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IN MEMORIAM
SVATAVA PIRKOVA JAKOBSON
Dr. Svatava Pirkova Jakobson was born
in Vienna on March 19, 1908, and died in a Taylor, Texas, nursing home
on September 19, 2000. In 1967, after her divorce from the famous linguist,
Roman Jakobson, and after many years of teaching Czech language and
literature and folkloristics at Harvard, Svatia, as she was known to
friends and students, came on a visiting lectureship to The University
of Texas at Austin. Enthralled by the Czech communities in East Central
Texas, and the rich store of historical, folkloric, and musical materials
of which they were the repository, she decided to stay on, and eventually
her lectureship became a professorship in the Department of Slavic Languages.
Her home in Austin on River Hills Road became a social center of intellectual
exchange, in which Texas citizens of Czech descent, UT faculty from
a number of disciplines, visiting lecturers, students in Slavic languages
and other departments, and local and visiting poets and musicians enjoyed
the warm atmosphere, the good Czech cooking and French wines, and often
surprising and intense intellectual exchange. The house had been built
by a local Czech carpenter under Svatia's close supervision, and became
a landmark of intellectual life in Austin. Svatia was at home in a number
of languages, and foreign visitors especially, but also aspiring young
poets and musicians, made a point of visiting her.
Her father had been a prominent figure
in the first Czechoslovak Republic and her ex-husband had been a world-famous
linguist and one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Their
divorce had been an amiable one, and Roman often visited her in Austin.
Their life together had been an unusually adventurous one, full of hairbreadth
escapes and constant danger, before, during, and after the outbreak
of the Second World War. Svatia's fieldwork in folk music and ethnography
had taken her to Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania. She had
also translated into Czech the works of Russian poets of the stature
of Pushkin and Pasternak, and the brilliant contemporary Russian prose
writer Olesha. Her husband was one of the key founders of modern linguistic
science. He was also a Jew and a Russian, and in 1939, the impending
Nazi takeover forced them to leave the Brno University of Technology,
where they had been teaching, and escape to Denmark. Unfortunately,
the Nazi armies were not far behind them. They fled to Norway, with
the Nazi armies still hot on their trail, and had to endure train bombings,
to hide under harsh conditions in the mountains, and to sleep where
they could, often in hay barns. Crossing a bridge into Sweden in a horse-drawn
sleigh, they were briefly jailed, but finally reached Stockholm in May
1940. Still in peril, they sought the aid of the American ambassador
there and eventually acquired the papers that would permit them to leave
for the United States.
Roman taught at Columbia, Harvard,
and MIT, and Svatia was a lecturer in Czech language and literature
at Harvard. She continued her work in folk music and collaborated with
John Lomax and his son Alan, who was curator of the American Archive
of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, where she occasionally
served as a consultant. While in New York, she wrote a regular column
for the Czech immigrant newspaper Nové-Yorkské-Liste.
In the late 1940's she served as editor-in-chief of the state department
sponsored journal America.
It would not be an exaggeration to
say that in Austin Svatia fell in love with the Czech Moravian communities
of Texas, and with the Czech language and the need to teach it correctly,
especially to young people of Czech ancestry who had grown up in Texas.
She had strong feelings about these things, and about the local Czech
newspapers that had come to life in Texas. Although she had no children
of her own, she was known as the fierce and protective mother of young
poets, musicians, and linguists.
Svatia had become a United States
citizen in 1952, but in the later 1950's was denied a visa to visit
her beloved Czechoslovakia. In 1968, she was granted a visa. It was
the time of "the Prague spring," and "socialism with
a human face." Unfortunately, it did not last long, and she was
plunged unexpectedly, and fairly late in life, into a continuation of
the adventures of her younger years, when she was temporarily trapped
in Prague as Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invaded the country. In the
resulting chaos, she managed to escape to the west and returned to Austin
to continue her teaching career.
For the 1976 Bicentennial Celebration
of the American Revolution, Svatia was asked by the Smithsonian Institution
to arrange and coordinate the participation of all the Eastern European
countries in the folk festival on the National Mall in Washington.
Svatia's warm sense of humor, especially
about herself, was legendary. Some of us still remember her account
of trying to get to Roman's funeral in Boston in the summer of 1982.
Roman had converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and was being
buried by the Orthodox Church. The taxi driver, as Boston cabbies are
notorious for doing, gave her a wild spin around the city and claimed
not to know where the church was as the meter ran up. As time ran on,
Svatia burst into tears and told the cabbie she was going to miss the
funeral. "Who's funeral?" he asked. "My ex-husband's,"
she said. "Your ex-husband," he repeated incredulously, "then
why are you crying?"
After her retirement from the University
in 1978, Svatia continued to work with students, monitoring their projects
and extending her own ethnographical studies of the Texas Czechs. She
donated more than 3,000 books, hundreds of tapes and recordings, and
a large collection of Czech newspapers to The University of Texas libraries.
In 1993 she received the Texas Czech Heritage Award for her contributions
to the preservation and promotion of the Czech heritage in the state.
Svatia participated in several international
congresses on linguistics and folklore. Her articles have appeared in
a varied number of professional publications. She was also an indefatigable
trekker on the lecture trail, a guest speaker at many universities.
One of her most memorable lectures was a brilliant structural analysis
of the ceremonial at a Bosnian Muslim wedding that she had researched
in her graduate student days at Charles University. She left a vivid
memory on all who knew her.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared
by a special committee consisting of Professors Sidney Monas (chair),
Hana Pichova, and John Kolsti.
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