Éva Schmidt's biography

Éva Schmidt was born on 28 June, 1948 in Budapest, to a family of intellectuals. The ruins of the castle district in Buda provided the ideal scenery for play in her childhood. She completed the ornamental sculpture program of the Vocational Secondary School of Fine and Applied Arts with honors in 1966. She spent the 1966/67 academic year in Ghana, where her father worked on secondment as an economist. This is where she acquired a reliable command of English, and she also conducted studies in anthropology at the local museum together with her younger brother Adam.

She began her university studies in 1967 at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, where she acquired a degree in English, ethnography and Finno-Ugric studies in 1973. In the meantime, she spent two academic years in Leningrad with a state scholarship from the autumn of 1969. The official site of her studies was the Finno-Ugric Department of the Leningrad university, but she also attended Mansi and Khanty classes at the Institute for Northern Peoples operating at the Herzen Pedagogical College. She befriended Ob-Ugric students studying there, and through talking to them, she acquired conversation skills in several Khanty dialects. In addition, she frequently consulted Nikolaj Ivanovič Terëskin, a linguist of Khanty origin and researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

In January 1970, she near-miraculously managed to get to Western Siberia. In Soviet times, foreign researchers could only meet language relatives at large university and academy centers, they could not travel to the field. However, as a scholarship student, Éva Schmidt could slip through amidst the boundary poles, and she spent the winter holidays by the Ob river, in Tugijani village, with the family of a fellow student. This Ob Khanty family also adopted her as a daughter, and the first village she visited became a permanent reference point, the center of the Ob-Ugric world for Éva Schmidt. This was when she collected her first materials in the field. In the following year, she managed to return to Siberia, this time to Khanty-Mansijsk. In the meantime, she aimed to read all the materials in Ob-Ugric subjects and in Khanty language. Based on her knowledge of the literature and her firsthand experiences, she prepared her thesis for the Finno-Ugric major (The reflection of language development and language innovation in the literary language of the Middle Ob and Kazym dalects). This work undoubtedly exceeded the level of an average thesis.