Roman Osipovich Jakobson 1896-1982 the Unity of His Thought on Verbal Art

Abstract

Roman Jakobson was one of the great minds of the modern world, and the effects of his genius have been felt in many fields: linguistics, semiotics, art, structural anthropology, and, of course, literature. Consider the scientific milestones that marked his long life: one of the founders of the Russian formalist school, he emigrated to Prague in 1920, where his activity in a free environment guaranteed the survival and evolution of formalist ideas during the twenties and thirties and contributed heavily to Prague structuralism; driven from pillar to post by the irrational forces abroad in Europe between the wars, he performed an odyssey, each station stop of which marked some significant contribution to the scientific study of literature. He was forced repeatedly to move, sometimes in order to maintain life itself: from Prague to Copenhagen, then at length to New York, where he was a leading figure during the war in the Ecole libre des hautes etudes, and finally to Cambridge, where he had a long career at Harvard and MIT. His meeting with Levi-Strauss in New York was crucial for the dissemination of formalist and structuralist ideas in Western Europe, and his brief visits to the Soviet Union in the late fifties and after provided even there an impetus to the development of such studies. For those who worked with Roman Jakobson he was, of course, a great teacher and scholar but somehow also a deeply personal experience, a landmark in one's life. I met him first in 1946 as a graduate student in a course he gave at Columbia University in Slavic phonology and morphology, a subject of which I was then profoundly and, as he would have said, systematically ignorant. But Jakobson was an artist in Tolstoy's sense of the word, and as he developed the subtle and satisfying principles of phonological analysis, he succeeded in infecting most of us with his own intellectual excitement. Yet the lectures of that great discoverer of arrangement and order were not orderly in any obvious sense. Like his earliest articles on literature, which were in fact also lecture notes, they gave an impression of studied spontaneity, of a contrived happening-with gestures. Jakobson was not only a meticulous and tireless investigator who missed no detail and never forgot anything, he was indeed also an artist, even an actor. The