STRUCTURING EURASIA: SAVITSKY’S “SYSTEMIC GEOGRAPHY” AND A STRUCTURALIST PROGRAM

Savitsky often maintained that Eurasianism was meant to be a “systemic study of Russia.” If it was, then Savitsky’s geographical conception was of fundamental importance to the system’s consistency, for it provided Eurasianism with a geographic skeleton, “a clamp”, in Savitsky’s own words, that kept together the centrifugal forces of Eurasia’s various cultures. Savitsky’s geographic conception proceeded from the assumption that there exists a definite territorial complex of Eurasia, and the major task of the geographer was to uncover its borders and those regularities that define it.
Among the Eurasianists Savitsky was the person most interested in the natural sciences, a trait quite unusual for a nationalist. As he confessed on several occasions, his intellectual heroes were the chemist D. I. Mendeleev and the geoscientists V. V. Dokuchaev and V. I. Vernadsky. Although Savitsky shared Trubetskoi’s and Suvchinsky’s (his closest associates in the Eurasianist leading troika) interest in turn of the century religious philosophy, his main inspiration appears to have had its roots in the works of these natural scientists, each of whom also erected a philosophical system, in one or another way encompassing the world into a single meaningful concept (e.g., Vernadsky’s “geosphera” and “cosmism”). Mendeleev, whose periodical table was a model for Savitsky’s theory of correspondences, also attracted Savitsky through his interest in Russia’s position with respect to the West. In a letter to the Eurasianist treasurer, P. N. Malevsky-Malevich, Savitsky wrote: “Mendeleev was an Eurasianist in the common sense. He, too, argued that we should not mold our nature according to the single model of Western Europe… and made reasonable judgments about our Tatar and Turkish ancestors…””^[1] Vladimir Vernadsky’s conception of the complex and systematic study of Russia’s natural productive forces, stimulated by the needs of war, also had a profound impact on Savitsky’s conception of economic geography. He translated Vernadsky’s environmentalist ideas into his own vision of Eurasia as a compound of geographical, biological, and social entities.^[2]
The key figure who stimulated Savitsky’s “systemic” or “structuralist” method of geographical mapping was Vasilii Vasil’evich Dokuchaev.^[3] Dokuchaev himself displayed a decisive lack of interest in political issues (remarkably for a member of the intelligentsia), even if his studies of the condition of the soil (black soil or chernozem in particular) had high social relevance in a backward and agricultural country. Dokuchaev’s role in the formation of the structural approach lay in his description of the mutual interdependence of different factors that contribute to the emergence of a specific soil type. These factors may be biological, anthropogenic, geomorphologic, climatic, etc. Besides that, Dokuchaev arrived at the conclusion that the disposition of specific types of soils, due to their dependence on climatic conditions, follows the logic of latitudinal and longitudinal zones, that is, they depend on the regularity of law. The chaos of the Earth’s surface was, thus, explained and ordered, and the path for a “scientific” mapping and structuring of Eurasia was open.
