The New School of Literary History in...

The New School of Literary History in RussiaAuthor(s): Boris Tomashevsky, Gina Fisch, Oleg GelikmanSource: PMLA, Vol. 119, No. 1, Special Topic: Literatures at Large (Jan., 2004), pp. 120-132Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261491 .Accessed: 16/08/2011 10:53

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PMLA

criticism in translation

The New School of Literary History in Russia

Introduction

BORIS TOMASHEVSKY

TRANSLATED BY GINA FISCH

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY OLEG GELIKMAN

GINA FISCH is assistant professor of

French at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her current project is a study of eighteenth-century fiction and moral

philosophy centered on the work of Isa- belle de Charriere.

OLEG GELIKMAN is a PhD candidate in

comparative literature at the Humani-

ties Center of Johns Hopkins University, where he studies critical theory and the aesthetics of prose. Hte is completing a dissertation entitled "The Disclosure of

Form: Russian Formalism, French Mod-

ernism, and the 'ragmatics of Prose."

120

ANTHOLOGIES OF LITERARY THEORY, THE BACKBONE OF

COURSES ON LITERARY CRITICISM, RELY ON VIKTOR SHKLOV-

sky's "Art as a Device" or Boris Eikhenbaum's "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" to broach the subject of Russian formalism.' The canonical status of these essays is well deserved. Written when the author was merely twenty-four, Shklovsky's 1917 essay bristles with a polemical fervor, wit, and knack for example that announce him as a critical prodigy. Marked by the mixture of embittered pride, rigor, and self-conscious malaise typical of later formalism, Eikhenbaum's dense history of the formal school is re- markable for its titanic effort to marry historical considerations to a systematic analysis of the evolution of key formalist doctrines.

The considerable virtues of these two essays notwithstanding, neither one came at a particularly apt moment for taking stock of the critical practice of Russian formalism. Shklovsky's milestone essay is too early a docu- ment to serve as a guide to subsequent formalist scholarship, including his own. Similarly, Eikhenbaum's "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" suffers less from some internal defect than from the effect of historical exigencies that motivated its appearance.

Eikhenbaum wrote his retrospective essay at a moment of twofold crisis of the formalist school. On the one hand, the formalists were under polemical attack from Trotsky, whose 1923 Literature and Revolution wrongly assimilated their enterprise to the Kantian current of German philosophy and created a rap sheet of accusations that would serve as a blueprint for later antiformalist campaigns.2 On the other hand, around 1924 the theo- reticians of OPOYAZ (an acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic

Language) had begun reexamining and modifying their earlier positions.

"The New School of Literary History in Russia" is a translation of "La nouvelle ecole d'histoire

litteraire en Russie," Revue des etudes slaves 8 (1928): 226-40, and is published with the

permission of the Institut d'Etudes Slaves. The photograph of Boris Tomashevsky on this

pageq is reproduced with the permission of the Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg State University.

?) 20(04 BY THE MODERN L.ANGUIAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

Boris Tomashevsky 121

By that time, their argument for the specificity of the object of literary criticism had achieved its canonical form and thus was ripe for facile adoption by admirers and for hasty dismissal by adversaries and rivals. To overcome its crisis, the formalist school could adopt as its methodological basis the nascent structuralist linguistics (the strategy even-

tually chosen by the Prague school) or renew the

study of the historical dynamic of literature. Unim-

pressed with the renaissance of linguistic scholar-

ship taking place around them, Eikhenbaum and

Shklovsky resolutely pursued the historical path, while Yury Tynianov would make at least one memorable attempt to mediate between the alter- natives (his and Jakobson's 1928 "Problems'".3 But when writing "The Theory of the 'Formal Method," Eikhenbaum had not yet fully developed the

methodology characteristic of the second, historical phase of the formalist school. It may be ob-

jected that he never did, largely as a result of the Stalinization of the cultural sphere beginning in 1929. True as that may be, Eikhenbaum's attempt to articulate the historical function of literature in

conjunction with the earlier formalist account is

legible in his studies of literary habitus (6bIT [byt]) in his subsequent works.4 Whatever its outcome, this search itself is instructive enough to be considered an integral part of the evolution of Russian formalism and to be included in an account of it.

Compact and less embroiled in polemics, Bo- ris Tomashevskys essay "The New School of Liter-

ary History in Russia" ("La nouvelle ecole d'histoire litteraire en Russie") benefits in no small measure from the perspective of its later date. A member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in its heyday and, starting in 1922, a colleague of leading OPOYAZ members at the legendary State Institute of the

History of Arts in Petersburg, Tomashevsky was in a unique position to produce a fair summary of the scholarly positions and achievements of formalist scholarship as a whole.

