Jacobson, Roman Osipovich

Moscow

Roman Yakobson was born in Moscow, one of three sons in a Jewish family of a chemical engineer and a merchant of the I guild , a graduate of the Riga Polytechnic Joseph (Osip) Abramovich Jacobson (originally from Austria-Hungary ) and his wife Anna Yakovlevna Jacobsigi, nee Volpert (born ^[2] . In 1914 he graduated from the gymnasium at the Lazarev Institute and entered the Slavic Philology Department of the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University , which he graduated in 1918. In 1915, he became one of the founders of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and remained its chairman until 1920. In 1918-1920 he worked at Moscow University.

One of the closest friends of R. O. Yakobson was Mayakovsky , who introduced him to the work of Khlebnikov and highly appreciated his article on this poet. Mayakovsky mentions Jacobson in the poem "Comrade Netta" and the essay "I traveled like this." In turn, Jacobson wrote on the death of Mayakovsky article "On the generation that squandered his poets."

Czechoslovakia

In February 1920, he traveled to Revel as part of the Central Union trade delegation as an employee of ROSTA , and from there in July of that year to Czechoslovakia as a translator of the Red Cross mission involved in the repatriation of prisoners of war. Then he worked in the Soviet embassy.

Czechoslovak Deputy Foreign Minister Vaclav Girsa believed that Jacobson was a “scammer of the Soviet mission, a spy and provocateur” ^[3] . In January 1923, the police searched him on suspicion of espionage ^[4] . In the same January 1923 he was appointed head of the press office of the embassy. On September 16, 1927, he was dismissed from this post as a non-partisan decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks , but continued to work as an embassy until December 1928, for which Ambassador Antonov-Ovseyenko was put on sight by a decision of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks ^[5] .

In 1926 he became one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle , and served as vice president. Then he became an intermediary between the Czechoslovak and Soviet governments, when the latter forced Prague to immediately recognize the USSR under the threat of sanctions ^[3] .

In 1930 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the German University in Prague (topic: Über den Versbau der serbokroatischen Volksepen ). In 1931 he moved to Brno , taught Russian philology and ancient Bohemian literature at Masaryk University - as an assistant in 1933-1934, a visiting professor in 1934-1937, and an assistant professor in 1937-1939. In 1937 received Czechoslovak citizenship. Participating in international scientific conferences and congresses, traveled extensively throughout Europe; These trips were paid by the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry.

In the 1930s, Jacobson adjoined Eurasianism , one of the leaders of Eurasianism, N. S. Trubetskoy, was his closest associate in linguistics and correspondent, and the other, P. N. Savitsky , was the godfather of Jacobson, who converted to Orthodoxy in 1938.

Scandinavia

On March 15, 1939 , immediately after the German troops entered Czechoslovakia, he and his wife left Brno for Prague, where they hid for about a month waiting for exit visas, arrived in Denmark on April 23, where Jacobson lectured at the University of Copenhagen (by invitation, sent before the occupation), from there on September 3 to Oslo , where he worked at the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies and was elected a full member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences .

On April 9, 1940, barely hearing the announcement of a Nazi invasion of Norway, the Jacobsons, without even stopping home for documents, fled to the Swedish border and entered Sweden on April 23 as refugees. There, Jacobson taught at Uppsala University ^[6] .

In May 1941, the Jacobsons sailed to the United States on the Remmaren cargo ship (the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and his wife Tony sailed with them), which arrived at New York on June 4.

USA

1942-1946 - professor of general linguistics at the Free School of Higher Studies , a kind of French university organized by the French and Belgian governments in exile.

1943-1946 - also a visiting professor of linguistics at Columbia University . At the same time, he served as an employee of the Czechoslovak military intelligence in the United States ^[3] .

1944 - became one of the founders of the New York Linguistic Circle and his magazine Word .

1946 - the Chair of Czekoslovak Studies was organized at Columbia University, where Jacobson worked from the day it was founded, but in 1949 decided to leave the university because of constant accusations of pro-communist sympathies.

1949-1965 - professor of Slavic languages ​​and literature at Harvard University (since 1965 Professor Emeritus ).

