Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Роман Осипович Якобсон, 1896-1982) was a Russian-born linguist and literary theorist and one of the most influential scholars of the twentieth century. In Moscow he co-founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915 and was close to the Russian Formalists and Futurist poets. He moved to Czechoslovakia in 1920, and in 1926 co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle with Vilém Mathesius, where he worked closely with Nikolai Trubetzkoy on structural phonology.

Jakobson fled the Nazi occupation in 1939 through Scandinavia and reached the United States in 1941. He taught at Columbia University, then at Harvard from 1949 and later also at MIT. His relevance to this site lies in his close ties to the Eurasianist émigrés Trubetzkoy and Petr Savitsky, whose ideas about a distinct Russian-Eurasian civilization were revived after the Soviet collapse.

Sources

• Toman, Jindřich. The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. MIT Press, 1995.
• Glebov, Sergey. From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s-1930s. Northern Illinois University Press, 2017.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.