SERGE KARCEVSKI (1884-1955)

Serge Karcevski

(August 28, 1884-November 7, 1955)

Roman Jakobson

The Linguistic Circle of Prague was founded in 1926, and when, two years later, its founders grew into a tightly knit team, they worked on the preparation of the first two volumes of the Travaux du Cercle, both dedicated to the first international congress of Slavic philologists, invited to Prague in 1929. Each of the collaborators was expected to make a novel contribution to some of the crucial problems of linguistic theory. Serge Karcevski, one of the first promoters of the Circle, teemed with new ideas but failed to meet the last deadline for the presentation of his paper, and I can still see him frenziedly improvising his essay in a snug little Prague café. The succinct product of this swift endeavor was perhaps one of the most illuminating of his theoretic papers. Far from being sketchy, it was a ripe fragment of that fundamental book of synthesis, fostered in his mind but never achieved.

In point of fact, each of KarcevskPs publications was conceived by him only as a kind of preview to this ultimate performance—the Book in which he believed to the last days of his life. Everything that he wrote had been fully weened in his mind, and his chiseled formulations, either in Russian or, even more in French, reveal a most enlightening resolution of the problems tackled. Even when some aspects of these questions received merely a cursory glance, the attentive reader knew that they had been not less probed in the authors mind.

In his essay published in the first volume of the Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague under the eloquent title : י Du dualisme asymétrique du signe linguistique,’ Karcevski deals with the oscillation of language between two poles, definable as the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete, the social and the individual, the stable and the mobile. To him, the form (signans) and function (signatum) of a verbal sign ‘se trouvent dans un état d’équilibre instable ‘ gravitating, the former to homonymy and the latter toward synonymy, and he claimed that it is in this very play between the two ‘ que réside la vie de la langue ‘.

There is no doubt as to who initiated the author into the puzzles of linguistic antinomies. Born in the Siberian city of Tobolsk, the young Serge Karcevski emigrated in 1907 to Geneva where he studied linguistics under Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. He was torn by two rival talents, creative-writing and scholarship, and his first stories printed in Russian periodicals were a success and elicited the approbation of Maxim Gorky. The fascination of Saussure and his school, however, won him over compietely to linguistics, but throughout his life his approach to language, and the style in which he wrote about it, carried an artist’s stamp. Karcevski became an apostle of the Saussurian school. He was the first who in 1917-1919, during his shortlived return to Russia, fired the young generation of Moscow linguists with the Cours de linguistique générale and applied its precepts to the study of contemporary Russian.

Saussure’s lectures, Bally’s and Sechehaye’s training, the subsequent discussions in the Moscow Dialectological Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the progeny of Fortunatov’s school ¹, and especially a longer collaboration with the master of Russian syntax, A. Peškovskij, then the guidance of Antoine Meillet during the young scholar’s lectureship in Strasbourg (1920-1922) and in the late twenties, when teaching in Prague, his ever closer contact with the rising Prague Circle, in particular with its Russian linguists— all this influenced the research of Karcevski until 1927 when he received his doctorate from the University of Geneva and taught there until 1954, first as privat-docent and finally as professor.

Whatever new stimuli Karcevski may not have encountered after his Geneva studies, the fundamentals of his life work never changed. He sought an ever more precise and explicit presentation of ‘idées générales sur le langage, tel qu’il est vu à travers notre langue maternelle ‘ and like his first and greatest teacher, he was never satisfied to stop at the stage attained so that a life-long meditated key-work on general linguistics was never set down—neither by master nor by disciple. Karcevski left, however, precious prelimi- naries to this summa linguistica : a few articles aimed directly at questions of general linguistics and a higher number of longer studies describing Russian primarily, but with consistent reference to linguistic theory ; two books are particularly important : Système du verbe russe (Prague, 1927) and The outline of the Russian language (Moscow, 1928), characterized by the author as ‘ an elementary introduction to the science of language, based uniquely on the mother tongue ‘.

Nurtured on Saussure’s ideas of synchronic linguistics, Karcevski rigorously circumscribed his scope of observation to his native tongue : contemporary, urban Russian. Material from other Ianguages is only incidental in his studies, and even his book reviews deal almost uniquely with investigations of modern Russian. ‘ In my work I am a man of one love—he used to say—and this love is the Russian language ‘. Any scission between the linguistic explorer and the native informant was profoundly alien to this scholar. The negative side of such a self-imposed limitation was the excessive influence of the Russian language pattern on Karcevski’s approach to some problems of general linguistics. But for the language under observation, this ascetic limitation guaranteed the highest accuracy and thoroughness of analysis. Karcevski was the first linguist of the Saussurian trend to attempt a systematic description of such a typically ‘ grammatical ‘ language as Russian ; the earlier research of this school was concentrated on the more ‘ lexicological ‘, occidental languages.² This circumstance necessitated the search for new analytic and descriptive devices, and modern linguistics owes Karcevski more than one illuminating find.

