Part IV: Structuralism and Semiotics: Profiles of the Founders Jakobson and Trubetskoy: Chapter 18: The Autobiography of a Scholar: Jakobson's Generation.

This article focuses on published works about Russian thinker Roman Osipovich Jakobson. Jakobson's negative attitude toward memoirs was based on several key premises. The element obviously unacceptable to Jakobson was the tense of the genre: memoirs belong to the past tense; they push one's life into the past, thus putting an end to one's biography and consequently, to one's life. Jakobson presented his life exclusively in terms of his work. Thus he did not follow the traditional dichotomy between facts of life and creativity. This was no doubt caused by the author's particular attitude to life and by his temperament. C. Lévi-Strauss, put it succinctly in the Tribute to Roman Jakobson: "What struck those who approached Roman Jakobson was the extraordinary kinship between the man and his work.