Savitsky quoted Dokuchaev’s work “On the teaching of natural zones”, in which the latter comes very close to formulating a “structuralist” approach that focuses on the relationship between elements in the system:

“It cannot be doubted that the knowledge of nature – of its forces, its elements, its phenomena and its physical bodies – has made such gigantic steps in the course of the 19th century that the century itself is often called the age of natural sciences and natural scientists. However, it was mostly separate bodies that were studied, such as minerals, rocks, plants and animals, and separate phenomena, separate elements, such as fire (volcanism), water, earth, air. We reiterate that by doing so, science may have reached astonishing results. But it did not study their interrelationships, this genetic, eternal and always regular (zakonomernyi, Gesetzmäßig) connection that exists between forces, bodies and phenomena, between organic and non-organic nature, between the realms of plants, animals and minerals on the one hand, and man, his life, and even his spiritual world, on the other. Yet, it is these interrelationships, these regular mutual interactions that form the essence of our cognition of nature, the kernel of true Naturphilosophie, the best and highest charm of natural sciences!”^[4]

Following Dokuchaev, the main novelty of Savitsky’s view consisted in its systemic approach that went beyond the holistic tradition of 19th century geography.^[5] Savitsky disagreed with the division of geography into descriptive geography proper and statistics (the latter meant study of the state), a separation that occurred early in the 19th century. He followed in the footsteps of the German geographical tradition, Humboldt and Ritter in particular, with its strong Romantic roots. The German tradition treated territory not as a separate entity but as a complex that included natural conditions of all sorts and the anthropogenic landscape. This concept was warmly received and elaborated upon by 19th century Russian geographers, so that the idea of the “territorial complex” became firmly rooted in Russian geographic tradition, too.^[6] The German tradition found its most well known representative in Friedrich Ratzel, the author of Anthropogeographie.^[7] At the turn of the century, the discipline of geography, inspired by Friedrich Ratzel’s insistence on the mutual dependence of territory and human societies, brought about a complex and diverse body of thought on territoriality, known as geopolitics.^[8] Although the term itself was, apparently, coined by Rudolph Kjellen, a Norwegian journalist, the most important treatments of this new geographical trend were those of the British Halford John Mackinder and the German Karl Haushofer.^[9] The common assumption of the apologists of geopolitics, who otherwise differed drastically on almost every position, was that geography determined history and politics. In his 1921 article, “Continent – Ocean”, Savitsky, for instance, argued that Russia-Eurasia was a separate and autarkic economic unit due to its continental nature, which prevented Eurasia from participating in the global economic exchange based on oceanic communication.^[10] However, Savitsky did not just extrapolate contemporary geopolitical concepts onto the Russian case. In another article he also attempted to chart a dramatic destiny for Eurasia based on his idea of “migrations of culture.” According to his theory, in each historical epoch a particular geographic region hosted the most dynamic civilization and the shift of the center of world culture followed the path determined by changes in climatic conditions. In the new era, Eurasia was predestined to replace Western Europe as a new center of civilization.^[11]
Utilizing these diverse sources, Savitsky elaborated a geographic conception of Eurasia as a territorial complex fundamentally different from Europe.^[12] This vision paralleled Nicholas Trubetskoi’s conception of autarkic civilizations, of which Eurasia was just one. Not surprisingly, this conception also ferociously opposed any project of universal history, which was viewed by the Eurasianists as undermining the God-given differences between cultures. Needless to say, the main threat to the existence of differences was the standardizing civilization of modern Europe.
Savitsky proposed a theory that described regularities in the territorial structure of Eurasia in such a way that the border between Europe and Eurasia became enshrined in the data of physical geography. The natural climatic zones of Russia-Eurasia were taken to prove the existence of an autarkic Eurasian civilization. Building upon Dokuchaev’s method of defining soil zones stretching in Russia roughly from east to west, Savitsky suggested dividing Russia into a series of latitudinal stripes, each defined by climate, soil, flora, and predominant agricultural methods.^[13] Savitsky argued that two factors were of prime importance in this process of structuring the territory. First, there was the factor of climate, or temperature changes, moving from South to North. Obviously, under ideal conditions the annual average temperature will fall with movement northwards. Savitsky termed this factor “South-North regularity.” However, in defining the Earth’s surface this factor will not act alone. It will be supplemented by the second factor, that of humidity. In Eurasia, under ideal conditions, humidity will decrease as we move toward the point most remote from the sea shore, a point that will be located in the continental heart of Eurasia. This factor Savitsky called “center – periphery regularity.” These two factors together shaped the disposition of soils, the distribution of flora and fauna and, consequently, regional specializations in agriculture. Savitsky agreed that ideal conditions do not exist in nature and that the physical relief, the morphology of the Earth’s surface, will have an impact upon climatic conditions. Yet, for Savitsky the uniqueness of the Eurasian landmass consisted in the fact that its three great plains are almost completely “excluded from the impact of the relief”. The principles of “South-North” and “Center-Periphery” regularities ought to work with mathematical precision upon the Eurasian plains. Considering the predominant impact of the Arctic Ocean, whose shoreline is the longest in Eurasia, vectors of both regularities will coincide on the South – North line, with minor exceptions. With movement from the south of Russia northwards, the temperatures will fall, while humidity will increase.