Since 1957 - also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

November 17, 1952 became a naturalized US citizen.

In 1948 he published a thorough refutation of the hypothesis of Andre Mason about the falsity of “ Words on Igor's Campaign ”. The scientific discussion around the publication encountered some political difficulties (especially in France), because, according to Jacobson, “many do not believe in Mason, but consider his debunking of the Russian cultural tradition a convenient tool in the anti-communist campaign” ^[7] . At Columbia University, students distributed flyers accusing Jacobson of supporting the communist line in his book on the Word ^[7] .

In 1959 he founded the journal International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics and became its editor in chief.

In 1962, he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature ^[8] .

July 18, 1982 he died at his home in Cambridge (Massachusetts) . Buried at Cemetery. On his tombstone is written in Russian, in Latin transcription: “russkij filolog”.

Travel to the USSR

• 1956, May 17-25. At the invitation of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, he participated in a meeting of the International Committee of Slavists in Moscow on the preparation of the IV International Congress of Slavists.
• 1958, September 1-10. Member of the IV International Congress of Slavists in Moscow.
• 1962, October 1-10. Participated in a meeting of the International Committee of Slavists in Moscow
• 1964, August 3-10. Member of the VII International Congress of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences in Moscow.
• 1966, August 4 — September 8. Participant of the XVIII International Congress of Psychology (Moscow), the International Seminar on the Production and Perception of Speech (Leningrad), the Summer School on Semiotics ( Tartu ), and the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli ( Tbilisi ). He lectured at the Institute of Slavic Studies , at the Institute of Russian Language , at the Institute of Asian Peoples .
• 1967, August 17-24.
• 1979, September 29 — October 4. Participant of the II International Symposium on the problems of the unconscious in Tbilisi.

Family

Brother - historian, political scientist and bibliographer Sergey Osipovich Yakobson ( 1901 - 1979 ), director of the Slavic and Central Europe department of the Library of Congress (his second wife is Elena Aleksandrovna Jacobson , radio host of Voice of America, 1912 - 2002 ) ^[9] .

Another brother, Mikhail Jacobson, was deported from France during the German occupation and died in a concentration camp.

Wives

1. 1922-1935 Sofya Nikolaevna Feldman (1899-1982), in the second marriage of Gaasov
2. 1935–1962 Svatava Pirkova ^[10] , married Pirkova-Jacobson (1908–2000), folklorist, professor at the University of Texas at Austin
3. 1962-1982 Kristyna Pomorska (1928-1986), literary critic

With his active work in any place of residence (Moscow, Prague , New York ), R. O. Jacobson made a significant (and sometimes decisive, not only nationally, but also globally) contribution to the development of linguistics as a science. One of the founders of structuralism in linguistics and literary criticism . Some of his works are of great interest to psycholinguistics .

Jacobson's first significant work was the study of the peculiarities of the language of the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1919). Contrasting poetic language with natural, Jacobson proclaimed that " poetry is a language in an aesthetic function" and therefore "indifferent to the object it describes." This thesis formed the basis of the aesthetics of early Russian formalism , which turned the traditional correlation of form and content in a literary work. A later article (1928), co-authored with Yu.N. Tynyanov , states that although literary criticism operates with its own internal laws, these laws must be correlated with other areas of culture - politics, economics, religion and philosophy.

In a study comparing Russian and Czech versification systems (1923), Jacobson focuses on the sound segments of words called phonemes that do not have their own meaning, but their sequences are the most important means of expressing meanings in a language. Interest in the sound side of the language led Jacobson to create (with the participation of N. S. Trubetskoy ) a new branch of linguistics - phonology , the subject of which is the differential signs of sounds that make up phonemes. Jacobson established 12 binary acoustic features that make up the phonological opposition, which, he claims, are the language universals that underlie any language.

The method of structural analysis in terms of binary oppositions had a great influence on the anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss ; Levi-Strauss's use of it in the analysis of myth laid the foundation for French structuralism. Jacobson, along with Levy-Strauss, is the author of the idea of ​​the emergence of a language as a combination of gestures and shouts that turned into phonemes ^[11] .

