consisted of four "diffused exclamations": SAL, BER, YON, and ROŠ (pronounced "rosh"), combinations of which yielded all the words of attested human languages (e.g., IR III, p. 16).
Since the existence of the new “Japhetic” macrofamily implied large-scale migrations for which Marr could not account, he decided to re-interpret the similarities of “Japhetic” languages in “typological” terms. According to the 1923 article “Indo-European languages of the Mediterranean" (in Russian, IR I, pp. 185–86), “Japhetic” and Indo-European languages are not related to genetically different families, but rather represent two subsequent stages of one glottogonic process. In a speech addressed to Soviet archeologists on 6 September 1926, he insisted that the originally “Japhetic” Scythian language acquired Iranian features by historical evolution (Mikhankova, 1949, pp. 383–84). Furthermore, according to Marr, the very notion of a developed proto-language is a fiction, and today’s national languages and language families came into being through convergence of numerous tribal dialects (IR I, pp. 185–86).
After the initiation of Communist government, Marr developed a Marxist basis for his theory. He claimed that Japhetic languages had existed across Europe before the advent of the Indo-European languages. They could be still recognised as a substratum over which the Indo-European languages had imposed themselves. Using this model, Marr attempted to apply the Marxist theory of class struggle to linguistics, arguing that these different strata of language corresponded to different social classes. He even claimed that the same social classes in widely different countries spoke versions of their own languages that were linguistically closer to one another than to the speech of other classes who supposedly spoke "the same" language.
The temporary success of Marr’s teachings in the USSR owes a great deal to his ability to present his doctrine as the only Marxist alternative to the “bourgeois” science of comparative linguistics. Thus he has directly, albeit inconsistently, associated his stages of glottogonic development with socio-economic formations, as described by Marx and Engels. According to one of his students, A. A. Kholodovich (Yazyk, 1936, pp. 44–45) the “amorphous” (i.e., isolating or analytic) languages correspond to primitive communism, agglutinative languages are typical of clan communities, while inflected languages evolve in class societies. Marr prophesied that the eventual triumph of communism would cause the genesis of a new universal language “where supreme beauty will be combined with the supreme development of the mind” (IR III, pp. 111–12).
Marr’s use of Marxist phraseology helped him to advance his personal career in the USSR. At various periods of time during the 1920s he was director of the Academy of the History of Material Culture, the Leningrad Public Library, the Institute of the Study of Ethnic and National Cultures of the East, and the Section of Materialist Linguistics of the Communist Academy. He was permitted to manage the National Russian Library from 1926 until 1930, and the Japhetic Institute (later renamed the Institute of Language and Thought) of the Academy of Sciences from 1921 until his death. He was elected Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1930. In January 1934, he was awarded the Order of Lenin.
Marr died on 20 December 1934, and official mourning was declared in Leningrad.
Marr’s New Linguistic Doctrine remained a part of the official Soviet orthodoxy until the end of the 1940s, although some of his pupils, notably the Iranologist V. I. Abaev (q.v.), had already begun to tacitly dismantle many of its elements. On 20 July 1950, however, Marr’s teachings were declared anti-Marxist in an article published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which was signed and possibly even written by Stalin. The article, named "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics", was apparently inspired by the writings of Marr's most energetic opponent, Arnold Chikobava[1]. The author wrote that "N. Y. Marr introduced into linguistics incorrect and non-Marxist formula, regarding the "class character" of language, and got himself into a muddle and put linguistics into a muddle. Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula which is contrary to the whole course of the history of peoples and languages."
Among the possible motives that prompted the Stalin to interfere with a linguistic theory, one can mention Stalin’s desire, common to many autocrats of the past, to become an authority of the sciences, as well as the incompatibility of Marr’s cosmopolitan myth with the largely nationalist ideology of post-war Russia. Traditional historical linguistics was rehabilitated subsequently.
The late writings of N. J. Marr are now of interest mainly for Sovietologists and historians of linguistics. His earlier works, however, retain their scholarly value and should be of interest to anyone studying the cultures of the Caucasus.
[IR] N. J. Marr, Marr, Nikolaĭ Yakovlevich (1964–1934): Izbrannye raboty, 5 vols., Leningrad, 1933–37. This collection of selected papers mostly contains Marr’s later works of rather dubious scholarly value, but it can be consulted for his complete bibliography up to 1933 (vol. 1, pp. XI-XXVI; 507 items).
The following articles by Marr should be of interest to Iranists: N. J. Marr, “«Mudrost’ Balavara», gruzinskaya versiya «Dushepoleznoĭ istorii o Varlaame i Ioasafe»” (The “Wisdom of Balavar,” a Georgian version of the “Edifying History of Barlaam and Joasaph”), Zapiski Vostochnogo otdeleniya Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 3, 1889, pp. 223–60. “Persidskaya natsional’naya tendentsiya v gruzinskom romane: Amirandareyaniani” (A Persian national tendency in the Georgian romance Amirandare y aniani), Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, June 1895, pp. 352–65. “K voprosy o vliyanii persidskoĭ literatury na gruzinskuyu (o Visramiani)” (On the question of the influence of Persian literature on Georgian [about the Visramiani]), Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniya, March 1896, pp. 233–37. “Eshche o slove «calabī» (K voprosu o kul’turnom znachenii kurdskoĭ narodnosti v istorii Sredneĭ Azii),” (Again the word čalabī [on the question of the cultural significance of the Kurdish people in the history of the Middle East”]), Zapiski Vostochnogo otdeleniya Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva 20, 1911, pp. 99–151.
Marr’s contribution to the study of individual languages was discussed in his memorial volume Yazyki Evrazii v rabotakh N. J. Marra (The languages of Eurasia in the works of M.), Iazyk i myshlenie 8, Moscow and Leningrad, 1937. Therein, the following articles deal with Iranian languages: V. I. Abaev, “N. J. Marr i osetinovedenie” (M. and expertise in Osssetic, pp. 200–7), O. Vilchevskiĭ, “N. J. Marr i kurdovedenie” (M. and expertise in Kurdish, pp. 209–33), V. D. Dondua, “N. J. Marr i problema iranskogo sloya v gruzinskom” (M. and the problem of the Iranian layer in Georgian, pp. 235–41). The authors of these three articles were influenced by the ideas of the New Linguistic Doctrine.
The numerous biographies of N. J. Marr are not uniform in their quality and emphasis. The official Soviet biography, V. A. Mikhankova, Nikolaĭ Yakovlevich Marr, Moscow and Leningrad, 1949, belongs to the panegyric genre. A more concise, but objective, account can be found in V. M. Alpatov, Istoriya odnogo mifa. Marr i marrism (The history of a myth. Marr and Marrism), Moscow, 1991 (especially pp. 6–111). R. L’Hermitte, Science et perversion idéologique. Marr, marrisme, marristes, Paris, 1987, focuses on the infamous second part of Marr’s scholarly career. I. V. Stalin, Marksizm i voprosy yazykoznaniya (Marxism and questions of linguistic science), Moscow, 1950 (reprint) represents the official statement of condemnation of the New Linguistic Doctrine.
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