What Trubetskoy and Jakobson sought to do with phonology – to deduce laws which govern the relationships between acoustic impressions – Lévi-Strauss and a host of others sought to do with myths, folktales, literature, marriage customs and psychology. Rules could often be deduced that could create the fundamentals of a system out of what would otherwise be a jumble of data. Trubetskoy’s phonemic theories, said Lévi-Strauss, some twenty years after the prince’s death, were a monumental breakthrough: ‘For the first time, a social science [was] able to formulate necessary relationships.’ He predicted that Trubetskoy’s and Jakobson’s insights ‘will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played with the physical sciences’.35
Eventually the euphoria of structuralism wore off, once it became clear that structuralism works for (some) phonemes, but not as one moves into progressively broader areas of culture, such as literature, psychology or folklore. ‘The more elements there are, the harder it is for structuralism to work’, as Anatoly Liberman, a specialist on Trubetskoy’s phonology, put it. However the utopian enthusiasm of Russia’s Silver Age to search for the universal geometry of our human natures, channelled by Trubetskoy and Jakobson into linguistics, is still present in that field: it has been the precursor to other projects (almost) as utopian as it was, for instance Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar and the cognitive revolution in psychology. While many of Trubetskoy’s findings have been forgotten, his fundamental project – to tease out necessary relationships from the elements of language – still intrigues linguists.
The excitement of his discoveries failed to rescue Trubetskoy from the deep depression that enveloped him following the collapse of the Eurasianist movement (which, for many of its members, had been less a political organization than a form of self-help). For Trubetskoy, the end of the movement and the consolidation of Bolshevik rule cemented the permanence of his exile.
Surveying Stalin’s Russia, Trubetskoy realized with horror that the National Bolshevism being implemented was just the kind of national synthesis they had sought through their writings:
We were excellent diagnosticians, not bad predictors, but very poor ideologues – in the sense that our predictions, hitting the mark, turned out to be nightmares. We predicted the emergence of a new Eurasian culture. Now that culture actually exists, but is completely a nightmare and we recoil from it in horror.36
Trubetskoy’s life and scientific endeavours would end in tragedy. He wrote only rarely on Eurasianism after his split with the movement. Following the March 1938 Anschluss of Austria, he became a target of the Nazis, who were suspicious of all Russian émigrés, especially those with any demonstrable political sympathies. In May of that year, the Gestapo searched his flat and confiscated his correspondence with Jakobson, as well as the notes for his beloved Prehistory of Slavic Languages. It was evidently too much for the prince to bear. He died eight months later of a heart attack, which friends believe was brought on by the stress.
Jakobson managed, however, to save the draft of Trubetskoy’s Principles of Phonology, which would become the prince’s greatest legacy. Before fleeing the Nazis, first to Scandinavia and then to the US, Jakobson hid his own correspondence with Trubetskoy in Prague. He later recovered these valuable letters, which he published in 1976. Jakobson would live on until 1982, teaching at Harvard and MIT, and becoming one of the most eminent linguists of his time. But his friendship with Trubetskoy still haunted him late in life. Shortly before his death, Jakobson reminisced about the demise of Trubetskoy:
The long period of our collaboration had come to an end. From now on I would have to work alone and verify for myself future findings and subsequent hypotheses. In addition it became more apparent that my vivid collaboration with the Linguistic Circle of Prague would soon come to an end, as would later the activities of the circle itself. For me the years of homeless wandering from one country to another had begun.37
By the late 1930s, Savitsky had become the last bearer of the Eurasianist flame. Following the schism with Suvchinsky and the left wing of the movement, the remaining cohort gradually melted away. Some, particularly Suvchinsky’s followers, had returned to the USSR, where they (almost without exception) met a tragic fate. Trubetskoy had continued to publish occasional articles in Eurasianist journals organized by Savitsky, but following his break with the movement he never showed the same enthusiasm, and declined to stay in touch with most of his erstwhile comrades. Of the Prague-based movement, few were left or still interested by the late 1930s. Savitsky continued to publish articles about the USSR in the Prague-based Slavische Rundschau, and the Paris-based journal Le Monde slave. He had stopped participating in the Prague Linguistic Circle as well. Jakobson and Trubetskoy had begun to focus on their own efforts and had disengaged from the circle by the mid-1930s. Jakobson still lived in Prague and saw Savitsky often; but Trubetskoy went to Prague less and less. In the late 1930s, following Trubetskoy’s death and Jakobson’s departure from Prague ahead of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Savitsky was left without his old companions. These years were particularly unproductive for him.
The war had split the émigré community into two groups: those whose implacable hatred of the Bolsheviks blinded them to the nature of German aggression (they remained neutral or even supported Germany), and those whose loyalty to the motherland rallied them to the defence of ‘Holy Russia’, despite their reservations about Stalin’s regime, and prevailed upon them to make temporary accommodation with the Soviet government. Savitsky was firmly of the latter group, and became more and more alienated from other émigré political groups who sided with the Germans.
When the Nazis occupied Prague in 1939, Savitsky stayed, but was fired from his job teaching Russian and Ukrainian at the German University of Prague due to his anti-German politics. He was then hired as director of pedagogy at the Russian Gymnasium, but was fired in 1944 over his refusal to mobilize older students from the schools for army service in special Russian units of the German army.
Aside from the loss of two jobs, the Savitsky family was little affected by the conflict. The children were too young to be drafted, their father too old. Czechoslovakia suffered comparatively little heavy fighting in the war, and Prague changed hands both times with scarcely a shot being fired. Soviet troops first entered Czechoslovakia in 1944, and in May 1945 Savitsky brought his family out to welcome the Soviet ‘liberators’ on 9 May, as the first units paraded through the city. His pride in the rodina or motherland, however, was to be severely tested in the coming days. Along with the Red Army, units of the Soviet counterintelligence service SMERSH (short for Smert Shpionam or ‘death to spies’) swept into Prague to round up White Russians and monarchists. They arrested 215, including Savitsky.38
The Savitskys’ first brush with the Soviet ‘special services’ came in the middle of May, only days after Soviet troops entered Prague. A young uniformed officer appeared at their door wanting to speak to Savitsky. A soldier with a submachine gun waited on the stairs outside their building, while another took Savitsky’s two sons for a ride in their military vehicle. The officer left after a long chat in Savitsky’s apartment; he was ‘happy to have met such a Russian patriot living abroad’, according to Savitsky’s son, Ivan. A few days later, a different group of soldiers returned and took the elder Savitsky away for interrogation somewhere in Prague. But he returned a week later in high spirits, having been given a letter stating that he had been investigated and nothing had been found against him. A week after that, however, a new group of soldiers came, and for the first time there were men with them wearing plain clothes. They had a much more serious air about them, Ivan recalled. Despite Savitsky’s protests that he had already been investigated, the soldiers said that was irrelevant. It gradually dawned on the family that something serious was happening, and that the visitors were not like the first two groups, who had probably visited all the Russian émigrés living in Prague and done cursory checks. This unit had come with express orders from on-high to arrest Savitsky. Savitsky’s wife Vera, sensing that things were taking a turn for the worse, asked her husband if he would be needing winter clothes – even though it was still the middle of May. Savitsky, still confident, replied: ‘No, of course that won’t be necessary. I’ll just have a chat with them here.’39 That chat was to last a decade.