A GREAT AND ENTHRALLING ADVENTURE

He went to high school at the Leiden City Gymnasium, from which he graduated on June 15, 1938. He began his university studies in Slavic lan guages and literatures the same year in Leiden and completed his bachelor’s degree cum laude on October 10, 1941. Nicolaas van Wijk, Van Schooneveld’s professor (see 111. 1), had already died, and Van Schooneveld had started cataloguing the extensive and valuable library which Van Wijk had bequeathed to Leiden University Library. From October 1, 1941 through March 31, 1942 Van Schooneveld was hired as a staff member at the University Library to work on this project (see 111. 2). He was forced to give this job up after he was drafted for the ‘Arbeitseinsatz’ in Germany. He in fact never left Leiden, but spent the entire period of the war working on Van Wijk’s library. This job gave him access to the library’s stacks, then still located on the Rapenburg, where he would occasionally hide during these war years. On June 13,1946, Van Schooneveld took his doctoral examination with Van Wijk’s successor, Reinier van der Meulen (see 111. 5). Soon afterwards he had the opportunity to continue his studies with a Rockefeller Fellowship at Columbia University, New York. He would belong to the first generation of Slavists and linguists in the United States who were trained by Roman Jakobson. In the spring of 1949 he defended his dissertation A semantic analysis of the past predicates in Old Russian under Jakobson (see 111. 4). He then started teaching Russian and German at the University of Oklahoma (1949-1951) and in the fall semester of 1951 became visiting lecturer at Harvard University, where Jakobson had already started teaching. By Royal Decree of June 24, 1952, Van Schooneveld succeeded Reinier van der Meulen as professor of Balto-Slavic languages in Leiden. He gave his inaugural lecture, Over de woordsoorten in het moderne Russisch on May 15,1953 (see 111. 6). In the meantime he had taken up residence at Zoeter- woudsesingel 55. In 1959 he was given a year’s leave to be visiting professor at Stanford University in California. During that year he accepted a perma nent position at Stanford and was subsequently permitted to resign from Leiden on July 5,1960. Van Schooneveld remained at Stanford University as professor of Slavic languages and literatures until 1966. From 1966 on he worked in the same capacity at Indiana University, Bloomington, ‘known as Van by some administrators, as Schoony by most of his graduate students, but Kees (pronounced “Case”) by those closest to him.’ 2 Since his retire-