The Prague Linguistic Circle was a school of linguists and literary theorists founded in Prague in October 1926 on the initiative of the Czech linguist Vilem Mathesius. Its best-known Russian members were Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose work founded structural phonology. The Circle matters for this site because Jakobson and Trubetzkoy were closely connected to Petr Savitsky, the geographer and chief theorist of interwar Eurasianism, who also lived in Prague. Their ideas about language unions and Eurasia as a distinct geographic and cultural space fed directly into Eurasianist doctrine, which post-Soviet thinkers such as Alexander Dugin later revived. The child pages profile these three figures.
Sources
- Toman, Jindrich. 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.