INTERNATIONAL PHD IN GERMANIC AND SLAVIC
STUDIES

Thesis title: Roman Jakobson’s Collaboration with Interwar Czech Press

The dissertation Roman Jakobson’s Collaboration with Interwar Czech Press examines Roman Jakobson’s activity in interwar Czechoslovakia, specifically focusing on the period between 1920 and 1939. The analysis centres on Jakobson’s writings published in the Czech press and has developed with a philological approach and through consistent archival research. The term “Czech press” is used broadly to encompass a wide selection of newspapers and journals published in Czech, German, Russian, and French. The aim of this thesis is to investigate Jakobson’s role in Czechoslovakia through the lens of “cultural transfer”, a concept first theorised by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner. In addition to analysing his activity as a writer in the Czech Press, the thesis also considers Jakobson’s relationships with other scholars and prominent international figures, such as André Mazon, Naděžda Melniková-Papoušková, or Jurij Sokolov. The study is structured into five chapters. The first chapter outlines the methodology and the cultural-journalistic context in which Jakobson arrived after his departure from Russia. This chapter is divided into two sections: the first offers a general overview of Jakobson’s evolving role within the Czech milieu, while the second presents a recognition of the periodical in which he published. The second chapter explores the various genres Jakobson employed, including obituary, report, translation, review, and polemic. Each genre is examined through a localistic selection of case studies, some of which illustrate Jakobson’s role as a cultural transfer between the Russian and Czech context. These examples enable the author to identify the characteristics and the intentions of Jakobson’s journalistic writing. The third chapter addresses three relevant themes in Jakobson’s journalistic writings: poetry and folklore. They represented two dominants in Jakobson’s activity. As in the previous chapter, these themes are contextualised within Jakobson’s broader body of work and further elucidated through specific examples. Regarding poetry, the analysis concerns Aleksandr Puškin and Boris Pasternak. Folklore is investigated through a triangled perspective which considers Jakobson’s collaboration with Petr Bogatyrev and their correspondence with the Russian folklorist Jurij Sokolov. The fourth chapter delves with another topic, film studies. The analysis of this topic has a different purpose, i.e., to show how a lack of relevant theoretical writings in Jakobson’s opus represents a huge difference between him and the formalists in the late twenties. The fifth chapter focuses on Jakobson’s correspondence, analysing unpublished documents from the Slavische Rundschau’s collection held at the LA PNP. The thesis also includes an appendix containing uncollected writings by or about Jakobson, a table listing the obituaries he wrote for Slavische Rundschau, and a selection of letters from the same collection.