Roman Jakobson and the obituary genre

Abstract

In the scholarly literature on Roman Jakobson, the many obituaries he created have not been discussed. Yet, his earlier Formalist and Futurist positions notwithstanding, he began to write obituaries immediately after arriving in Czechoslovakia (1920) and continued to publish such texts subsequently. Some of Jakobson’s obituaries published in Czechoslovakia reflect his emphasis on constructing his own scientific “genealogy”, as well as attempt to uncover and define an underlying invariant (“impulse”) of his subject’s life and path in science (see texts on the death of J. Baudouin de Courtenay, V. Mayakovsky, N. Trubetzkoy). Following his move to the United States, and after renewing in the mid-1950s direct contacts with scholars in the USSR, Jakobson responds in print to the death of B. Tomashevskii, B. Eikhenbaum, P. Bogatyrev, as well as, not long before his own death, to the murder of poet-translator Konstantin Bogatyrev. Jakobson reprinted the most important of these obituaries in his Selected Writings, where some became part of his narrative on the growth of modern linguistics, while others were included in a small section devoted to the history of Russian Formalism. Refs 42.