It is hard to think of a more telling tribute to a scholar, who in addition to boasting an outstanding research record also has been an inspiring academic teacher and an outstanding "university citizen," than when his former studentsÑnow for the most part holding respectable academic positions of their ownÑtook the initiative to honor him with a Festschrift on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of his academic career at UCLA. While his peers put together a volume in his honor to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday (The Language and Verse of Russia, H. Birnbaum and M.S. Flier, eds., Moscow, 1995Ñdelayed by several years for purely technical reasons) Dean Worth's former studentsÑthus a crop of Slavists of the next generationÑhave generated the present volÂume of sixteen research papers. The contributions contained in it speak for themselves, and it is not for me to comment on them except perhaps to note that, while covering a wide range of topics, many of them reflect to some degree the scholarly interests and methods of the honoree. What I instead will attempt to do here is to sketch once more, if only in brief outline, a portrait of DeanÑhis scholarly career, his accomplishments as an academic teacher, and his achievements as a university citizen and administrator.

Dean Worth was born on 30 September, 1927, in New York City. He received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, and went on to study Russian language and literature at the ƒcole nationÂale des langues orientales vivantes (Sorbonne, Paris) and at the ƒcole pratique des hautes Žtudes, where Pierre Pascal and AndrŽ Vaillant were among his mentors; he was awarded diplomas (certificates) at both in 1952. He earned his A.M. at Harvard in 1953 and his Ph.D. at the same university in 1956, with Roman Jakobson as his chief teacher and adviser. Before going to Paris, Dean was for one year an instructor at Dartmouth, and after having received his doctorate worked as a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Slavic Department and, subsequently as a Research Fellow at the Harvard Russian Research Center. In 1957 Dean came to UCLA, rising through the ranks to Professor (in 1965) and subsequently, in 1978, was given the special and rare distinction of advancement to Above-Scale Rank. On several occasions, Dean served as Department Chairman, Chair of the Advisory Committee of the UCLA Center for Russian and East European Studies, on the Executive Committee of the College of Letters and Science, and Chair (and previously Member) of the influential campus-wide Council on Academic Personnel. In addition, he has shouldered a number of other administrative duties, some of them campus- or system-wide, while attending to his duties as academic instructor, including regular service on departmental M.A. committees and departmental as well as extra-departmental Ph.D. committees. Off campus, Dean has been a Consultant of the Rand CorporationÕs Linguistic Project, the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (serving as Chair of its Joint Committee on Eastern Europe), the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Canada Council, and others.

Dean Worth has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Kennan Center for Advanced Russian Studies (serving four years on its Academic Council) as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center. He is the recipient of grants from the International Board of Research and Exchanges (IREX), NSF, NEH, and the US Office of Education. Currently Dean is the Managing Editor of the prestigious International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics (founded by R. Jakobson) and serves on the editorial board of the journals Russian Linguistics and Ricerche Slavistiche. He has been Secretary and subsequently President of the American Committee of Slavists and is presently one of the Vice Presidents (and a Presidium Member) of the International Committee of Slavists. Dean is a Member of the Medieval Academy of America, of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. In March of 1994 Dean Worth was inducted as a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in recognition of his scholarship, his teaching, and his role in facilitating academic and generally cultural contacts between Russia and the United States.

Dean Worth's teaching, graduate as well as undergraduate, has primarily focused on Russian linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic, but has also regularly included readings of Old Russian texts and occasionally a course in Old Church Slavonic. Among his special interests other than Russian and Slavic linguistics proper, reflected both in his teaching and his own research, is the Igor' Tale, the Zadonshchina, Russian (and Serbian) folk poetics, Russian literature, and Paleosiberian linguistics.

Dean Worth's publications to date include seven books, authored or co-authored by him, as well as eight volumes he edited or co-edited. The total number of his scholarly publications is close to two-hundred titles. As I stated in the preface to his collected essays, On the Structure and History of Russian (1977), published on the occasion of Dean's fiftieth birthday, and repeated in the more recent, aforementioned Festschrift in his honor (p. 8), "each of his studies contains at least one subtle observation, fresh thought, or novel insight." This assessment, originally made more than two decades ago, is, I submit, as valid today as when I first formulated it. As can be seen from the above, Dean's overall research and other academic record is indeed most impressive and distinguished. It goes without saying, therefore, that he has been invited to give a number of lectures at many universities, among them Harvard, Yale, Oxford, London, Heidelberg, Berlin, Vienna, and Stockholm.

For me, as his colleague and friend, it is a great privilege and true pleasure indeed to have been offered the opportunity of prefacing this tribute to him.



Henrik Birnbaum