Abstract An aperçu of the early years (1961–1965) in the life of a working scholar with a lasting record of achievement that touches on many details in the fraught relations between Roman Jakobson and the author, one of his most outstanding students. The account of these peripeteia, framed in cultural as well as biographical terms, provides an unusual insight into the sociology of knowledge as it pertains to the development of linguistics and semiotics in the twentieth century.