Of course, humidity will also increase from East to West, as one approaches the Atlantic Ocean. But, according to Savitsky, this “horizontal” increase is ten times less drastic than the “vertical”, South-North increase. The result of Savitsky’s grandiose project of raionirovanie, or mapping, was that on the territory of Russia no longitudinal zones could be established – only latitudinal ones were present. Russian landscape, flora and fauna, soils and agriculture changed only when one moves northwards from the south. If one takes off in Europe and goes eastward, one will encounter a drastic change somewhere along the line passing from Scandinavia through the Baltic lands and Poland to the Ukrainian Black Sea coast line, after which the character of the territory, the climate, the flora and the fauna will remain essentially the same well into Siberia. Eurasia emerged as a combination of three long zones, that of the tundra, the forest, and the steppe, stretching in “horizontal” direction across the north of Europe and Asia and constituting a system of mutually complementing and interdependent complexes of climate, organic life, and state formations.
The entire historical paradigm of the Enlightenment, which interpreted the eastern direction as a gradual slope away from Europe and, correspondingly, civilization,^[14] was demolished by the geographical conception of Eurasianism and the subsequent historical scheme that was built upon geography. Instead of a gradual change from West to East there came into being a dramatic frontier between West and East, followed by the autarkic territory of Russia-Eurasia, structured by the latitudinal “horizontal zones”. Instead of the eastern slope of Europe gradually changing into Asia Savitsky drew a map of Eurasian space, where a non-European civilization, the leader of the colonized peoples of the world, developed out of the geographically determined interaction between the Russians and the Turkic peoples of Asia.
It is worth noting that Savitsky’s vision of Eurasianist geography implied a program for writing Eurasian history. Already Humboldt detected the importance of the steppe “highway” in Eurasian history, in particular for the movement of nomads and their invasions of settled civilizations. A 19th century Russian scholar, one of the founders of the regionalist movement (oblastnichestvo), Afanasii Shchapov, spoke of the Eurasian steppe and its crucial importance for the dynamics of Russian history.^[15] Albeit Shchapov saw the steppes as the main reason for the mixing and hybridization of peoples and hence for the emergence of particular regional identities in Russia, Savitsky called the steppes a “clamp” that secured the physical unity of the Eurasian world.^[16] In the works of Nikolai Trubetskoi and George Vernadsky, who noted the importance of the steppe route in Eurasia for the rise of nomadic conquerors, the geographic conception of Savitsky was tied to a vision of historical developments, in which the Russian Empire naturally took the place of the great nomadic empires of the past.
The Eurasianist discourse not only insisted on the fundamental importance of external borders, separating Eurasia from the impact of standardizing modernity of Europe. It also sought to annihilate differences within Eurasia itself. An attempt to salvage empire from the threat of modern nationalism, Eurasianism tried to invent a supranational entity on the territory of the former Russian empire. In this venture Savitsky’s geography was a full-fledged participant: it suggested a geographical conception of Eurasia where culture and history constituted one single whole with territoriality. As Savitsky put it, “the social and historical sphere and the territory should merge for us into a single whole, into a geographical individual or landscape”.^[17] To explore this unity Savitsky suggested a new category, which became the centerpiece of his theory. He called it mestorazvitie (place-development) and defined it as a “broad co-existence of living creatures, who are mutually adapted to each other and to the environment and who adapted the environment to themselves. Synthesis is required. The ability to look simultaneously at the social and historical milieu and at the territory is required ”.^[18] Such a synthesis was possible, according to Savitsky, because the globe’s surface follows certain rules (Savitsky used the term “zakonomernost’, a Russian calk of the German “Gesetzmäßigkeit””). Thus, “the geological organization, the hydrological specifics, the quality of soil and the character of vegetation are interdependent; they are also connected to the climate and to the morphologic outlook of the given part of the Earth’ surface”.^[19] This theory of the organization of the earth’s surface, too, had a long tradition behind it, but Savitsky’s immediate inspiration must have come from Vasilii Dokuchaev’s theory of natural zones, a cornerstone of Russian and later Soviet divisions of Russia’s territory into latitudinal zones.
