Andre Mazon

Mazon, André 

Born Sept. 7, 1881, in Paris; died there July 13,1967. French Slavic philologist. Member of the Académic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1941).

Mazon studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Prague. From 1905 to 1908 he taught at Kharkov University and from 1919 to 1923 was a professor at the University of Strasbourg; from 1924 to 1951 he taught at the College de France. Mazon worked at the Institute of Living Oriental Languages (1909-14) and was honorary president of the Institute of Slavic Research at the University of Paris (1937-59); he was also vice-president of the International Committee of Slavists (1958-67).

Mazon was one of the founders and, from 1921, the editor of Revue des etudes slaves. An outstanding scholar in the field of Russian classical literature, Mazon published valuable works on Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev, Herzen, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. He also studied Old Russian literature (The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and Zadonshchina). It was Mazon’s thesis that The Tale of Igor’s Campaign was written not in the 12th century, but rather in the 18th century; this hypothesis was convincingly criticized by a number of Soviet and foreign critics.

Mazon wrote works on Russian and Czech grammar and on the morphology of the Russian verb. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1928), the Polish, Bulgarian, and Czechoslovak academies of science, and other academies of the world.

WORKS

Vid v slavianskikh iazykakh: Printsipy iproblemy. Moscow, 1958. (Translated from French.)
Lexique de la guerre et de la revolution en Russie (1914-1918). Paris, 1920.
Emplois des aspects du verbe russe. Paris, 1914.
Grammaire de la langue tchèque. Paris, 1921.
Contes slaves de la Macédoine sudoccidentale. Paris, 1923.
Manuscrits parisiens d’Ivan Tourguénev. Paris, 1930.
Le Slovo d’Igor. Paris, 1940.
Grammaire de la langue russe. 3rd ed. Paris, 1949.

R. A. AGEEVA