Charles E. Gribble In Memoriam

It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of our colleague and friend Charles Edward Gribble, Professor Emeritus of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures, on June 3, 2016 after a long illness. Chuck (as he was known to his friends and colleagues) had a distinguished career of teaching, research, and service in the field, which spanned nearly 60 years, 35 of which he spent at the Ohio State University. He is survived by his wife, Lyubomira Parpulova Gribble, and his daughter, Elizabeth Rayna Gribble. Chuck was born on November 10, 1936 and grew up in Lansing, Michigan, where his father was an executive with the General Motors Corporation. He entered the University of Michigan with the intention of specializing in physics, but soon he became captivated by the sound, structure, and history of foreign languages—a passion that would endure to the end of his life. Under the guidance of the distinguished Slavist and Byzantinist Ihor Ševčenko, he received his B.A. with High Distinction in Slavic Languages in 1957. Subsequently, he served as a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Michigan. In 1958, Chuck entered the graduate program in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where he studied under the eminent Slavic linguist and structuralist Roman Jakobson. After receiving his A.M. degree, he served as a guide and translator at the first American National Exposition in the USSR held in Sokol’niki Park in Moscow in the summer of 1959. At the exhibition, he met President Eisenhower and witnessed the historic Kitchen Debate between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Returning to the United States, Chuck continued his graduate studies in Slavic linguistics at Harvard with a focus on historical Slavic linguistics and philology. He developed significant expertise not only in Russian but also in Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Lithuanian. He returned to the USSR as an exchange student at Moscow State University in 1960–61, where he had the opportunity to work with the prominent linguist V. A. Zvegincev. Back at Harvard, he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Horace G. Lunt on an early 12th-century East Slavic manuscript, Linguistic Problems of the Vygoleksinskij Sbornik, and defended it in 1967).