Roman Jakobson Retires at 71

Roman Jakobson, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and General Linguistics, is retiring.

Jakobson is an international authority on Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures. He was one of the founders of the Slavic Formalist School of Literary Scholarship and a leader in the structural trend in linguistics and poetics. He has published over 350 books and articles.

A bibliography of his work appeared in two volumes that contained studies by other scholars; the volumes, issued in 1956 and 1967 in The Hague, were intended as tributes to Jakobson. His "Selected Writings" in six volumes are also being published there.

A native of Moscow, he has held the Cross Professorship at Harvard since 1949 and the Institute Professorship at M.I.T. since 1957.

Jakobson, 71, is a member of the Norwegian, Danish, Serbian, Netherlands, Polish, and Irish Academies of Science. He was made Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1947, and received the Award of the American Council of Learned Studies in 1960.

He is now Visiting Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, Calif., and will now remain professor Emeritus at Harvard.