On 6 March 1927, the "formal school in literary scholarship" gathered its troops for what was des- tined to be its final live appearance-a public dispute with the Marxist critics based at the Leningrad

State University. The symbolic aura of the event was not lost on the participants or the audience, for the

late-night debate was held in the auditorium of the former Tenishev gymnasium, the place where, in 1914, Shklovsky delivered "Resurrection of the Word," a futurist birth certificate of Russian formalism. The 1927 evening followed a pattern typical of the Soviet cultural life of the period. Marxists used all the politically inflammatory rhetoric they could muster in an effort to discredit what they perceived as an overly influential school of thought. Proud of their scholarly achievements, the formalists-Ei- khenbaum and Tynianov-responded with sarcas- tic, often condescending rejoinders. Never afraid to cause a commotion, Shklovsky publicly ridiculed the literary analyses of his opponents in his biting "In Defense of the Sociological Method" (later published in HosbIi JIe4) [Novyj Lefl). But the evening was opened by Tomashevskys overview of the de-

velopment of the formalist movement, which the Red Newspaper, a publication not known for its formalist sympathies, declared "interesting and in- formative" in its mildly hostile account of the pro- ceedings (Ustinov 268). The lecture Tomashevsky delivered that night was an early version of the essay translated here. While visiting Jakobson in

Prague in February 1928, Tomashevsky presented it

again, this time in front of the recently organized Prague Linguistic Circle. A Czech translation by Jan

Mukarovsky promptly appeared in Casopis pro mo- derni filologii. Later the same year, Tomashevsky went on to publish his retrospective assessment of Russian formalism, in an enlarged and amended form, in the French Revue des etudes slaves.5

The pragmatic and historical circumstances of

Tomashevsky's account minimize the distortions built into the process of anthologization. Unlike "Art as a Device," his essay was not meant to ig- nite a polemic; unlike "The Theory of the 'Formal Method," it did not come into being as a symptom of malaise. While Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum were addressing uncomprehending and hostile detractors, Tomashevsky was speaking to colleagues in Prague and to a foreign audience in Paris. Thus, the final, French version of the address, in sharp

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122 The New School of Literary History in Russia

contrast to the two other essays, presumes little and does much to anticipate-and preempt-possible misunderstanding.

Tomashevsky's essay has more to offer than

greater accessibility and concision. It is a signifi- cant piece of criticism and reflection in its own

right. The essay incorporates important clarifica- tions the author had made in his book-length ex-

position of the methodology of literary criticism, Theory of Literature (Teopa JI4TepaTypbI [19251)- surely a precursor of the Rene Wellek and Austin Warren volume.6 Moreover, Tomashevskys unique perspective opens the writings of Russian formalists to present-day debates on the nature of critical practice. In North America, up to now, early formalist concepts such as device (npHeM [priem]), literariness (JmTepaTypHocTb [literaturnost'l), bar-

ing the device (o6HaxeHMe npheMa [obnazenie priema]), defamiliarization (ocTpaHeHwe [ostrane-

nie]), blockage (3aTpyAHeHHe [zatrudnenie]), and others have been filtered through the New Criti- cal pleas for an invariant identity of the artwork

grounded in its self-reflective or iconic quality. On the other side of the Atlantic, the proponents of

literary structuralism (Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette) grafted the formalist

scholarship onto the taxonomic schemes of general rhetoric or onto the comprehensive theory of narrative. These projects emerged out of sharp dissatisfaction with the academic style of French

literary criticism and hence favored the initial, "militant" phase of Russian formalism.7 Yet the formalists' turn to history in the mid-1920s indicates that their prior insistence on the distinctness of works of literature was not a plea for an invariant self- sameness. The preoccupation with the emergent status of literariness characteristic of the later formalist accounts points toward historical process as the limit of any taxonomic critical project. From this point of view, formalist concepts have to be

thought of as "criteria of identity" or "symptoms of the aesthetic" operating in functional-relational rather than ontological or transcendental fashion: they help determine where and how literature ap- pears at a given moment, not what the essence of

literature is or how an a priori notion of literariness can be recovered out of the empirical detail. Thus reinterpreted, Russian formalist scholarship should supply the terms of a critical inquiry well attuned to the historicity of literary works and to the supplementary aesthetic and cognitive dimen- sions emerging in the literary use of "natural" lan-

guage or narrative. I close with two quotations that, within cer-

tain limits, testify to the possibility of renewing the

reception of Russian formalism at the angle sug- gested above. Both come from Roman Jakobson, whose contribution to formalism and to its later

discovery in the United States and France is enor- mous, though not unambiguous. The first is from his 1934 essay "What Is Poetry?":

The [formalist] school, say its detractors, fails to grasp the relationship of art to real life, it calls for an "art for art's sake," it is following in the footsteps of Kantian aesthetics. Critics with ob- jections in this vein are so completely one-sided in their radicalism that, forgetting the existence of a third dimension, they view everything on a single plane. Neither Tynianov nor Mukarov- sky nor Shklovsky nor I-none of us ever pro- claimed the self-sufficiency of art. What we have been trying to show is that art is an integral part of the social structure, a component that inter- acts with all others and is itself mutable since both the domain of art and its relationship to other constituents of the social structure are in constant dialectical flux. What we stand for is not the separatism of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function.8

The second quotation comes from the preface Jakobson wrote to the first French collection of the

writings of Russian formalists. There he fondly re- calls his recent encounter with Tomashevsky: "I like to refer to one of the most able and staunch repre- sentatives of this group, B. Tomashevsky, who, during our last meeting in Moscow in 1956, observed that perhaps the most audacious and stimulating ideas of the movement still remain in the shadow" ("Vers une science" 11; my trans.). Though translat- ing even the full range of formalist scholarship

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Boris Tomashevsky I23

would be but a preliminary step in removing this shadow, making Tomashevsky's "The New School of Literary History in Russia" an available reference

point helps us grasp the key critical dilemmas that had driven the evolution of the formalist movement.

