Introduction

When Saussure's linguistic revolution first came to light it met with an enthusiastic reception in Russia. Like the rest of Europe, Russia had experienced a wave of reaction against nineteenth-century positivism. Rather than treat the world as so much empirical data to be recorded and typologised, thinkers like Marx and Freud had begun to seek the non-observable structures and processes underlying those data. Nietzsche, meanwhile, questioned the very foundations of reason through his rediscovery of the pagan elements of human existence. The end of the nineteenth century coincided with Russia's coming to maturity as a nation state and the corresponding need to assert a distinctive identity. By rejecting western tradition, the anti-empiricist trends provided Russian intellectuals with weaponry in their struggle to differentiate themselves from the societies to which they were indebted. It is no coincidence that the avant-garde art which catapulted Russia to the forefront of world culture combined the influences of those anti-empiricist trends with a revival of interest in Russian icon-painting, nor that the Bolshevik revolution which confirmed Russia's international presence drew inspiration from Marx. (The stylised canvases of Natalia Goncharova and the suprematist abstractions of Kasimir Malevich, for example, betray a strong iconic influence.) It is in this context that Roman Jakobson, himself associated with the revolutionary poet, Maiakovskii, seized upon the Cours de linguistique générale as the means to spearhead the anti-positivist revolution he instituted in Russian linguistics.