Description: Essays on politics, music and culture.
Following his discharge from the Army, my father Morris Halle enrolled as a Master’s student at the University of Chicago for the winter term of 1945. Although Morris was by that time fluent in seven languages, his acquaintance with linguistics, the field which would become his primary academic focus would not be made at Chicago.
This was due to the marginal status of linguistics at UC. Legendary President Robert Maynard Hutchins reportedly took a dim view of the field, making little attempt to hold on to Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir, important linguists who would decamp to Yale well before Morris arrived. The linguistics classes available to Morris were taught by the Sanskrit scholar George V. Bobrinskoy and these he told me he found relatively uninteresting. It was not until the summer visit to the University of the Princ
The dissertation below will come as a surprise to those who remember Morris. None of his surviving friends I have spoken to had heard of it, and while his interest in Russian literature was apparent to all who knew him, none of us were aware of any writing he had done on it. For seven decades, it inhabited the most distant point in his home office, the extreme far right of the top shelf just under the ceiling . It is there where I came upon it following his death in April of 2018.