In a previous piece in this series, I discussed Georges Dumézil’s student and colleague Lucien Gerschel and their discussions of the Roman general Coriolanus. Gerschel had attended lectures by Dumézil at the École Pratique des Hautes Études shortly before the Second World War. Dumézil describes him as “one of the most constant and most original of my auditors” (Mariages indo-européens, p. 21). He was attending Dumézil’s lectures alongside Roger Caillois, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt and Élisabeth Raucq in the late 1930s, and seems to have gone into hiding during the war because he was Jewish (see Mariages indo-européens, p. 26). After the war he attended Dumézil’s lectures until the very last one in 1968 (Le Roman des jumeaux, p. 218), as well as those of Émile Benveniste. He became an interesting scholar in his own right in the 1950s. Dumézil supervised his research, supported his career and Gerschel provided research support to him, including correcting proofs of his books. (There is more about Gerschel’s work in the earlier piece.)
Gerschel’s notes on Benveniste’s post-war lectures were the raw material from which Benveniste’s Vocabulaire, the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, was shaped. The transcripts were typed up, Benveniste edited them, and then worked with Jean Lallot and series editor Pierre Bourdieu in getting them into the final form. I have remarked before that the work done on this text was just in time, because Benveniste’s stroke in December 1969 put an end to his writing and lecturing career. But until recently I hadn’t realised how close it also was to Gerschel’s death.
Gerschel’s death has puzzled me for a while. I knew it was in the early 1970s, since Dumézil’s return to the Coriolanus story in the third volume of his Mythe et Épopée in 1973 is in tribute to him. This would have been quite young if he was a student in the 1930s. Dumézil mentions his death in the 1973 preface to the second edition of the first volume of Mythe et Épopée (p. 27), in a way which indicates it happened after the first edition of 1968. C. Scott Littleton refers to him as “the late Lucien Gerschel” in the introduction to Dumézil’s Gods of the Ancient Northmen, also in 1973 (p. xv). Dumézil said in 1979 that a posthumous collection of his essays was in preparation, to be edited by Georges Charachidzé (Mariages indo-européens, p. 22 n. 1). Hervé Coutau-Bégarie notes that this collection was due to rescue Gerschel “from oblivion” and was “ardently desired” by Dumézil (L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil, pp. 199-200). This collection was never published. But I couldn’t find any notice of Gerschel beyond those mentions. The only record I could find of someone with that name had a birth date which seemed possible, but said he died in the 1980s, which indicated this was a different person.
One of the last tasks in the revision of this draft of my manuscript on Benveniste and Dumézil has been going back over some texts I’d read before, but which I wanted to revisit. This included Dumézil’s last major project, the Esquisses de mythologie, of which he published three volumes of twenty-five sketches – ideas or short essays which he says that he lacked the time to complete himself, but which he hoped others might pick up, develop, criticise or otherwise engage with. He was in his mid-eighties when the first volume of Esquisses appeared, and a fourth volume appeared after his death. When I first read the Esquisses I was thinking of different things and had missed material relevant to Gerschel. Two things in this re-reading were interesting in relation to Gerschel and Coriolanus.
One was that Dumézil returns to the Coriolanus story in “De Méléagre à Coriolan”, esquisse 17 in Apollon sonore et autres essais. The second was that Dumézil mentions Gerschel’s tragic demise in 1983, in esquisse 47 in La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés. This is a text about the Finnish national epic the Kalevala and the magical object of the sampo:
Gerschel mourut en 1970, dans des circonstances très pénibles. Trouvé mort sur la voie publique, sans papiers, il ne fut identifié que plusieurs mois plus tard, alors que j’étais à Chicago, et ses abondants dossiers ont disparu. Aucun Nachlass ne subsiste de ce grand érudit, sinon dans ma mémoire, le souvenir plus ou moins précise de projets dont il m’avait fait confidence, et quelques notes que j’ai jointes aux brouillons de mes cours du Collège de France. Sept ans plus tard, invité à contribuer à un volume qui se préparait en Amérique, en l’honneur de mon ami, le folkloriste turc Pertev Naili Boratav, je voulus associer Gerschel à cet hommage et, sous nos deux signatures, je mis en forme sa note sur la production du sampo. Notre article parut en anglais en 1978, dans Studies in Turkish Folklore, in honor of Pertev N. Boratav, publié par Ilhan Başgöz et Marc Glaser (Indiana University), pages 89-94.
Gerschel died in 1970, in very tragic circumstances. Found dead on the street, with no identification papers, he was not identified until several months later, while I was in Chicago, and his extensive papers have disappeared. No Nachlass remains of this great scholar, except in my memory: the more or less precise recollection of projects he had confided in me, and a few notes I appended to the drafts of my Collège de France lectures. Seven years later, invited to contribute to a volume being prepared in America in honour of my friend the Turkish folklorist Pertev Naili Boratav, I wanted to include Gerschel in this tribute and under both our names I edited his note on the production of the sampo. Our article appeared in English in 1978 in Studies in Turkish Folklore, in honor of Pertev N. Boratav, published by Ilhan Başgöz and Marc Glaser [actually ‘Mark Glazer’] (Indiana University), pages 89-94 (La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, p. 212).
