Trubetskoy wrote a fanciful essay on ‘The Legacy of Genghis Khan’, in which he claimed that Russia’s historical penchant for ideocratic, authoritarian rule originated with the Mongols. However, this work was not taken seriously – not even by its author. In 1925, he wrote to Suvchinsky about the forthcoming article, which he described as ‘tendentious’: ‘There is a big question as to whether we should hide this from public view… I fear that for serious historians this will present a big bull’s eye.’14 Ultimately it was published under a pseudonym. As Trubetskoy explained to Suvchinsky: ‘I still would not want to put his name on this piece, which is clearly demagogic and dilettantish from a scientific point of view.’15
CHAPTER FOUR
COALS TO NEWCASTLE
In 1922, fortune smiled on Trubetskoy. He was offered a teaching post at the University of Vienna, in the Slavic department. It was a coincidence: the job had been offered to a more senior professor from Munich who had turned it down, and so it passed to Trubetskoy. He was obviously happy to be in Vienna, one of Europe’s intellectual capitals; but evidently he found his appointment as a teacher of Slavic linguistics quite amusing, as he reminisced later, in 1933, to Jakobson: ‘Being a refugee has taught us that when traveling to Tula, one must bring one’s own samovar.’ He was chuckling over the equivalent of ‘bringing ice to Eskimos’.1
The lesson, he wrote, was that:
in Paris immigrants should open fashionable boutiques or nightclubs. In Munich, beer halls. Russian Slavic specialists should, according to this principle, stick to Slavic countries. In other countries, Russian Slavists have not managed to make a go of it, not one, except me. And I am the exception that proves the rule: I was given a job not in the capacity of a Slavist, but that of a prince. And that in Vienna, which is already up to its eyeballs in princes!
The Vienna job was the start of an incredibly creative period for Trubetskoy, in both his political activism and his linguistic scholarship. He wrote to Jakobson in September 1922 that he was on a very productive ‘streak’ and ‘went around like one possessed. I am choking, bursting with so many new ideas that I hardly manage to jot them down.’ He provided Jakobson with the first detailed outline of (what else?) his proposed Prehistory of Slavic Languages.2
In 1925, Jakobson, Savitsky and Trubetskoy helped formed the Prague Linguistic Circle, along with some other Czech and Russian colleagues. This would pursue many of the theoretical questions that had interested the Eurasianists, and gave them a more respectable theoretical gloss.3 They would meet regularly in Prague, either at Savitsky’s house or at the downtown café U Prince. Over beer and sausages, they would develop the outlines of a new theory that would revolutionize linguistics.4
Collectively, the writings of Trubetskoy, Jakobson and Savitsky sought to argue that cultures and civilizations have natural boundaries that delineate the extent of the unconscious architecture of a unique cultural geometry. They are characterized by an entire substratum of unconscious relationships between language sounds, music scales, folk dress, art and even architecture which will naturally occur over a certain territory and end at common geographical frontiers of common culture.5 These delineate the boundaries of large-scale cultural change, much like a watershed, inside which culture and language flow towards each other.
The Eurasianists proposed that such a boundary runs roughly from the Russian city of Murmansk to the westernmost Belarusian city of Brest and on to the Romanian town of Galati, dividing Europe along a number of interesting criteria. On one side is the Orthodox world, on the other side the Catholic. On one side, many Russian songs are composed on the pentatonic scale, which is also widely in use among the Finnish and Turkic peoples of the Russian zone, but is barely to be found on the other side of the line.6 The line also roughly divides some rather esoteric linguistic structures: on the Eurasian side of the line one finds the phonological correlation of consonants,7 which is absent on the other side.8 To Trubetskoy, that was the boundary of the Eurasian cultural conglomerate.
Savitsky argued that the territory of Inner Asia – Eurasia – occupied by the late Russian Empire and now the USSR, was a single, integrated geographical unit, forming one ‘zone’ due to the relatively flat terrain between western China and the Carpathian Mountains, where a strip of fertile land running east to west is joined vertically by six major river systems. Russia was, in Savitsky’s formulation, a separate ‘continent’ surrounded by formidable barriers from the outside, but whose internal arrangement was conducive to the mingling and interdependency of its peoples.9
Trubetskoy’s view of culture as a system was encapsulated in a number of articles devoted to the view that all the nations of the Russian Empire represented a single political unit by virtue of its singular culture. As he wrote in 1921:
Generally speaking, [Russian] culture comprises its own special zone and includes, besides the Russians, the Ugro-Finnic peoples and the Turkic peoples of the Volga Basin. Moving to the east and southeast, this culture merges almost imperceptibly with the Turko-Mongolian culture of the steppes, which links it in turn with the cultures of Asia.10
Nineteenth-century linguistics saw the evolution of languages as a process of divergence from a common ancestor – just as French and Italian were descended from the common original Latin, or Indo-European languages descended from Sanskrit. But it had trouble explaining why all Balkan languages, for example, despite being from different ancestries, had come to resemble each other over time.
Trubetskoy and Jakobson drew on their phonological research to argue that acquired language traits are not acquired by accident, but result from the internal workings of a language’s systemic ordering principles. This gave ‘convergence zones’ like the Balkans and inner Eurasia, where languages of different origins grew more alike over time, a mystical, teleological significance or purpose. As Jakobson phrased it in 1929: ‘The question of “to where” has become more important than “from where”. ’11 While Trubetskoy wrote: ‘The evolution of a phonemic system at any given moment is directed by the tendency towards a goal….’12
For both men, the act of becoming was never random. It had a sense, a reason, which was quite beyond the power of the human will to change. The evolution of languages, he believed, took place in time, but not in history. The latter was the domain of caprice and chance and accidents; the former, a clockwork of necessity. Thus, the convergence of Eurasian languages’ unconscious structural characteristics over time was of metaphysical importance. The ‘Eurasian cultural conglomerate’ included 200 different languages and ethnicities, comprising Eastern Slavs, Finns, Turks and Mongols; on the periphery, the Caucasian and Paleo-Asiatic peoples were related not by common origin, but instead by cultural and linguistic borrowings. These had taken on special teleological significance for the Eurasianists: this so-called tendency of common development was more important to them than having a common origin.
For the Eurasianists, the unconscious was superior, because it demonstrated a logical geometry in the absence of coercion, politics, chance and history. A national language could be spread by executive fiat or colonial force, for example; but the tone structure of languages could only converge due to some unconscious sympathy. Borrowing on a very minute, atomic level, such as sound changes, was indeed more important to them as a signifier of cultural closeness than cognate words were. For example, Trubetskoy believed that the tonal similarities between Russian, Finnic and Turkic languages were more important as a marker of internal cultural sympathy than are the obvious cognates in Czech, Polish and Russian, where ryba is the common word for fish and ruka means hand (ręka in Polish).