Leksa Manuš (1942-1997):
Leksa - short for Alexander in Romani, Manuš - "man" in Romani Leksa Manuš is a creative alias, real name: Alexander Dmitrievich Belugin.
The family in which Leksa Manuš was born, was a multinational - among his ancestors were Russians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Germans, Prussians, Poles, Roma, but he felt a special kinship with the latter. He perfectly mastered the different dialects of the Romani language and devoted his life to research of this nation’s culture. After serving in the army Leksa Manuš graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the Latvian State University, defending them in his English diploma: "Peculiarities of Latvian Roma dialects". On 19th June 1970 Romani poet Nikolai Satkevich introduced Leksa to his future wife Belugina (nee Shnurkova) Nadezhda Grigoryevna, who lost her parents during the Great Patriotic War and was adopted by a Romani family: Shnurkova (nee Vasilkova) Natalia Semyonovna and Silnitsky Grigory Ivanovich - an actor in the Romani “Romen” Theatre. On August 11th 1970 Leksa and Nadezhda got married. More than 20 years the Belugins worked at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) of USSR, Leksa Manuš in the Sector of Linguistics. He finished graduate school at The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Leksa Manuš was considered a unique linguist. |
According to the calculations of his colleagues he mastered a total of (to various extents) no less than 50 languages and he knew about a dozen tongues and dialects of the Romani language. Leksa Manuš had his own systematic approach to the study of linguistic patterns in different language groups that helped him rapidly master individual languages. Leksa Manuš engaged in in-depth comparative and historical linguistics and the study of the history of the Roma people, who according to his findings, began their development in the days of ancient civilization in the Indus Valley (present day India) where a significant part of the caste of singers and dancers was forced for some reason to leave their country and go on a journey.
Leksa Manuš published his scholarly articles about Romani language and Romani history, Romani folklore and literature, history of religion and peculiarities of Roma music in numerous Soviet and foreign ethnographic, Roma-centered and other periodicals, often in the author's translation into the language of publication. In the 1970s-1980s in Moscow and Riga collections of Romani children's poems by Leksa Manuš came out and the collection of poetry of Roma from different countries in Romani and Hungarian were published in 1980 in Budapest and were named after one of Leksa’s poems - "Gypsy Lullaby" (in the book 10 of his poems were published). In 1990 India the world-famous Indian epic "Ramayana" translated by Leksa Manuš was first published in Romani and English |
Leksa Manuš made two alphabets for Roma children in the dialect of Russian and Latvian Roma. In Riga the "Alphabet" with illustrations by Leksa’s friend – the talented Romani artist and poet Karlis Rudevich – came out in 1996.
In 1997 in Riga Leksa Manuš’s last work was published – the big "Romani-Latvian-English and Latvian-Romani dictionary". In the Romani-Latvian-English part he gave the etymology of Romani words. There he also the first time in the world described the grammar of the dialect of Latvian Roma in detail. Leksa edited the manuscript of the Latvian-Romani dictionary, which for many years had been developed by a Latvian Roma from Ventspils Janis Neilands and Karlis Rudevich added to it and prepared it for publication. Leksa Manuš died on May 25th 1997 from a stomach ulcer and was buried in one of the suburban Moscow cemeteries. Today the legacy of Leksa Manuš consists of dozens of his scientific works, unique original research in the field of history and culture of the Roma people in the field of linguistics and ethnography and hundreds of poems. |