Savitsky clearly defined levels of possible “place-developments”: according to his theory, each village is such a place-development. The steppe zone of Eurasia, too, is such a place-development. A higher level of place-development is Eurasia as a whole. Fascinatingly, the “old world” in its entirety, the territorial unit that includes Eurasia, was not counted by Savitsky among “place-developments”. In the scale of place-developments Eurasia (as “the Russian world”) is immediately followed by the largest possible place-development, the globe! According to Savitsky, “between the concept of the globe as the “place-development” of humankind and the definition of Russia-Eurasia as a “place-development” there is a difference of principle. We know other place-developments commensurate to Russia-Eurasia (the “place-development of Europe, for example”) but we do not know such for the globe”.^[20] The obvious problem with this thesis (why can’t the entire landmass of Europe and Asia count as a place-developemnt?) did not perplex Savitsky despite the fact that he himself had put forward a detailed argument as to why the old world should be called not “Eurasia,” as von Humboldt did, but, rather, “Oikumene, the universe, the continental landmass upon which Russian history unfolded and is unfolding now”.^[21]
The underlying motif of Savitsky’s systemic geography was the “establishment of the geographic wholeness of the Eurasian world” with all its implications for Russian imperialist designs.^[22] Yet, in order to prove the wholeness of Russia as a geographic world, Savitsky also had to establish its difference with respect to other geographic worlds. For Savitsky the task of mapping continents on the contiguous landmass and the establishment of proper borders constituted the fundamental problem for scholarship. Mapping a geographical region (raionirovanie), establishing the region, was for him the most important method as well as the goal of geographical science (in fact, of knowledge in general).
Such attention to the process of construing the borders can be explained by the predominance of the topic in post-Versailles Europe, as Mark Bassin noted.^[23] At the same time, similar to Nikolai Trubetskoi’s structural phonology, the concept of border is key to the establishment of difference and, correspondingly, to the emergence of meaning. Borders, thus, acquire sense and purpose as the foundation of human culture, or, to be precise, as the necessary precondition for the diversity of human cultures. Savitsky agreed that while mapping a region according to several defining characteristics, “the net of divisions by a single principle will tend to have a specific place on the map… the task is not so much to establish exact borders because there are no such borders”. Ideally, Savitsky thought, one should establish regions according to one single principle, be it climate, soil or the dialectical specifics of the language spoken. But if we put maps of different regions established according to a single principle upon each other, some lines of division may coincide and we can speak of a multi-characteristic region. “Geographic worlds”, such as Europe, Asia or Eurasia, are exactly such multi-characteristic regions. They emerge when the researcher puts a map of one single-characteristic region upon the map of another. Savitsky firmly believed that coincidences that occur if we superimpose one map upon the other were not accidental. His theory of correspondences, developed under the impact of Mendeleev’s table of elements, asserted that there is a teleologically defined relationship between these correspondences: they reveal a deep structure hidden behind the “atomistic” surface of visible phenomena.