NOTES The translator and I thank Wallace Martin and Richard A.

Macksey for their help with the preparation of this material. 1 In keeping with the formalist emphasis on the artifac-

tual and convention-bound elements of the literary artwork and following Richard Sherwood (28), I chose to render "IMcKyCCTBO KaK npIHM" as "Art as a Device" rather than its wider-known yet too metaphysical alternative, "Art as

Technique." For identical reasons, this translation uses "How Gogol's 'The Overcoat' Is Made" instead of "The

Making of Gogol's 'The Overcoat"' for Eikhenbaum's "KaK cgejiaHa <<IIIwHeJb>> ForoJa."

2 These generic antiformalist charges include neglect of the social context of literature, narrow aestheticism, meth-

odological anarchism, scholastic passion for mindless classi- fication, and, finally, attachment to obsolete class values that

potentially hinders the task of shaping the Soviet individual. 3A reader can readily apprehend the divergence between

the late formalist and early structuralist programs of literary scholarship by comparing the "Problems" with a 1929 man- ifesto also written, at least in part, by Jakobson, who was this time writing as a member of the nascent Prague school (Jakobson, Karcevskij, Mathesius, et al.). See also the lucid and balanced discussion of the difference between structuralism and formalism in Steiner, esp. 210-11.

4 See his "JI4TepaTypHbii 6blT" (1927), translated as

"Literary Environment" (Pomorska and Matejka 56-65), and other articles collected in JIHTepaTypa, Moi BpeMeH- HMK, and O npo3e, o no33M4.

5 Since Tomashevsky was fluent in French (his only earned degree, in electrical engineering, was from the Uni- versity of Liege), it is reasonable to suppose that he wrote the essay in that language. The article has not been reprinted in French or Russian. For the details of the publication history of "La nouvelle 6cole," see Galan 22, 42n24.

6 Even a critic as hostile to formalism as Pavel Medve- dev, a member of the Bakhtin circle, acknowledged that Theory of Literature represented an important revision of the formalist doctrine (184n3).

7 Volume 8 (1966) of the journal Communications is a locus classicus of the momentous joining of linguistics, an- thropology, the study of folklore, and literary criticism known as French structuralism. Barthes's "Introduction a l'analyse structurale des r6cits," Todorov's "Les categories

du recit litt6raire," and Genette's "Frontieres du r6cit" all contain relevant statements on the relation of the structuralist

project to its formalist precedent. An essay entitled "L'h6ri- tage m6thodologique du formalism" ("The Methodological Heritage of Russian Formalism") served as an opener in Todorov's La poetique de la prose; curiously, the English translation of the book relegated the article to the appendix. Todorov will discuss the legacy of formalism again in "Some Approaches to Russian Formalism." Genette's en-

gagement with the Moscow, Jakobson-led wing of formalism punctuates his work from Figures I (esp. "La litterature comme telle" [253-65]) and Figures II (esp. "Langage po6- tique, po6tique du langage" [123-54]) to Mimologiques.

8 Qtd. in Matejka and Titunik 174. The translation of "Co je poezie?" (1933) in Matejka and Titunik is abbrevi- ated. Some of the passages omitted appear in translation in Galan 113-14. The full version of Jakobson's essay-which has been characterized by Ren6 Wellek as a "boutade" and

by Victor Erlich as "brilliant" (qtd. in Galan 110)-is available in Czech in Jakobson, Studies.

WORKS CITED

Bann, Stephen, and John E. Bowlt, eds. Russian Formalism. New York: Harper, 1973.

Barthes, Roland. "Introduction a l'analyse structurale des recits." Barthes et al. 7-33.

Barthes, Roland, et al. Communications 8: L'analyse structurale du recit. Paris: Seuil, 1981.

Ejxenbaum, Boris. JI4TepaTypa: TeopMa, KpzTMKa, nojie- MMKa. Leningrad: Priboj, 1927. - . Moi BpeMeHHIK. MapmIpyT B 6eccMepTze. Len-

ingrad: Izdatel'stvo, 1929. Moscow: Agraf; Saint Peters-

burg: Inapress, 2001. - . npo3e, o n033HM: C6oPHHK cTaTefi. Leningrad:

Xudozestvennaja, 1986. . "The Theory of the 'Formal Method."' