Nicholas Marr is one of the 'lunatics' in Marina Yaguello's book Lunatic Lovers of Language. Other epithets levelled at him by fellow linguists include madman and megalomaniac. Yet his theories were lauded in the Soviet Union between about 1930 and 1950.
With a name like Marr he certainly doesn't sound Soviet. His father was Scottish and his mother Georgian (his Georgian name is Nikolos). He hardly knew his father, who was 87 when Nicholas was born in 1863, and grew up in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. He studied Arabic, Georgian and Armenian at St Petersburg University and later became dean of the Oriental faculty at the same university.
At the beginning of his career he gained plaudits for his work on the Caucasian languages and for championing minority languages in the Russian Empire and throughout the world. The descriptions lunatic and megalomaniac refer to his views on the origin and development of language. Marr propounded the so-called Japhetic theory, which considered that the Basque language and the Caucasian languages had a common origin. The name Japhetic comes from Japheth, Noah's third son, since his two first sons Shem and Ham already had language groups named after them (Semitic languages eg Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew and Hamitic languages (a term no longer used) eg Coptic and ancient Egyptian). Marr believed (or said he believed) that Indo-European languages developed from the Japhetic group.
Most modern linguists and philologists say that they do not know for sure how and when language first appeared, but Marr had a theory. He claimed that speech, in the form of several different languages, emerged in lots of different places simultaneously. He believed that the sounds of the languages arose via collective human activity and it was the socio-economic nature of the society that determined the language. Over the years he worked to discover the minimum number of semantic elements that formed the basis of all the world's languages and he finally got this number down to four. So, what he was saying was that all the words in all the languages of the world could ultimately be traced back to four 'words' or elements, namely sal, ber, yon and rosh.
Furthermore, Marr believed that all languages went through stages in a pre-determined pattern, linked to the prevailing socio-economic features in the society where the language was spoken. The Japhetic languages thus represented an early stage of development and the Indo-European languages represented a later stage. Marr believed in the mixing of languages and claimed that humanity was moving from plurilingualism to monolingualism and that ultimately there would be just one universal language.
Although Marr had never believed in the superiority of Russian, or that this universal language would be Russian, his theory was seized upon by Stalin, who saw parallels between Marrism and Marxism eg the idea of stages of development and a move away from a class system to unification. There is no evidence to suggest that Marr had actively participated in the 1917 Russian Revolution and he was not a Party member until after the 16th Congress of the Communist Party in 1930 when Stalin spoke of the USSR being diverse in its culture and nationalities but unified in its socialist content, and of the USSR being on the path to a single entity with a single language. Marr, presumably, jumped on the bandwagon.
In the early 20th century there were several very eminent linguists in Russia and the young Soviet Union, but with the rise of Marr's theories, they were forced to leave (eg Trubetskoi - who described Marr as 'utterly mad' - left for Prague, where he was to found the influential Prague School along with another defector Roman Jakobson, who described Marr's ideas as 'the sheer nonsense of a paranoia-patient'). Worse things happened to others: Evgenii Polivanov, a very respected linguist who had transcribed the unwritten languages of the Soviet Union, and had criticised Marr's Japhetic theory, was executed in 1938.
Now that he was affiliated with the Party, Marr changed his theories to make them more orthodox Marxist. He introduced the idea of language as a superstructure, which develops as a result of 'leaps' taking place in the economic structure of a country. He claimed that the class characteristics of language took precedence over national characteristics, a claim which led to the absurd statement that the language of proletarians, regardless of their country of origin, is more similar than the language spoken by different social classes purportedly speaking the same language.
Stalin changed his views and rejected Marr's theories in 1950 (Marr had died in 1934 at the height of his fame). He still talked of a single socialist society, but no longer talked of a single language. However, Marr's theories over the previous twenty years had provided a smokescreen to bring about the increasing Russification of the Soviet Union, and the imposition of the Soviet Cyrillic alphabet on languages spoken in the non-Russian republics, such as Moldovan.