Savitsky’s work on Eurasian geography made a profound impression upon his colleagues in linguistics. Both Trubetskoi and Jakobson saw Savitsky’s methodological «system», which assumed the existence of a deep structure underlying the visible surface of «atomistic» facts and governing the configuration of territoriality, as a sign of a new structuralist scientific outlook. In a different historical context, and well beyond the period of intensive cooperation with Savitsky, Jakobson recalled him as an “ingenious scholar” and a “pioneer of structuralist geography”.^[24] When Savitsky’s work on the geographical specificity of Russia-Eurasia was published in 1927, Trubetskoi wrote to Roman Jakobson: “Savitsky’s Geographical Specifics [of Russia] has been published. Do read it. It’s interesting. It’s the first attempt to bring structure to a field that has traditionally been marred by chaos…”^[25]
From Savitsky’s principle of establishing geographic regions according to numerous characteristics one deduces the necessity to describe a given territory from as many perspectives as possible; yet, it must be a focused, a localized description that does not transgress the border. This principle of localized description according to a multitude of characteristics and subsequent combination of data to create (or, rather, confirm the existence of) a region was later adopted by Roman Jakobson, when in 1929-1931 he and Savitsky cooperated very closely (although the Eurasianist movement at this very moment was undergoing its lethal crisis). Based on Savitsky’s methodology, Jakobson analyzed different characteristics of Eurasian languages and drew the borders of Eurasia in accordance with the common area in which Eurasian characteristics of languages were detectable.^[26] Jakobson agreed that “Eurasia is a typical “multi-characteristic” region, a special geographic world, separate and whole”. Correspondingly, “each sphere [of this world] must be studied in the structural multiplicity of its specific phenomena”. Jakobson labeled it “the method of coordination” (metod uviazki) and considered Savitsky’s theory of “place-development” to be a particular case of that method. Evidently, the issue of the relationship between the whole and the parts of the entire system becomes of major importance in the application of this method.^[27] In fact, it constitutes its very core. Moreover, since Jakobson’s research into the languages of the Eurasian Sprachbund was founded on Savitsky’s vision of territoriality, for Jakobson linguistic characteristics acquired in the process of common historical development within the Eurasian space gained predominance over genetic characteristics. Thus, there emerged a linguistic border (a phonological border, to be precise) between such Slavic languages as Czech and Russian, whereas differences between Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic languages within Eurasia were minimized.
At this point, it is useful to introduce a critical perspective on Eurasianist structuralism. Recently, Patrick Seriot argued that in Savitsky’s and Jakobson’s theory “structure” is not so much a mental construct, a model defined by the interrelationship of its elements, but rather an ontological whole, whose existence must be repeatedly demonstrated.^[28] Indeed, the Eurasianists did not invent Eurasia with analytical purposes in mind. They took the fact of the continent and the culture for granted and believed in its a priori existence. Therefore, Seriot spoke of the specific “ontological structuralism” of the Prague thinkers as opposed to Saussurian structuralism.
Whether we accept Seriot’s notion of “Eastern and Western structuralisms” and of the totalizing and ontological character of the Eastern one, there remains little doubt that in the 1920s and 1930s there emerged a distinct vision of renovation in the humanities. This vision invoked the language of an emerging structuralism, and was marred by the intellectual project of constructing the unity of Russian imperial space. Three Eurasianist thinkers, Roman Jakobson, Petr Savitsky, and Nikolai Trubetskoi all shared this vision, although, admittedly, their interest in Eurasia as an alternative to Western modernity differed. To a significant extent that vision developed under the impact of Savitsky’s attempt to apply systemic analysis to the study of geography.
For all the Eurasianist thinkers, this new scientific era was connected with a method that was rooted in the Russian intellectual tradition. Reflecting the new intellectual mood of the 1920s that stressed national scholarly traditions, they spoke of a specific “Russian science” which differed from its West European counterpart by preferences in its object of study and a specific method.^[29] That method – “systemic” or “structuralist” – was opposed to the “atomistic” science of the 19th century. “Russian science” was teleological, and it embraced the entirety of facts and attempted to find regularities that governed the ocean of data. The Eurasianists, at least in the period of 1920 – 1930, offered an unprecedented attempt to translate the ideological doctrine of Russia’s “special path” into a conception (a range of conceptions, to be precise) of “Russian science“ as the source of a new scholarly paradigm.
