Dear Colleagues,
I write today to offer remembrances of Alexander (Sasha) Nakhimovsky, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, who passed away unexpectedly on June 27, 2024. It is a fitting day to offer these thoughts, as today we formally open Bernstein Hall. Our newest academic building is the new home of the Department of Computer Science, in which Sasha was housed while at 51, but as importantly, it is a building that embodies many of the intersections of the liberal arts that were part of Sasha’s intellectual identity. In Bernstein Hall, we find both sciences and the arts: there are Bernstein faculty working in computer languages and linguistics, in music and media studies, in Jewish Studies and photography, all of which, as we will see, were deeply relevant to Sasha.
Sasha graduated with a degree in mathematics from Leningrad University and earned his PhD in linguistics from Cornell University in 1979. He arrived at 51 in 1985 after teaching at Cornell University and SUNY Oswego: here, he was not only a member of the computer science department but also taught advanced Russian courses. In 2009, he founded 51’s Linguistics Program, which he directed and taught in until his retirement in 2013.
A true polymath, Sasha was the author or co-author of dozens of research publications, including articles and books on computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and XML Programming.
Together with his wife Alice Nakhimovsky, professor of Jewish Studies and Russian and Eurasian studies, Emerita, he translated many works on Russian cultural history and semiotics into English.
Stan Brubaker, professor of Political Science, describes Sasha’s trajectory from a childhood in Soviet Russia to a scholarly career and family in Hamilton, N.Y.
It started with a hoola-hoop. Then Sasha heard the jazz of Louis Armstrong, copied onto X-Ray film, a sort of musical samizdat. After winning a USSR-wide mathematics competition, he was enrolled with a full scholarship in the uber prestigious mathematical-physics department of Leningrad University, but soon found himself drawn to the theatre, to literature deemed subversive by the USSR, and to circles that brought the attention of the KGB. Some friends were sent to Siberia. Sasha was lucky simply to be drafted into the Red Army, where he was subjected to spinning experiments supposed to simulate weightlessness in space. As his friends reunited, after serving their terms, their circle of connections grew to include a visiting graduate student named Alice Stone. Later he and Alice were married in Leningrad before a bust of Lenin. Though Sasha loved his native Russia, he loathed the regime that stifled its potential. So, he was happy to come to America — and to enjoy belatedly a marriage reception with Alice in New York City.
Having known a life of oppression, Sasha valued all the more the life that freedom opened. While one sensed an undertow of melancholy, compounded by a gravitas of soul, Sasha cherished the simple joys of hearth and home. He would often pause when presented with a home-cooked meal, to announce with a mixture of reverence and relish, “Ah, salmon!” or whatever Alice had prepared. Having lost his own father as a child, he was an especially loving one to his two children, Isaac and Sharon. Though he had lost hearing in one ear during his military service, he was passionate about music and with Alice, ensured that that passion was conveyed to their children as they learned the arts of violin and viola. And he was usually patient as Alice began her mid-life mastery of the piano.
With Alice and others, Sasha co-authored a sequence of what colleague Mieka Erley, associate professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies and chair of that program calls, “superb” Russian language textbooks from the beginning to the advanced level. Mieka notes, “The inimitable Nakhimovsky humor is everywhere in evidence in these textbooks (as in a memorable satire of the USSR based around the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial named Zyuzya), but what is most remarkable is their clarity and effective presentation of material. Several generations of students benefited from the thoughtful structuring and presentation of these books, with one describing Beginning Russian as ‘pedagogically one of the best textbooks I've ever read, in any subject.’”
Sasha’s work in linguistics was capped by his 2019 book The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis. This was an original and innovative work that raised new research questions and drew on untapped sources of peasant speech to recreate an entirely lost — indeed erased — linguistic and moral world.
In her recollections of Sasha, Nancy Ries, professor of Anthropology, Emerita, notes his standing in the field of Russian linguistics and his intellectual persona:
He was enormously inventive as a scholar and teacher of language and linguistics, sharing his deep knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and thought in a multitude of creative ways across myriad projects and publications. Sasha had a biting wit and irony and loved to push his many interlocutors (including me) towards greater precision and clarity of thought; his thousands of posts on the Slavic language and literature listserv "SEELANGS" show his fervent devotion to the finest points of linguistic debate and accuracy in translation and his generosity in sharing his erudition.
A trip to Tajikistan in his youth inspired a lifelong interest in Central Asia; a visit to the University of Kabul much later in his career sparked the development of the Project Afghanistan lecture series at 51. Carolyn Guile, co-director of the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization, describes the Project: “Sasha’s aim was to raise awareness and knowledge of Afghanistan by inviting prominent speakers to campus, including academic, politician, and future president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani and the late war correspondent, Tim Hetherington. In 2021 Alexander became passionately involved in a Scholars at Risk initiative to provide support to a group of Afghan filmmakers who had been teachers at the University of Kabul, and who were in extreme danger owing to their anti-Taliban views, expressed in their creative work and teaching.”
In addition to overseeing Project Afghanistan, Sasha also led the Forum on Security and Democracy within the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization for ten years — well into his retirement. In 2020, he invited Fiona Hill, former official at the U.S. National Security Council on Russian and European Affairs to campus to talk about U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine. Guile notes that, “The Russian full-scale invasion and war of aggression in Ukraine pained him greatly; his support of Ukraine was unequivocal. He worked tirelessly to bring awareness of this war and the atrocities that have accompanied it, inviting Alona Verbytska, adviser to the President of Ukraine, and Vera Mironova to campus in 2023 to discuss the conditions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and what to anticipate.”
Guile reflects on Sasha’s contributions to the center: “We will miss his generosity, intellectual integrity, energy, and enduring enthusiasm not just for conversations, but for the art of argument. His fundamental belief in the necessity of academic freedom and free inquiry, and civil, collegial debate unfettered by censorship was unwavering, and an example to emulate. He was kind, and he listened. Our debt to him is immense. I know our future gatherings will always be animated by his inspiration, his good taste in wine, and his twinkling, cheerful mischievousness that pervaded all our many collaborations.”
Beyond the center, Sasha’s legacy at 51 is evident yet another way: he was instrumental in 51 receiving an important donation of a collection of photographs by Ukrainian-born Jewish photographer Yevgeny Khaldei. Khaldei captured half a century of striking images of Soviet history. One of the most famous photographers of World War II, he covered that conflict from its opening hours in the far north through to the taking of Berlin and eventually the Nuremberg Trials. In the 1990s, Khaldei worked together with Alice and Sasha on the first U.S. exhibition of his work, which was at 51. Khaldei also worked with the Nakhimovskys on compiling a retrospective of his work, Witness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei. During his two visits to 51, Khaldei was very taken with the students he met, leading him to make an extremely generous donation of almost a hundred photographs to the University’s Picker Art Gallery.
Even in retirement, Sasha was looking ahead to new projects. In the weeks before his passing, he and Alice were working on a translation of Balanchine’s letters into English for the Guggenheim Museum Series "Works in Progress." A recording of Sasha’s voice reading the texts will be part of the performance at the Guggenheim in January. Nancy Ries writes, “Many will greatly miss Sasha's keen intellect, and the imaginative new projects he might have produced, but we also mourn the loss of Sasha Nakhimovsky's steadfast care.”
Mieka Erley speaks for her colleagues in REST and beyond when she writes, “We will miss Sasha, his gentle smile and fierce intellect.”
May his memory be a blessing.
Lesleigh
Lesleigh Cushing
Provost and Dean of the Faculty