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Algirdas Julien Greimas

Lithuanian-French linguist (1917–1992)

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Biography

Greimas's father, Julius Greimas, 1882–1942, a teacher and later school inspector, was from Liudvinavas in the Suvalkija region of present-day Lithuania. His mother, Konstancija Greimienė, née Mickevičiūtė (Mickevičius), 1886–1956, a secretary, was from Kalvarija. They lived in Tula, Russia, when he was born, where they ran away as refugees during World War I. They returned with him to Lithuania when he was two years old. His baptismal names are Algirdas Julius but he used the French version of his middle name, Julien, while he lived abroad. He did not speak any language other than Lithuanian until preparatory middle school, where he started with German and then French, which opened the door for his early philosophical readings in high school of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. After attending schools in several towns, as his family moved, and finishing Rygiškių Jonas High School in Marijampolė in 1934, he studied law at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, and then drifted toward linguistics at the University of Grenoble, from which he graduated in 1939 with a paper on Franco-Provençal dialects. He hoped to focus next on early medieval linguistics (substrate toponyms in the Alps). However, in July 1939, with war looming, the Lithuanian government drafted him into a military academy.

The Soviet ultimatum led to a new "people's government" in Soviet-occupied Lithuania which Greimas was sympathetic to. In July 1940, he gave speeches urging Lithuanians to elect leaders who would vote in favor of annexation by the Soviet Union. As his friend Aleksys Churginas advised, in every speech he would mention Stalin and end by clapping for himself. In October, he was discharged into the reserve, and he began teaching French, German, Lithuanian, and humanities at schools in Šiauliai. He fell in love with socialist Hania (Ona) Lukauskaitė, who later became an anti-Soviet conspirator with Jonas Noreika, served ten years in a lager in Vorkuta, and was a founder of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group of anti-Soviet dissidents. Greimas became an avid reader of Marx. In March 1941, Greimas's friend, Vladas Pauža, a boy scout and fellow teacher, enlisted him in the Lithuanian Activist Front. This underground network was preparing for a Nazi German invasion as the opportunity to restore Lithuania's independence. On 14 June 1941, the Soviets detained his parents, arresting his father and sending him to Krasnoyarsk Krai, where he died in 1942. His mother was deported to Altai Krai. Meanwhile, during these traumatic deportations, Greimas had been mobilized as an army officer to write up the property of detained Lithuanians. Greimas became an anti-Communist but retained a lifelong affinity with Marxist, leftist, and liberal ideas.

Nazi Germany's invading forces entered Šiauliai on 26 June 1941. The next day, Greimas met with other partisans and was put in charge of a platoon. He handed down an order from the German Commandant to round up 100 Jews to sweep the streets. He felt uncomfortable and did not return the next day. Nevertheless, he became an editor of the weekly Tėvynė, which urged ethnic cleansing of Jews from Lithuania. The nominal editor, Vladas Pauža, was a proponent of genocide. In 1942, in Kaunas, Greimas became active in the underground Lithuanian Freedom Fighters Union, which derived from the Lithuanian Nationalist Party, which the Nazis had banned in December 1941. He grew close to life long liberal-minded friends Bronys Raila, Stasys Žakevičius-Žymantas, and Jurgis Valiulis.

In 1944, he enrolled for graduate study at the Sorbonne in Paris and specialized in lexicography, namely taxonomies of exact, interrelated definitions. He wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion (a topic later popularized by Roland Barthes), for which he received a PhD in 1949.

Greimas began his academic career as a teacher at a French Catholic boarding school for girls in Alexandria in Egypt, where he would take part in a weekly discussion group of about a dozen European researchers that included a philosopher, a historian, and a sociologist. Early on, he also met Roland Barthes, with whom he remained close for the next 15 years. In 1959, he moved on to universities in Ankara and Istanbul in Turkey, and then to Poitiers in France. In 1965, he became professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where he taught for almost 25 years. He co-founded and became Secretary General of the International Association for Semiotic Studies.

Greimas died in 1992 in Paris, and was buried at his mother's resting place, Petrašiūnai Cemetery in Kaunas, Lithuania. (His parents were deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation. His mother managed to return in 1954; his father perished and his grave is unknown, but he has a symbolic tombstone at the cemetery.) He was survived by his wife, Teresa Mary Keane.

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