Roman Jakobson's influence on Mihai Pop's thinking and career

Rucsandra Pop

pp. 7-7

in: Iulian Apostolescu (ed), Romanian Structuralism, Acta Structuralica 3, 2019.

Abstract

In April 1929, the young university graduate Mihai Pop has moved to Prague to study Slavistics. After a few months that he spent learning Czech language, he became a PhD candidate at Charles University. The young scholar had the chance to connect with the Prague Linguistics Circle. He became particularly close with the three Russian scholars - Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Piotr Bogatyrev, with whom he remained in a lifelong connection. The present paper aims to examine the way meeting Roman Jakobson impacted the career of Mihai Pop and how their intellectual relationship unfolded during more than 50 years. In my research I rely on different types of sources: a long interview conducted by the sociologist Zoltán Rostás the 80s, where Mihai Pop is recalling his Prague years; the correspondence between Pop and Jakobson found in the archive of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; documents from the archive of the Center for Advance Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; documents from Pop’s personal archive; studies about the Prague Linguistic Circle and various publications edited by Pop or to which he has contributed. Mihai Pop’s maturity work shows the strong influence that Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Piotr Bogatyrev had on him during his formative years.

Cited authors

Jakobson Roman

Pop Mihai