The notions of “exam” and “lesson”, which Lotman used to define Jakobson’s attitude towards the host of the immortals, and the attitude of the living towards the late classic, are used here to test our own attitude towards Jakobson and Lotman. Various aspects of their legacy are united in the idea of “romantic in science”: this is the title that Lotman used for Jakobson, but we could justly name Lotman the same. The scientific approaches of Jakobson and Lotman have a lot in common; the major distinction lies in the area of interpretation of communication and the mechanisms of translation. Thus, unlike Jakobson, Lotman insists on multilingual communicative schemes, and sees a creative potential in situations of cultural misunderstanding and untranslatability.

Roman Jakobson’s works on visual semiotics are characterized by a complex variability of method. The problems of visuality cannot be explored in a purely structuralist way, so Jakobson operates sometimes as a “formalist”, attentive to the conflictual interactions of forces in the work of art, and sometimes as a spontaneous phenomenologist,researching man’s perception of his own body and its projection onto external images. The constant element in these works is their dynamic approach to visual images, and that is not a diachronic dynamic of evolution but a static dynamic of the conflict and tension of forces which shape an esthetical object.

This paper offers a close reading of R. Jakobson’s essay “Language in Operation” (1949), exploring “undercurrents” of his then developing theory on communication. In that essay, we argue, Jakobson treats communication as a multifunctional “intricate process,” a transfer of experience where in verbal performance is moved by suggestion and inference. From this vantage Jakobson’s choice of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, poet and analyst, as both privileged object of analysis and implying role model is of particular interest.

Despite the general view of Jakobson as a founding father of structuralism, in the interwar period he was occupied rather with form than with function. He borrowed the concept of structure from various sources, among which one can consider the anti-darwinian stream of orthogenesis, for which causal explanation has to be replaced by goal-orientated evolution, and in first place idealistic morphology, which claims that two forms can look like each other without any contact in space or time, and that similarities cannot be explained by chance, but by a hidden plan, which has to be discovered. It is thus possible to reconstruct a whole series of scientific and philosophical trends of thought, which strive to assert the possibility of interaction without contact, for instance J. Frazer’s idea of imitative magic, which was a source for Jakobson’s famous opposition between metaphor and metonymy.

This short paper aims to programmatically outline the contours of a general framework for future research on structuralism and its genealogy. I wish to argue that mainstream approaches to the history of structuralism need to be significantly broadened, not only to better account for the contributions of Eastern and Central European thinkers, but also to take into full consideration structuralism’s deep, complex and rich roots in 19^th Century German thought. To make this point, I will succinctly compare three distinct historiographical models of structuralism (“French”, “East-West”, “Jakobsonian”), each of which provides a very rough and selective, yet highly contrastive map of the intellectual and personal networks that underpinned the development of structuralism up to World War II.

The article is devoted to one of the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is little read and less commented upon. The meaning of the poem on the death of Alfred the Ætheling, the brother of king Edward the Confessor, which is included into the Abingdon and Worcester manuscripts for the year 1036, is reconstructed on the basis of comparison with the later sources of the 11^th-12^th centuries. The analysis of the poem shows that its rhythmical, sound, lexical and syntactic organization goes back not to the Western-Germanic tradition of alliterative verse but to the hagiographical and homiletic tradition recorded in the rhythmical and alliterative prose of Wulfstan and Ælfric. An attempt is made to show that the compiler of the Chronicle composed the poem on the death of Alfred following the example of an earlier rhythmical text on the death of Edward the Martyr included into the Peterborough manuscript as an annal for the year 978.