Jakobson was one of the most significant linguists and structuralists of the 20th century. He lived in Czechoslovakia before the Second World War and was a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
He came from a wealthy Jewish family. During his studies he became familiar with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who greatly influenced him. In 1920 he moved to Prague as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission, but he soon devoted himself solely to his academic career. In 1926 he co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle and the following years he devoted himself to phonology and to the theory of poetry in the specific case of Czech culture. Jakobson was a supporter of the synchronic
approach of language development (study of the relations between the language’s elements and their function on a horizontal level), as opposed to the then universally accepted diachronic approach (historical vertical level of the development of languages).
When the Second World War broke out, he pulled off a dramatic escape from the Nazis via Scandinavia to New York, where he co-founded with Levi-Strauss the Free School for Advanced Studies (a sort of French university-in-exile). There he met with illustrious linguists such as Franz Boas and Benjamin Lee Whorf. One of Jakobson’s friends from his time in Czechoslovakia was Jan Patocka, to whom he dedicated a warm obituary.
