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TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
Although the pivotal role of the Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky (1892-1945) in the development of modern linguistics and literary theory has been repeatedly stated by prominent scholars, he has remained virtually unknown outside Russia.l Yakubinsky was educated at Petersburg University in 1909-15 during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, a field that hitherto had been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarians' positivist and historicist concerns were contested by a range of scholars interested in the functional diversity of language and concomitantly in the processuality of language as an individual and a collective activity.2 In this heated atmosphere of reevaluation and change Yakubinsky, with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Vlktor B. Shklovsky, initiated the movement that later came to be called Russian formalism. In fact, the functional distinction between "poetic" and "practical" language that Yakubinsky introduced in his groundbreaking study "On the Sounds in Poetic Language" ("O 3syKax cTUXOTsopHoro As3wKa"; Jakubinskij 163-76) became the cornerstone of formalist criticism and "served as the activating principle for the Formalists' treatment of the fundamental problems of poetics" (Pjchenbaum 8).3 Yakubinsky thus laid the foundation for structuralism. However, he soon moved away from the formalists' preoccupation with poetic and literary texts and devoted himself to the social dimension of the functions and forms of language.4
Yakubinsky's move can be interpreted in several ways: as a continuation of the work of his teachers Jan A. Baudouin de Courtenay and Lev V Shcherba, as a result of political developments during the early years of the Soviet Union and his alignment with the Communist Party,5 and as a consequence of his theoretically and politically motivated opposition to Saussurean linguistics. Saussure's ideas had been gaining popularity among Russian scholars since the posthumous publication of his Course in General Linguistics, in 1915.6 Yakubinsky objected to several of Saussure's basic postulates: to his insistence on the "impossibility of a revolution" ("impossibilit6 d'une revolution") in language, hence the impossibility of political action in and through language; to his presupposition that the "law of fate" ("loi fatale") rules linguistic evolution and change, which cannot be voluntarily and consciously effected by (individual) speakers; to his abstract notion of a "social mass of...