The foundations of another new direction in science - neuro - linguistics - are laid in the work of Jacobson on aphasia (1941), in which he connects speech disorders with neurological data on the structure of the brain. This study provided physiological justification for his teaching on metaphor (axis of selection) and metonymy (axis of combination) as two main opposed to each other ways of ordering language units, which also determine the difference between poetry and prose . This opposition soon became an integral part of the terminological apparatus of literary criticism.

• Full member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences (1949), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1950), Serbian Academy of Sciences (1955), Polish Academy of Sciences (1959)
• Corresponding Member of the Finno-Ugric Society in Helsinki (1949), British Academy (1974)
• Honorary member of the Theonoya Society for the Study of Mythology in Brussels (1950), the International Phonetic Association (1951), the Royal Irish Academy (1961), the American Association of Armenian Studies (1964), the Academy of Aphasia (1968), the Italian Association for the Study of Semiotics (1972), and the (1974), Mark Twain Society (1977), (1978), New York Academy of Sciences (1978)
• Foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Literature (1960), Finnish Scientific Society (1977)
• Member of the Philological Society in London (1950), the Acoustic Society of America (1951), the International Committee of Slavists (1955), the Scientific Committee of the World Psychiatric Association (1964)
• Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge (1961), University of Michigan (1963), University of New Mexico (1966), University of Grenoble (1966), University of Nice (1966), University of Rome (1967), Yale University (1967), Charles University in Prague (1968), Purkine University in Brno (1968), University of Zagreb (1969), Ohio State University (1970), Tel Aviv University (1974), Harvard University (1975), Columbia University (1976), University of Copenhagen (1979) ), Ruhr University (1980), Georgetown University (1980), Brandeis University (1981), Oxford University (1981)
• President of the Linguistic Society of America (1956)
• Vice-President of the International Association of Contemporary Slavic Languages ​​and Literature in Paris (1952), the International Committee of Slavists (1958), the International Association of Semiotic Studies (1974)
• Order of Tomas Garrig Masaryk 2 degrees (1991; in memory).

Jacobson R. O. Some questions of linguistic semantics. Report at the Academic Council of the Russian Language Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences // Unforgettable voices of Russia: Voices of Russian philologists are heard. Vol. I. - M.: Languages ​​of Slavic cultures, 2009. - S. 189-196. ISBN 978-5-9551-0327-3 Recorded by Yu. Menshov on August 12, 1966. The record is stored in the library of the Islamic Republic of Yaroslavl them. V.V. Vinogradova RAS .

• Binarism

• R. Jakobson. Echoes of his scholarship. Lisse, 1977;
• A Tribute to R. Jakobson. B .; NY, 1983;
• Ivanov Vyach. Sun The linguistic path of R. Jacobson // Jacobson R. Selected works. M., 1985 (" Linguists of the world ");
• Gamkrelidze T.V. R. O. Jacobson and the problem of isomorphism between the genetic code and semiotic systems // Problems of Linguistics . 1988. No. 3;
• R. Jakobson: A complete bibliography of his writings. B., 1990;
• Imperial Moscow University: 1755-1917: Encyclopedic Dictionary / A. Yu. Andreev , D. A. Tsygankov. - M .: Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN), 2010. - S. 873-874. - 894 p. - 2000 copies. - ISBN 978-5-8243-1429-8 .

• Jacobson, Roman Osipovich // Encyclopedia " Round the World ".
• Roman Jacobson. Works on poetics. 1987. Facsimile. pdf, 10.9 Mb
• R.O. Jacobson. Linguistics and poetics.
• R.O. Jacobson. Typological studies and their contribution to comparative historical linguistics.
• R.O. Jacobson. On the theory of phonological unions between languages.
• R.O. Jacobson. On the linguistic aspects of translation
• R.O. Jacobson. Zero sign
• Roman Jacobson. The latest Russian poetry. Sketch one: Approaches to Khlebnikov
• Biography of Roman Jacobson in the Gallery of the International Society of Philosophers
• R.O. Jacobson. From the memoirs (Khlebnikov and Twisted)
• R.O. Jacobson. Of the small things of Velimir Khlebnikov: “Wind-singing ...”
• "Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jacobson. Life is like a novel" documentary (director Vladimir Nepevny)