Eduards Volters

Eduards Volters (18 March 1856 – 14 December 1941) was a linguist, ethnographer, archaeologist who studied the Baltic languages and culture. He was a long-time professor at the Saint Petersburg University (1886–1918) and Vytautas Magnus University (1922–1934).

Volters, born in Riga, studied linguistics in Germany, present-day Estonia, and Ukraine earning his master's degree in 1883. In 1886–1918, he lived in Saint Petersburg where he taught at the Saint Petersburg University and worked as a librarian at the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He supported and encouraged Lithuanian and Latvian students and joined their cultural activities. In 1918, Volters moved to Vilnius and started organizing the Central Library of Lithuania (considered to be the predecessor of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania). Due to the Polish–Soviet War, he moved to Kaunas where he lived until his death. He established and headed the Central Library (1920–1922), was director of the Kaunas City Museum (1922–1936), and taught various courses at the Vytautas Magnus University (1922–1934).

Volters' interests were varied – linguistics, ethnology, folklore, archaeology. He was a prolific writer and authored more than 400 articles in Lithuanian, Latvian, German, Russian, though much or his collected material remains unpublished. In 1883–1887, he organized expeditions to collect ethnographic data and folklore examples in Lithuania and Latvia. In 1908–1909, Volters made the first audio recordings of Lithuanian folk songs. In total, Volters and his assistants collected some 1,000 fairy tales, 300 songs, and 2,000 examples of riddles, proverbs, jokes, etc. He prepared and published methodologies and instructions on how to collect ethnographic data to preserve accuracy and authenticity. Initially supportive of the Lithuanian press ban, Volters soon became its critic and managed to get a few Lithuanian publications approved and published for academic purposes, including the reprint of the Catechism, or Education Obligatory to Every Christian by Mikalojus Daukša in 1884. He published a statistical work on the inhabited localities in the Suwałki Governorate in 1901 and had similar works planned for the Kovno and Vilna Governorates. He also carried out or supervised several archaeological excavations – various tumuli in 1888–1889, Apuolė hill fort and tumulus in 1928–1931, Kaunas Castle in 1930 and 1932.