Petr Savitskii’s geographical method was derived from the Russian tradition of Naturphilosophie and Russian geographical science, of which Dokuchaev’s systemic study of soils was the best example.^[30] Savitskii argued that Dokuchaev’s approach was a result of the “place-development” of Russian geographic science. Savitskii believed that Russian geography was a special science, whose specificity was defined by the very specificity of its object. In European geography there exists a geomorphologic focus defined by Europe’s intense geomorphologic structure, whereas in Russian geography the emphasis is upon geobiology and the study of soils. The lack of significant mountain ranges that could have changed the climatic conditions across the country as well as Russia’s vast expanses made it possible to observe the zonal structure of soils and flora (the structure dependent on the South-North direction of climatic change) at its clearest in Russia. That is why, Savitskii believed, the study of forests became so prominent, and that is why the science of soil conditions was born. Savitskii even asserted that it was possible to speak of two different worlds of geographies, the Russian and the European, each with its specific poetics and language. Was it not true that Russians borrowed from the Germans most of the terms used in geomorphology, whereas Russian words that designate soils and natural zones, such as “chernozem”, gained currency abroad? Savitskii firmly believed that Russian geographical science was not only a “place-development”: it also promoted a synthetic method of studying natural and social phenomena.^[31] In the Russian geographic tradition Savitskii saw the tendency of Russian geography not to limit itself to descriptions of “atomized objects” but to engage in a systemic exploration of interrelationships between different forms of organic and non-organic nature on a given territory, including humans and their societies.
For Roman Jakobson, Russian Slavic studies represented a field that promised innovation in scholarly research. In the first, programmatic article that he published in the Slavische Rundshau in 1929 (the article was originally solicited from Trubetskoi, who did not live up to his promise to deliver the text), Jakobson outlined his vision of Russian Slavic studies as a locomotive of structuralism.^[32] According to Jakobson, “Studies of Russia (Russlandkunde) witness the fact that in an entire range of disciplines, for example, in literary studies, art history, linguistics, very heated discussions are taking place on crucial theoretical issues…”, and, correspondingly, “one senses an uplifting and a teleological movement of Russian studies to their future significance”.^[33] Jakobson noted – in a clear reference to Eurasianist preferences – that in Russian scholarship, exploration of Romano-Germanic studies was in disarray compared to the very developed Oriental studies.
The most important, indeed crucial, feature of modern Russian studies for Jakobson was that “Russia was explored as a structured whole”. Any province tends to become autarkic within its territory, Jakobson admitted, “but in Russian scientific thought the desire to embrace the entire Russian world and to view its temporary and spatial representations from the point of view of the whole was prevalent”.^[34] Thus, Jakobson made clear that in his view the new epistemological approach – structuralism – was intrinsically linked to the conception of Russia as a whole. To make his preferences and sources clear, he immediately listed examples of these new structuralist studies: Savitskii’s conception of Russia as a “special geographic world” and Trubetskoi’s works that revealed “the unity of the Eurasian cultural circle” (Eurasische Kulturzyklus). Jakobson also noted, in a reference to his own work, that an exploration of the “structural unity of Eurasian languages originally not tied by genetic bonds was being prepared”.^[35]