His gradual dissolution of Russian speech from its amplest to its minutest constituents enabled him to outline several cardinal processes and to discern their semantic values. His grasp of intonations in their relation to syntactic structure, and to the various roles of the utterance within the dialogue, surpasses the limits of Russian philology and has influenced the theory and concrete study of intonations in international science.³ Linguistics will respond to his appeal to pursue the pivotal inquiry into the structure of the dialogue as the primary form of discourse.

None of the experts in syntax would ever by-pass Karcevski’s classification of elementary combinations (Saussure’s syntagmes). Meillet was right in considering Karcevski’s analysis of Russian verbal categories as a remarkable performance⁴ and, as V. Vinogradov points out, it is this work on the system of the Russian verb that gave such an impetus to investigations of verbal derivation.⁵ His remarks on Russian nominal derivation are no less stimulating.⁶ The late scholar actively participated in the initiatory Prague discussions on the phonemic level of language and was particularly concerned with the relation between the phonemic and graphic pattern.⁷ The experienced teacher competed in Karcevski with the inquisitive analyst, and several noteworthy Russian essays were devoted by him to peda- gogical questions of his mother tongue and of language in general.

The theory of linguistic antinomies was due to Saussure’s doctrine ; Karcevski’s thought, however, displays a significant shift in emphasis. Strikingly enough, in epigraphs to his studies he draws upon the synthesizing spirit of German classical tradition. He is much less concerned with opposites in themselves than—as he echoes Goethe—’ das geistige Band ‘. He goes back to Kant in his reaffirmation that ‘ Begriffe ohne Anschauungen sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind ‘. Nothing was more innate to Karcevski’s spirit than asymmetrical dualism, the unceasing dramatic conflict of opposites. It is exactly like him to say : ‘ Or ce qu’il y a de véritablement nouveau, c’est leur rapport, leur croisement, et non les coordonnées elles-mêmes ‘.

Determined to cope with static linguistics preached by his teacher, he focuses upon the verb as the most dynamic among the parts of speech and, moreover, upon the most dynamic factor in the life of language, namely the productivity of grammatical categories.⁸ Of all morphological processes, the least predictable, that of derivation, enthralls him. In the description of the present stage of Russian, neology and other innovations repeatedly draw his attention.⁹ The intersection of morphology and syntax prompts him to the captivating problem of the common semantic value of preverbs and corresponding prepositions, and it is the interplay of two rival aspects of language, the cognitive and emotive, that inspires his ingenious insight into interjections and especially into the curious link between them and conjunctions.¹⁰

One may repeat about Karcevski what he himself said when analyzing the Russian perfective present : ‘ Pour lui, le passé et l’avenir se rejoignent facilement'.¹¹ And thus, when returning to his work, which at present belongs to the past, ‘ on empiète sur l’avenir ‘.

Source : Roman Jakobson, ‘ Serge Karcevski (August 28, 1884-November 7, 1955),’ Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 14.9-13 (1956). By permission of Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, and the author.

¹ Cf. his polemic article, ‘ O formal’nogrammatičeskom napravlenii ‘ (Russkaja Skola za Rubežon, No. 12, 1925).

² Cf. F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Ch. VI, § 3.

³ See particularly his papers ‘ Sur la phonologie de la phrase' (TC LP, IV, 1931) and י Phrase et proposition' (Mélanges J. van Ginneken, Paris, 1937).

⁴ BSLP, XXVIII (1928), p. 44.

⁵ V. Vinogradov, Izučenie russkogo literaturnogo jazyka za poslednee de- sjatiletiev SSSR, Akademija Nauk SSSR (Moscow, 1955), p. 19 ; see Karcevskij’s Système du verbe russe (1927), and ‘ Remarques sur la psychologie des aspects en russe' (Mélanges Ch. Bally, Genève, 1939).

⁶ ‘ De la structure du substantif russe ‘ (Charisteria G. Mathesio, Prague, 1932).

⁷ ‘ Cf. his articles ‘ Remarques sur la phonologie du russe' (Cahiers F. de Saussure, III, 1943) and ‘ Sur la rationalisation de l’orthographe russe ‘ (Belicev zbornik, Belgrade, 1937).

⁸ Cf. particularly his study ‘ Autour d’un problème de morphologie ‘ (Annales Academiae scientiarum Fennicae, В XXVII, 1932).

⁹ Cf., for instance, his Jazyk, vojna i revotjucija (Berlin, 1923).

¹⁰ Cf. his ‘ Introduction à l’étude de l’interjection ‘ Cahiers F. de Saussure, I (1941).

¹¹ Mélanges Bally, p. 248.