Roman Jakobson — linguist with roots in the Russian Empire
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was born in Moscow on 11 October 1896 (29 September, Old Style), the son of Osip Jakobson, an industrialist trained as a chemist, and Anna Volpert; one chronology gives 23 October. He grew up in a well-to-do Jewish family, studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and from 1914 at Moscow University, where he took his master's degree in 1918.
As a student he helped found the Moscow Linguistic Circle, in 1914 or March 1915 by different accounts, and was its president until 1920. The circle brought together linguists with avant-garde poets and painters, and with the St Petersburg group OPOYAZ it formed the core of what came to be called Russian formalism, the study of the devices that make a text literary. Jakobson collected folklore, wrote on Russian verse and on the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, and in 1920, at twenty-three, left Russia. He travelled first with a trade delegation to Reval, now Tallinn, and in July 1920 went to Czechoslovakia with a Red Cross mission for the repatriation of prisoners of war, then worked for some years for the Soviet mission in Prague.
He settled in Czechoslovakia, took his doctorate at the German University in Prague in 1930 and taught at Masaryk University in Brno. In October 1926 (sources give the 6th or the 26th) he was among the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle, whose members, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, developed the structural study of sound systems, or phonology. He became a Czechoslovak citizen in 1937. In March 1939, as the Germans occupied Prague, he left for Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and in 1941 reached New York on a cargo ship, together with the philosopher Ernst Cassirer.
In New York he taught at the École libre des hautes études and at Columbia, where he met Claude Lévi-Strauss, who drew on his phonology to found structural anthropology. From 1949 he taught at Harvard and from 1957 also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His paper Linguistics and Poetics, delivered in 1958 and published in 1960, with its six functions of language, became a standard text far beyond linguistics. He became an American citizen in 1952. He died on 18 July 1982 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Boston, as Britannica has it, aged eighty-five.
Tracing the roots — Moscow (Russia)
Born in Moscow in 1896, he studied at the Lazarev Institute and Moscow University, co-founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle and was its president until 1920, when he left for Czechoslovakia, at first working for the Soviet mission in Prague.
.svg?width=900)
Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.