Dumézil was in Chicago between October 1969 and March 1970, giving the Haskell lectures and working at the Chicago Divinity School, to which he had been invited by Mircea Eliade. Dumézil’s note therefore seems a bit confused on the chronology. If Gerschel died in 1970, and the identification was “several months later”, how could this be when Dumézil was still in Chicago? Perhaps he died when Dumézil was away in Chicago, and was identified after his return.
I have seen some of those notes by Gerschel in Dumézil’s archive at the Collège de France – he would send references, examples or other things relevant to Dumézil’s concerns, and Dumézil would keep them with the lecture notes. Dumézil’s handwriting is shocking, but his courses are very organised, numbering and dating each lecture, and indicating where something has been placed if he took material out of the sequence for use elsewhere. I hadn’t realised until rereading the Esquisses how relatively rare these traces of Gerschel were.
Given Dumézil’s mention of it, I went looking for the Gerschel and Dumézil text on the sampo published as the English chapter in 1978. The first place I went was the very useful L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil to check the reference. In the bibliographical entry on that English chapter, Coutau-Bégarie says that Gerschel:
avait eu l’intuition, en 1965, du caractère trifonctionnel d’un episode du Kalevala, la fabrication d’un objet magique, le sampo. Il est mort en 1970 sans avoir publié sa découverte. Des parents éloignés, ignares et uniquement soucieux d’argent, ont dispersé sa bibliothèque et versé à la décharge ‘ses abondants dossiers’.
had discerned in 1965 the trifunctional character of an episode of the Kalevala, the fabrication of a magical object, the sampo. He died in 1970 without having published his discovery. Distant relatives, ignorant and only caring for money, sold off his library and dumped ‘his extensive papers’ at the rubbish tip (p. 134).
The Festschrift was available in the Bodleian library in Oxford. Dumézil’s contribution is mainly in editing Gerschel’s text, and he only wrote a short paragraph to preface it. As far as I’m aware the French text is unpublished. Here’s Dumézil’s brief introduction:
In this Feschrift [sic] in honor of my dear friend (who was in Istanbul at the beginning of my university life, and who was the most brilliant of listeners and the most efficient of assistants), I would like to evoque and invite, the one who was for thirty years, until my retirement, my most constant and original collaborator in Paris, Lucien Gershel. He has published important articles, but when he died tragically in the beginning of 1970, while I was teaching in Chicago, his Nachlass was dispersed: nothing remains. I had, however, numerous joint projects which we had worked on together. In view of this “chain of friendship” which is one of the joys of our lives as researchers, I have edited for you this one which if I remember correctly dates from the fifties.—G.D. (p. 89)
Coutau-Bégarie says that Gerschel’s text dates from 1965, not the 1950s (p. 135). I know of no other mentions of Gerschel’s death, or the disposal of his papers, or what the collection due to be edited by Charachidzé might have contained. But the notes from Dumézil and Coutau-Bégarie which I’d previously missed have opened up a little window on this story. When Dumézil died in 1986 the last volume of his Esquisses was in draft, and was published eight years later, edited by Joël H. Grisward. Esquisses 84-87 are on the Kalevala, and number 84 continues the discussion of sampo.
References
Émile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2 volumes, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969; Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Chicago: Hau Books, 2016; originally published as Indo-European Language and Society, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973.
Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonné, Paris: Economica, 1998
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I: L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuple indo-européens, Paris: Gallimard, second edition, 1974 [1968].
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée III: Histoires romaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
Georges Dumézil, Mariages indo-européens, suivi de Quinze questions romaines, Paris: Payot, 1979.
Georges Dumézil, “De Méléagre à Coriolan”, Apollon sonore et autres essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1982, 164-70.
Georges Dumézil, “La Fabrication du sampo”, La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, 209-18.
Georges Dumezil, Le Roman des jumeaux et autres essais, ed. Joël H. Grisward, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Georges Dumezil and Lucien Gerschel, “The Production of the Sampo”, trans. Mark and Diane Glazer, in Ilhan Başgöz and Marc Glaser eds. Studies in Turkish Folklore: In Honor of Pertev N. Boratav, Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1978, 89-94.
Lucien Gerschel, “Coriolan”, Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre, Paris: Armand Colin, two volumes, 1953, Vol II, 33-40.
C. Scott Littleton, “Introduction Part I”, in Georges Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, ed. Einar Haugen, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, ix-xliii.
Archives
Fonds Georges Dumézil, Collège de France
A more extensive list of Gerschel’s publications can be found in the previous piece: Lucien Gerschel, Georges Dumézil, William Shakespeare and the history of Coriolanus
This is the 69th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
