Baltist & Orientalist, Ethnologist
Cell. ph. +370 67746906, e-mail: palmaitis@yahoo.co.uk
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1. PALMAITIS INTRODUCTION
2. Positions and grants
3. Research work: Orientalistics, Indoeuropean and general linguistics,
Indoeuropean and Baltic linguistics, Prussology
4. Life programme: N.-Baltic boundary, Toponyms, Rurik, Neo-Prussian,
Documented novel about Ingermanland
5. Support
Mykolas (Michael) Letas Palmaitis (MLP), born in Soviet Leningrad on 14 May 1944, is one of the last descendants of the former micro-ethnic group of Old Peterbourgians. The name Palmaitis is a later Lithuanisation of 1970 instead of a Russian name which no more corresponded neither to origins, native westernized Old Middle Class Peterbourg culture, or adopted Lithuanian culture, nor to political orientation. His mother Tatiana was daughter of Sanct-Peterbourg Ukrainian Gregory Tarasenko and of a Baltic-German Maria Klosse. His father Constantin was son of a Sanct-Peterbourgian of the Russian-German origin Constantin Ekimov (son of Basily Ekimov and Anna Schenken) and of a Polish-German Martha Julia Henkel. MLP married Danguole Antanina Dulkyte (1962) in 1986. They bring up 3 daughters: Juze Alna (1987), Maria Sandinga (1988) and Martha Dangile (1991).
In 1961-1965 MLP studied mathematics and mechanics at first courses of Leningrad Institute of Mechanics and of Precision Mechanics and Optics. In 1965 he entered the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad University, graduating in 1970 as [M.A.] semitologist (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). Possibilities to find a job were restricted because of MLP's contacts with dissidents and because of publicly confessed Christian views. Having in mind his mother-line descent from Baltics, he escaped to Lithuania in 1970, where he defended the doctorate in Baltic linguistics in 1975. To get a job at Vilnius university was still impossible because of the control of K.G.B. This was the reason to escape to even more "anti-Soviet" Georgia, where MLP continued his oriental education studying Georgian, Old Georgian and Svan languages, and where he successfully habilitated in Indoeuropean linguistics in 1979. While Moscow Highest Attestation Commission (VAK) had to decide whether to acknowledge the degree or to annul it (the degree was annulled in 1981), MLP succeeded to get a position of a senior fellow researcher (without contacting the students) at the Chair of Baltic Philology of Vilnius University. A new habilitation in Baltic linguistics was prepared in 1998 (a book published in the same year), but the confrontation with colleagues having arisen after his teacher Prof. Dr. Habil. Vytautas Maziulis had been ousted from the academic circles, MLP left the university for the position of Director of international European Institute for Dispersed Ethnic Minorities. The Institute was set up on the initiative of Emmanuel Zingeris, MP, by the Council of Europe and granted with the auspices of the CE only after Gediminas Vagnorius, the Prime-Minister of Lithuania, had promised to back up the Institute and to provide it with necessary equipment and premises. These obligations were partly fulfilled as concerned financing several projects. At the end of 2000 the Institute was left without any means and had to dismiss the staff. MLP became engaged at the Institute on private initiative. Pensioned in 2007.
MLP is also active as a publicist, his views having developed from liberal democratic toward fundamental theocratic after so-called "terrorist attack" of 911 on "towers" (not only but on Building No. 7 too!) of the WTC, etc.
For main publications cf. Main Works.