Trubetskoy’s further letters to Jakobson are littered with seemingly random musings on sounds, vowels and patterns of sounds drawn in triangular and other shapes. Trubetskoy was pushing relentlessly towards something that he could not quite put his finger on, but – with Jakobson’s help – he might be able to.
Clearly there was something about this work that weighed heavily on Trubetskoy. His urge to write a book did have a firm practical reason behind it: he needed to publish in order to get a professorship at a major European university. While in pre-revolutionary Russia that might have been assured by his family’s connections, it was another matter now that he was an émigré wanderer in Europe. (‘Due to the lightness of my printed scientific baggage, I can only count on, in truth, a job in the provinces, and not even a professor’s position, but that of a docent.’)1
But Trubetskoy turned down at least one offer by Jakobson – in the very next letter, it seems – to find such a publisher, responding that he needed more time. He wanted to know what the rush was. From then on, Trubetskoy’s obsession with the book seems to have been mixed with a reluctance to be done with it. In a 1925 letter to Jakobson, he raised the subject again: ‘The Prehistory again occupies my attention. I believe that the later I shall print it, the better; such things are to be nurtured.’ Then, in 1926: ‘I simply don’t know when I will get to the Prehistory. I’m afraid it is overdue….’
Ultimately, Trubetskoy could never bring himself to finish his masterpiece. The manuscript of the book was in his flat in Vienna in 1938, when, following Germany’s Anschluss of Austria, the Gestapo searched the premises and confiscated all his writings. Trubetskoy’s friends believe the loss of this manuscript was what led to his heart attack and untimely death eight months later. But would Trubetskoy, Gestapo or not, ever have finished his masterwork? Eighteen years after he started it, he had only dribbled out parts of the book as scholarly articles and in his main work, The Principles of Phonology, published posthumously.
One explanation for both the obsession and the failure to see the end of it springs to mind: his attachment to the book may well have been driven by nostalgia, a simple yearning for the vanished Moscow of his youth. In Sofia, Trubetskoy did better than most exiles, but still found it hard to provide for his family on the meagre pay of a Bulgarian privatdotsent, an unsalaried professor dependent on contributions from his students. Even after he moved to Austria and got a full-time teaching position at the University of Vienna in 1923, he battled depression and ill health, and faced chronic financial difficulties. In one letter to Jakobson, for example, Trubetskoy said he was not able to make the trip to Prague for a conference because of lack of funds.
Those who knew Trubetskoy before the revolution as a grand aristocrat with unlimited self-entitlement formed a very different impression of the man from those who got to know him after his flight. In Europe he was prone to bouts of depression and self-doubt, sometimes isolating himself from friends and family, taking solace in his scholarly theories. ‘In a strange land, Trubetskoy remained a stranger’, wrote his colleague, the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, in his 1939 obituary. He was ‘naturally friendly with all people, modest and unassuming, but also a man who never overcame the inauspicious circumstances of his life’.2
For Trubetskoy, finishing the Prehistory would have meant letting go of the past, letting go of Moscow University, of the tuxedoed debates at the Ethnographic Society, of his oedipal rivalry with Shakhmatov, of the pleasant summers at his family estate at Akhtirka, in the Ukraine. These memories died hard for Trubetskoy – as they did for many Russian exiles like him. The Prehistory of Slavic Languages was indeed the last thread binding him to a dream life he had lost forever; but it was also the first hurdle in a scholarly steeplechase that would enlist Jakobson and that would last from the fateful December when they first got in touch until Trubetskoy’s death in 1938.
Jakobson, for his part, expressed increasing excitement about Trubetskoy’s obsession with the patterns he was finding in languages. True, Jakobson was himself looking for a professorship and probably figured that the patronage of Trubetskoy and his family connections could be useful in that endeavour. This ulterior motive might have justified a brief and indulgent correspondence with the prince, until it became clear that the latter had no useful contacts to speak of in European academic circles. But in fact Jakobson did not turn his flattery and encouragement elsewhere even after it became clear that Trubetskoy had no interest in finding him a job. Whatever it was about the book, it got Jakobson hooked as well, and he appeared genuinely to share Trubetskoy’s passion for delving deeper into the study of human language.
Inner logic
The linguistics that the pair had been discussing before the war raised the fascinating question of how sounds, words and structure created meaning. But the orderly semantic oppositions they unearthed manifested themselves as a static, crystalline, unchanging universe of interconnected elements frozen at a single instant in time. They could not explain the one constant attribute of language which Trubetskoy was finding in his study of pre-Slavic dialects and in his quest to usurp Shakhmatov’s mantle: change.
The rapidity of language change in history is astounding. Within a few hundred years a single language could split into two mutually unintelligible dialects. Poetry which rhymes in one decade can appear jarring and atonal a few dozen years later. Vulgar Latin’s transformation into French, Italian and Spanish is thought to have taken only 400–500 years. While these changes had been exhaustively catalogued by previous generations of philologists, culminating with Shakhmatov, the reasons for language change had never been seriously considered. By default, it had been generally thought that languages shift due to external historical factors, such as the movement of peoples, the isolation of some elements and contact with other languages.
Both Jakobson and Trubetskoy challenged this view that language change was primarily the result of history, in the sense that history was a random occurrence of external events. Both believed that most linguistic evolution is internally motivated rather than the direct result of external interference. All that was required to prove this was some evidence of the regularity of linguistic change, which would yield universal laws that apply to all languages at all times.
Later in life, Jakobson was fond of telling his colleagues that the start of the linguistic revolution that he and Trubetskoy had initiated owed its inspiration to the theory of thermodynamics. The new notion of equilibrium in physics, discovered in the 1890s by Ludwig Boltzmann, created a robust theory of ‘systems’. If gas from one chamber is released into another, or if an iron rod is heated at one end, these systems seek a ‘rest state’ – in other words, some gas will flow into the other chamber, or the heat becomes evenly distributed across the iron rod, which gradually cools. Jakobson credited Boltzmann’s idea of the equilibrium of systems with ‘the beginning of the new science and art, function and purpose rather than cause oriented’.3