‘[Linguistics] was the only branch of humanities that had a real scientific method, and… all the other branches of the science of man (ethnography, history of religion, cultural history) could move from their alchemic stage of development only if they followed the example of linguistics.’21
In 1912, Nikolay married Vera Petrovna Bazilevskaya, and the following year he was appointed a candidate professor in the department of comparative linguistics and Sanskrit on the recommendation of Viktor Porzhezinsky, the chairman. His letter of recommendation survives: ‘His [Trubetskoy’s] outstanding talent, wide reading in the literature of the subject, and finally, rare work ethic has shown itself in full measure in his various studies of linguistic science.’ Nikolay’s mentor also found it relevant to mention that he was the ‘son of the deceased rector’.
If Trubetskoy was known for single-minded pursuit of scholarly enquiry, Jakobson was the opposite. He flitted between projects, ideas, books, friends and even women, with an almost compulsive randomness. Short, bespectacled and intense, he seemed to thrive on disorder and an upturned existence almost as much as Trubetskoy shunned it.
Jakobson was born in 1896 to a family of Jewish Armenian merchants that lived in the centre of Moscow at No. 3 Lubyansky Proezd, just off a main trolley line and right around the corner from the Russia Insurance Society (whose building would, in 1918, be transformed into the ‘Lubyanka’, the headquarters of the feared Soviet secret police). Before the revolution, Jakobson, six years younger than Trubetskoy, had been a charter member of Moscow’s avant-garde scene. This was a time of thriving creativity, when movement after movement of artists – from symbolists to acmeists to suprematists to futurists – jostled for the limelight, denounced each other as poseurs and brawled with one another in the streets. Each had a more audacious project to reinvent the future, to pay homage to this or that legacy, to rediscover the primitive, and to (ever more feverishly) perform art in harmony with the great theoretical pronouncements of the day. Jakobson found himself surrounded by people with as great a sense of their own intellectual self-worth as his friend Trubetskoy.
Nor was Jakobson immune to the occasional excess of zeal in his desire to live life in harmony with his principles. Devoted to the theory of poetic formalism, for example, Jakobson avoided writing – and even speaking – in the first person, unless it was absolutely necessary or was under his artistic pseudonym ‘Comrade Alyagrov’. This somewhat compulsive feature of his personality was remarked on by virtually all his students and biographers. It also annoyed his second wife, Krystyna Pomorska: ‘A striking feature of his discourse is the strong tendency to avoid the first person singular… even when directly addressed.’22 It made the process of writing his memoirs especially tricky: in one set of reminiscences, he quotes extensively from a letter from ‘the poet, Alyagrov’ – without ever mentioning that he was Alyagrov.23 Or, as Jakobson wrote in 1962 of himself and his early linguistic interests: ‘Proverbial sayings were jealously seized upon to cover empty calendar sheets… The six year old boy, fascinated by these intermediate forms between language and poetry, was compelled to stay on the watershed between language and linguistics.’24
Even more curious than the idea of a six-year-old boy being fascinated by ‘intermediate forms between language and poetry’ is that these sentences display the fundamental applications of his theory, which was aimed more than anything at questioning and obscuring the role of the individual author in literature and poetry. Thus he refers to himself, wherever possible, in the third person (‘the six-year-old boy’) or uses the passive voice (‘Proverbial sayings were jealously seized upon’). According to one of Jakobson’s biographers, Richard Bradford, Jakobson seems to have produced around 5,000 pages of prose while self-consciously avoiding any trace of the lyrical first person: ‘This practice should not be dismissed as a mere eccentricity, rather it should be seen as silent testimony to his belief that the poetic function exerts a constant pressure on our linguistic presence.’25 In the style of the true Russian intellectual, Jakobson proved his commitment to ideas by living according to them. If he had a theory of writing, it should be applied to all writing. ‘Prose had to be prose’, as a former student of his, Omry Ronen, put it.26 And Jakobson considered the first person singular a poetic device. He avoided not only it, but also poetic flourishes in his writing – though he sometimes allowed himself the luxury of the first person in letters and reminiscences.
In his poetry, meanwhile, poetic devices (such as the first person) take on an almost obsessive prominence: his literary nom de plume, ‘Alyagrov’, under which he published poetry from 1914 until he left Moscow in 1920, was even a play on the first person singular in Russian (ya). In fact the ya in Alyagrov was deliberately emboldened to make the connection obvious: ‘Aлягров’. Jakobson considered himself a poet first and foremost; but by his own admission, he was not a particularly noteworthy one. He was, however, a great theoretician and analyser of other people’s poetry, and a promoter of other artists. He was intrigued by all things counterculture, bohemian and avant-garde in the moveable feast of pre-revolutionary Moscow.
Jakobson’s philosophy of language, which would one day revolutionize academia, was born amid his musings on poetic criticism. He believed that the principle of poetic language applied more generally – that language was not simply a tool to represent meanings that were, in some sense, already there and were waiting to be named. As he would put it three decades later: ‘language is composed of elements which are signifiers, yet at the same time signify nothing’.27
The suspicion cast on ‘objects’ in language was very much part of a new shift that was under way in how people viewed the world. The results of physics experiments, artistic inspiration, philosophical introspection and a host of other cerebral musings together and separately added up to what is known as modernism. Newtonian physics gave way to relativity; positivism gave way to phenomenology; in art, the realism of the nineteenth century gave way to futurism, cubism and suprematism. The linguistics of Jakobson and Trubetskoy was not above this trend. As Jakobson put it 50 years later, speaking of this period: ‘The common denominator, both in science and art, is not the emphasis on the study of objects but, rather, the emphasis on the relations between objects.’28 The two men were heavily influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure of the University of Geneva, who, in his posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale (1916), wrote in similar vein: ‘In language there are only differences.’
In his linguistic studies, Trubetskoy focused on a new discipline called ‘phonology’, the study of the relationships between sounds in ordinary language and how they differentiate meaning – an exploration of the patterns and symmetries that lie at the unconscious base of the linguistic utterance. A phoneme was not a sound; it was not even a thing. It was a relationship, a difference, which could appear in almost any form. For instance, a line drawn midway between the Russian cities of Novocherkassk (near the Black Sea) and Pskov (up towards the Baltic), for example, separates Russian pronunciation into the northeast g and the southwest h – gara in the northeast is hara in the southwest.29 While these are not the same sound, they are the same phoneme, so that however it is pronounced, the opposition between two words will be the same.