Samuil Bernstein

Samuil Borisovich Bernstein (; surname also transcribed as Bernshteyn; – October 6, 1997) was a Soviet linguist, known for his work on Slavic languages.

Life and work Samuil Bernstein was born in Barguzin, a village east of Lake Baikal in what is today Republic of Buryatia, in the Jewish family of Boris Samuilovich Bernstein, a revolutionary exiled to Siberia. With his parents' family, he moved around the Soviet Far East, including a few years in Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, then the capital of Soviet Sakhalin Oblast. As there was no high school in town, he left his parents to attend a high school on the mainland, in Nikolsk Ussuriyski (now Ussuriysk). In 1928, he entered Moscow State University, graduating in 1931.

In 1934 Bernstein earned his Cand. Sc. degree, with a dissertation on the Turkish influence in the language of the Bulgarian translations of the Thesauros, the collection of sermons of Damaskinos Stouditis. His first academic job was in Odessa, where he became the chair of the Department of Bulgarian in the local teacher's institute (mostly training teachers for the ethnic-Bulgarian towns and villages), and, later, the chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Odessa. In the 1930s, he recognized the existence of a separate Macedonian language. In 1938, he wrote an article called "Macedonian Language" in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Bernstein moved to Moscow in 1939, soon joining the faculty of Moscow University. He received his Dr. Sc. degree in 1946, with a dissertation on the language of Slavic manuscripts from the Principality of Wallachia of the 14-15th centuries. He served as the chair of the section from 1947 to 1970. ) In 1983, during the Congress of Slavic Studies in Kiev, the leadership of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences urged dialectologist Maksim Mladenov to deliver a report against him.

He was a corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Bernstein was a major contributor to the Atlas of the Bulgarian Dialects in the USSR, and author of dictionaries, textbooks, and numerous other works on the Bulgarian language and other Slavic and Balkan languages. His memoirs present an inside view of the Soviet academic establishment of the 1940s and 1950s. He died in 1997.

Selected works Бернштейн С. Б. Разыскания в области болгарской исторической диалектологии. Т. I. Язык валашских грамот XIV–XV веков. (Studies in the Bulgarian historical dialectology. Vol. 1: the language of the Wallachian manuscripts of the 14-15th centuries) Moscow-Leningrad, 1948. Бернштейн С. Б. Зигзаги памяти: Воспоминания. Дневниковые записи. (Memories zig-zags: Memoirs and diaries). Moscow, 2002.