After a period at the end of the war as a liaison officer to Soviet forces in Berlin, Dennis Ward returned to academe and in the 1960s became the first Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

The son of Clifford Ward, a Yorkshire steelworker, he was educated at Rotherham Grammar School and entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1942 to read German and Russian. But the war took him away from his studies after one year.

As an officer in The York and Lancaster Regiment, his knowledge of Russian was thoroughly tested at the end of the war when he found himself in Berlin, interpreting for the Allied Control Commission and coming into regular contact with his Soviet opposite numbers. Fluent in both German and Russian, he was appointed liaison officer to the Soviet military mission in the British zone.

Demobbed in 1947, he returned to Cambridge, graduating with first class honours in Russian and comparative philology. In 1949 he arrived in Edinburgh as the university’s first lecturer in Russian, and so began a distinguished academic career of almost 40 years. During the 1950s and especially the 1960s, when a big growth in Russian studies took place, the Russian department under Dennis Ward expanded to seven members of staff.

In 1963 he became the first, and so far the only, Professor of Russian at Edinburgh, producing many articles and reviews and two seminal works, The Russian Language Today (1965) and The Phonetics of Russian (1969).

He also devised and presented a Russian course for the BBC and was an early advocate of what used to be called “language laboratories”, taking a lead in starting the Language Learning Centre at Edinburgh and spending part of 1967 at the University of Essex, directing its Contemporary Russian Language project. He was a specialist in early epic slavonic poetry and translated the famous 12th century poem The Lay of the Host of Igor.

Over the years, however, his professional focus gradually changed. He had always been interested in art and now he began to explore the relationship between visual and literary representation. He also introduced an honours course on Russian art history and in 1982 accepted an invitation to lecture on Russian art at Grinnell College, Iowa.

By 1985 the good times for British universities were over, rationalisation was in the air and, in the twilight years just before perestroika, the outlook for Russian seemed unfavourable. Ward took early retirement, but continued for some years to pursue his professional interests and to speak up for Russian studies. Indeed, throughout the 1980s he was very active on the editorial board of the Scottish Slavonic Review, an important multi-cultural journal of that period.

An indication of his broad and eclectic contribution to Russian studies is Words and Images (1989), a book of essays published in his honour. Ten years later, at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Russian department, he addressed a large gathering of colleagues and ex-students whose esteem and affection for him was manifest.

An artist from an early age, after his retirement in 1985, he diverted much of his energies to his art and had a solo exhibition in Middleham, Yorkshire, in 1994, entitled The Sound of Ancient Voices, incorporating images of ancient worlds and mysterious Scottish standing stones. His work also regularly appeared at the annual Society of Scottish Artists exhibition at the Scottish Academy. He was chairman of the Edinburgh printmakers for several years in the late 1990s.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Robin, and by a son and two daughters.

Dennis Ward, linguist and artist, was born on February 1, 1924. He died on April 5, 2008, aged 84