In fact, at several levels of theoretical abstraction, completely different sounds could be regarded as the same phonemes; this makes the task of keeping track of them exceedingly difficult and heavily theoretical, but it opened up an extremely exciting prospect for Trubetskoy; he believed the patterns and re-curring rules he was finding to be evidence that linguistic evolution was not random, but had to be a small part of some much larger process of dynamic change. His soon-to-be one-sided duel with the soon-to-be-deceased Shakhmatov was to be fought over the significance of these patterns: Trubetskay’s insights led to the idea that universal laws of language exist and are valid for all languages at all times, which would revolutionize twentieth-century linguistics.
Trubetskoy and Jakobson were part of a generation of Russians who were bursting with self-entitlement and privilege: the sons and daughters of Russia’s Silver Age, that decade of artistic and intellectual ferment that produced poets like Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova, composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Prokofiev, and painters like Kazimir Malevich. Theirs was an arrogant generation, convinced of its own superiority. Like many previous generations of Russians, it longed to drag the country into the modern age, but saw her weighed down by history and tradition. It was full of scorn for the old generations, and longed to create a new Russian science and scholarship. Had it not been for a tremendous accident of history, in the form of the Bolshevik revolution, it no doubt would have done so.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SHORT SUMMER
Russia’s population turned out in droves to cheer Tsar Nicholas II when he declared Russia’s entry into the First World War in 1914. But within just a few years, this optimism and public spirit had vanished. Casualties from fighting the Germans were horrific, and wartime shortages took their toll. Pre-war Russia had witnessed the zenith of the reforming monarchy, taking its first baby steps into the modern era; but the war erased all that progress. Soon, the only crowds that gathered were those demanding bread, an end to conscription and finally the abdication of the tsar and an end to monarchy.
Not everyone, however, was so distracted by the dramatic European events that would soon change their lives forever. Trubetskoy’s autobiographical notes provide a good indication of what was occupying the prince’s monomaniacal attention span for most of this period: his teaching qualifications. He spends pages describing in minute detail the composition of the qualifying exam he took to hold a professorship (‘each of these questions had to be answered by a half hour of detailed discussion including the cogent literature. Each of the faculty members had the right to ask other questions on the same subject which had not been provided for in the program…’).1 He then lovingly lingers on his contributions to the scholarly work on ‘north Caucasian fire abduction legends’. And, following a brief mention of his research trip to Leipzig in 1913, his coverage of European affairs is succinct: ‘Soon after that the World War broke out.’ He then picks up again with his efforts to pass his instructor’s exam. Absorbed in his world of paleo-Siberian fricatives and Finnic folktales, Trubetskoy did not seem overly troubled by the carnage taking place in Europe and the upheavals in his own country.
His autobiographical notes break off in mid-1917, having failed to mention the end of the Romanov monarchy in March 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the short-lived provisional government came to power. His last thoughts, unsurprisingly, are of his plans to write his prehistory of Slavic languages: ‘in it I planned to illustrate the process of development of the individual Slavic languages from Proto Slavic… by an improved method of reconstruction….’
Leaving Moscow in the summer of 1917 for a spa in the north Caucasus town of Kislovodsk, Trubetskoy had no inkling that he would never return to his native Moscow. The Bolshevik seizure of the Winter Palace in the renamed Petrograd in October, and the declaration of Soviet government apparently caught him off guard. But he knew he could not return to Moscow, as all members of his dynasty would be potential targets for the communists.
For the next three years, Trubetskoy, his wife and daughter wandered the war-ravaged landscape of southern Russia: first to Tbilisi, then to Baku, then to Rostov, then to Crimea, and across the Black Sea by ship to Constantinople (see chapter 1). Finally, the young prince’s aristocratic connections proved useful in landing him a job in the Bulgarian capital Sofia teaching Slavic linguistics.
Jakobson, meanwhile, stayed on in Moscow, and even briefly joined the Bolsheviks, working for the bureau of propaganda – the imposingly named Commissariat of the Enlightenment. He even delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Tasks of Artistic Propaganda’ under his pseudonym, Alyagrov. Life in post-revolution Moscow was difficult: food was scarce, crime was rampant, and the Bolshevik regime, insecure and fighting a civil war across the breadth of Eurasia, was becoming increasingly intolerant of any dissenting views. As Jakobson wrote to a friend on his arrival in Prague in July 1920 (using the first person singular): ‘Really, each one of us has lived through not one but ten lives in the last two years… In the last few years I, for example, was a counter-revolutionary, a scholar (not a bad one), scholarly secretary of the Director of the Department of the Arts, deserter, card player, irreplaceable specialist in a heating enterprise, man of letters, humorist, reporter, diplomat. Believe me, this all is an adventure story and that’s all that there is to it, and so it is with almost every one of us.’2
Gradually, as the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, they began to quarrel with all who questioned orthodox Marxist views. The formalists’ view that art is autonomous and independent of society pitted them squarely in ideological conflict with orthodox Marxism, which held that art is an expression of history and social forces and must be subordinated to political considerations. Asserting, as the avant-gardists did, that the social context of literature was irrelevant amounted to a rejection of what was fundamental to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. In the pluralistic atmosphere immediately after the revolution, when the Bolsheviks needed allies and tried to appeal to the intellectuals, formalism could be tolerated. But as time went by, any competition to the official state ideology began to be met with stiffer and stiffer resistance.
It was unclear why, in the spring of 1920, Jakobson suddenly felt that he needed to leave Moscow, but it may have been related to the turning of the tide – to the slow erosion of the position of the formalists. He landed a job as interpreter for one of the first groups of Soviet diplomats to be sent abroad. The 24-year-old was not a diplomat by training, and nor was he really a communist. Furthermore, his knowledge of Czech was limited to a one-semester class on the comparative grammar of Slavic languages at Moscow University. But competition for the job was not too stiff, he had been told by the man who recruited him, because ‘everyone else was afraid the White army would blow them up as soon as they got over the border’.3
Whether it was because he was unafraid of this contingency or feared something worse if he stayed in Moscow – one way or the other, Jakobson embarked on a new life.
The people here are nice
Russia’s exiles – 2 million of them – made their way to Europe, Turkey, Persia and China in what was, at the time, the largest human migration the world had ever seen. The newly exiled Russians were overwhelmingly from the aristocracy and the intelligentsia: educated, cultured and cosmopolitan, used to lives of privilege. But in postwar Europe, they were shorn of their status – and even of their citizenship. They were stateless, poor and desperate. Former princes could be found waiting tables in Paris or begging in the streets of Shanghai; ladies accustomed to silk evening gowns and costumed balls were now chambermaids and prostitutes.