For Jakobson this remarkable openness of Russian science to structuralism was a result of a specific national epistemological tradition, which was characterized by animosity to positivism expressed by thinkers as different as Danilevsky, Dostoevsky, Fedorov, Leont’ev, or Solov’ev. Following Trubetskoi, Jakobson argued that the Russians preferred the question “what for?” to the question “why?”.^[36] He quoted the anti-Darwinist sequence of Karl von Baer, Danilevsky, Strakhov, Vavilov and, finally, Lev Semenovich Berg as one of the illustrations of the teleological inclinations of the Russian tradition. The fact that in his 1929 article Jakobson inserted those very lines of Dokuchaev that had been quoted by Savitskii in his 1927 book on the geographic characteristics of Russia in order to illustrate the holistic and all-embracing nature of the Russian scholarly tradition, points to the fact that Jakobson’s thought was under the direct influence of the “systemic” science promoted by Savitskii.^[37] If the latter believed that Russian science was focused on the unity of the universe, Jakobson argued that “for the fundamental and deeply original line of development of contemporary Russian science the following is characteristic: the correlation (Korrelativität) of separate rows of facts is not viewed in terms of causal dependence…the main concept with which [Russian] science operates is a system of correlating rows of facts, a structure immanent for the observer, and subjected to its own internal laws”.^[38]
It is true that there was a significant difference between Trubetskoi and Savitskii on the one hand and Jakobson on the other: the former two saw European civilization as the major source of the revolutionary upheaval and standardizing modernity to which they were opposed, while the latter considered bourgeois Europe as the major obstacle on the path of the revolutionary innovation.^[39] Still, all three Eurasianist thinkers subscribed to a vision of Eurasia as a holistic unity that can and should be described as a “structure.” This vision, however, implied a dramatic epistemological revolution: instead of a national unit to be described in genetic terms of common descent – a common trope of the 19th century organicist thought – they embarked upon the path of exploring and describing the unity of an empire, whose diversity (as Roman Jakobson would put it, “multiplicity of forms”) did not allow the use of the concept of a cultural “type”. The Eurasianist “structure” provided the means to describe the unity of the imperial space of Russia in a scientistic manner.
When the group of the Eurasianist thinkers dissolved in late 1930s, Roman Jakobson’s emigration to the United States proved crucial in spreading the structuralist paradigm. The key event in this process of expansion was the fruitful contact between Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes de New York, the idea for which was provided by another Russian émigré, Boris Mirkine-Guetzevitch. Alexandre Koyré, a younger Russian émigré naturalized in France, introduced Claude Lévi-Strauss to Jakobson.^[40] Answering the question if this encounter was decisive for his intellectual biography, Lévi-Strauss exclaimed: “And how much! I was at the time a kind of a naïve structuralist. I did structuralism without knowing it. Jakobson opened for me the doctrine already constituted in a discipline: it was linguistics, which I never practiced. For me, it was a revelation.”^[41] Lévi-Strauss also told the story of Jakobson’s contacts with Jacques Lacan, who was already influenced by another former Eurasianist, Alexandre Kojéve, whose lectures on Hegel Lacan had attended. The most important fact, however, was that it was Jakobson who inspired Lévi-Strauss to write “The Elementary Structures of Kinship”, the work that revolutionized anthropology by moving it from genetic analyses of ethnic cultures to the study of structures of culture and of acquired characteristics.
The ideology of Eurasianism with its stress on holistic and systemic analysis and on the importance of acquired characteristics (developed by languages through historical encounters within the Eurasian space) played an important role in the intellectual experimentation that helped crystallize the structuralist paradigm. Yet, most histories of structuralism not focused on the Prague Circle of Linguists fail to mention that role. For instance, the standard History of Structuralism by Dosset, although it tells the story of Jakobson’s impact on Levi-Strauss, fails to explore Jakobson’s own formative years spent in interaction with the Eurasianists.^[42] After World War II structuralism became one of the dominant modes of scholarly thought in the humanities and social sciences, and the role of Eurasianism – however deviant or ephemeral - with its defense of the unity of the Russian imperial space should be present in accounts of structuralism’s history.

