Content area
Full text
On 18 July 1982, only a few months before he attained his eighty-sixth birthday, Roman Jakobson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a towering leader in contemporary semiotics, linguistics, and poetics, and his death leaves a vast void in a broad spectrum of disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors. And for his many personal friends, students, and colleagues, his death represents an irreplaceable personal loss.
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was born in Moscow on 11 October 1896. In 1920, he moved to Czechoslovakia, where he became one of the founders and the moving spirit of the Prague Linguistic Circle, and where he remained until the German occupation forced him to seek safety in Scandinavia, whence he came to the United States in 1942. In the United States, he taught first at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York, then at Columbia University, and, beginning in 1949, at Harvard University, where he was the Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and General Linguistics. After his retirement from Harvard, he became Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At his death, he was Samuel H. Cross Professor Emeritus at Harvard and Institute Professor Emeritus at M.LT. He was a true internationalist: born a Russian, he soon came to adopt a second homeland, Czechoslovakia, a country to which he never lost his affectionate ties, and in the 'forties a third country became his permanent home, the United States. He was equally at home in the languages of his three homelands, Russian, Czech, and English, all of which he not only spoke but in which he wrote with finesse. But Polish, French, German, and all Slavic languages were essentially also his domain.
The scope of his scientific work was so broad, his work so varied, that it is impossible to do it justice in a brief statement. Last summer, the editors of the American...