Two Professors Invited To Meetings in Moscow

Two University professors have been invited to attend academic conferences in the Soviet Union during the next two months, it was learned yesterday.

One, Roman Jakobson, Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature and a Russian emigre, would be making his first visit to his native land in 37 years, if he attends the meeting of the interim committee of the International Conference for Slavic Philology. With his alternate, Professor W. Lednicki of the University of California, Jakobson was elected to the planning body at a Belgrade meeting last September.

The other Faculty member, Garrett Birkhoff '32, Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics, received a cable earlier this week inviting him to the Third Mathematical Congress of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences as the "guest" of the Academy. He is awaiting a covering letter with further information before deciding whether or not to accept.

Jakobson, too, is still uncertain about the details of the late May meeting of slavicists. With his U.S. passport--recently validated for travel in the Soviet Union--Jakobson is free to attend, even though he left Russia in 1920 as a known opponent of the Soviet regime.

"The conference," he said, "will be purely scholarly, without any political implications." The interim committee, elected on the basis of nationality from among the 200 Belgrade participants, will plan the agenda for a second philology conference, to be held in 1958. Under Russian chairman, Victor Vinogradov, it is "only natural," Jakobson said, that the committee meet in Moscow.