Student of the Faculty of History and Philology, graduate student and teacher of the Department of Russian Language and General Linguistics, Dean of the Faculty of Philology of Rostov State University Zoya Vsevolodovna Valyusinskaya served as a nurse on military ambulance train No. 134 during the Great Patriotic War.
Zoya Vsevolodovna was born in the city of Onega, Arkhangelsk region. Since childhood, she had a thirst for knowledge, which was instilled in her by her father, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Valyusinsky. He was a high school chemistry and mathematics teacher and the author of several science fiction novels published in the 1930s.
In 1941, after graduating from high school, Zoya Vsevolodovna entered the Faculty of History and Philology of Rostov State University, but she was not able to complete her studies, since after the start of the war she volunteered to go to the front. From December 1941 to August 1944, a recent student served as a nurse on military ambulance train No. 134. At the age of 17, the girl accompanied the wounded from the front to rear hospitals for three years.
Zoya Vsevolodovna often recalled these years, because at that time she was faced with pain, death, as well as true friendship and support. Most of all, she remembered the good things: the fatherly attitude of the wounded towards the young nurses, the caring military commissar of the train, her friendship with the nurse Alya, a student at the Moscow Aviation Institute, with whom her friendship lasted throughout her life.
In September 1944, Zoya again entered the Faculty of History and Philology and in June 1949 graduated with a degree in Russian language and literature. At the Department of Russian Language and General Linguistics, Zoya Vsevolodovna studied in graduate school from October 1949 to October 1952, and after graduation she began teaching at the university.
Already in 1954, Zoya Vsevolodovna defended her Ph.D. thesis on the topic: “Phraseological units that act as the main members of a two-part sentence in the modern Russian language.”
In 1963, Zoya Vsevolodovna received the academic title of associate professor. She wrote more than 100 scientific papers, was the author of sections of a textbook and a collection on practical stylistics, sections in the collections “Morphology of the Russian Language” and “Spelling and Punctuation”, published in different years by the Rostov University Publishing House. She was a co-author and one of the editors of the Dictionary of Russian Don Dialects, as well as a researcher of dialogue as a speech structure. To this day, her article on dialogue, published back in 1979 in the academic collection of scientific works “Text Syntax,” is referred to by all researchers of speech forms.
The war did not go unnoticed for Zoya Vsevolodovna’s health. Due to health reasons, she was forced to leave her position as dean of the Faculty of Philology. Until 1986, she tried to continue her work: she was an associate professor at the Russian Language Department of the Faculty of Philology of the Russian State University, gave lectures, taught special courses, gave scientific reports, supervised graduate students and graduate students.
Zoya Vsevolodovna died after a serious illness in 2001.
Zoya Vsevolodovna Valyusinskaya was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree, on April 6, 1985 on the initiative of the USSR Minister of Defense.
Text author: Regina Simakova