THE END OF EURASIAN ODYSSEY

During World War II Savitsky, who at that time taught at Prague’s German University, had to resign his position, despite some (admittedly, very reluctant) contacts with Nazi officials.^[43] He then accepted the position of director of the Russian gymnasium. For several years he had gone into hiding and lived and worked at the Kondakov Institute, a Russian émigré institution dedicated to Byzantine studies in Prague. When the Soviets arrived, Savitsky was arrested by the Soviet military counter-intelligence (SMERSh) together with the Kondakov Institute director Nikolai Andreev.^[44] Intriguingly, Andreev was released after a brief imprisonment and went through occupied Berlin to England, where he assumed a teaching position. As Andreev recalled, the major in the Soviet security service doubted whether Savitsky was the author of the patriotic poetry found in his home. He requested that Savitsky immediately write a poem to celebrate the Soviet cavalry division stationed in Prague. Savitsky came up with the following “Eurasianist” lines: “There is no name more honorable than horseman, for the horseman created Russia and defended her”.^[45] Despite this demonstration of loyalty and patriotism, Savitsky was sentenced to ten years and sent to a camp in Mordovia.
During his term in the Gulag Savitsky learned from his Leningrad acquaintances^[46] of the work of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev, a geographer and ethnographer who was the son of poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. Savitsky established a correspondence with Gumilev and inspired him to study Central Asian nomads in the Eurasianist vein. Moreover, Gumilev’s theory of passionarnost’, which explained the rise and fall of states by biological impulses in the populace, seems to have been suggested to him by Savitsky. The latter also recommended Gumilev to George Vernadsky and the correspondence between these two continued well into the 1970s.^[47] Savitsky appears to have had no interest in the theory of “ethnos”, and he hardly ever used the term. His main influence on Gumilev consisted in transmitting general Eurasian postulates, along with an interest in geography as a factor in historical development, and specifically Eurasian imperialism.
When Savitsky was released from the camps in 1956, he sought and received permission to return to Prague. At this time, Nikolai Andreev wrote to the historian George Vernadsky, himself a former Eurasianist and Savitsky’s friend, at Yale: “I forgot to inform you that Petr Nikolaevich Savitsky has come back to Prague and it seems (to E. D. Kuskova)’that he is excited about today’s Eurasia.’ Poor Petr Nikolaevich…”^[48] Savitsky himself never ceased to stress in letters to his friends and acquaintances that his convictions not only remained unchanged but even grew firmer.^[49] He wrote poetry (as he explained in a letter, he resumed writing poetry in the camps, where he was deprived of paper and writing tools. In order to keep himself sane, he composed and learned by heart over a thousand poems, most of them of ultra-patriotic content and poor quality. Savitsky himself did not cherish any illusions as to the quality of his poems) and in the first years of his imprisonment he even asked George Vernadsky and Roman Jakobson, through his wife, to help publish some of his poems in the hope that its patriotic content would help his release.
Savitsky returned to Prague in 1956 and re-established an active correspondence with those friends and associates who had survived the catastrophe of 1937 – 1945, including his former arch-enemy Suvchinsky.^[50] He continued to stress in his letters that his convictions not only remained unchanged but even grew stronger. He also published his poems in Russian journals in the West, which was probably the reason for his second arrest in 1961, this time by the Czechoslovak political police. Nikolai Andreev organized an intervention by Western scholars, and it luckily coincided with a purge in the ranks of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior. Ironically, Isaiah Berlin, perhaps the most outstanding liberal philosopher of the 20th century, intervened on Savitsky’s behalf in order to save him from the repressive regime that the latter intellectually supported. Among those who took part in the petition on Savitsky’s behalf were N. Andreev, B. Russell, D. Treadgold and L. Shapiro.^[51] After his release Savitsky made a living by occasional translations and publications. He never returned to active scholarly activity; his letters from the late 1950s – early 1960s demonstrate that his health and his psychological condition were deeply shattered by years of imprisonment. Savitsky died in Prague in 1968, a year when Eurasian tanks rolled in the streets of the city, and Eurasianism, it then seemed, had completely disappeared from intellectual and political horizons, whereas its impact on various areas of scholarship remained obscure.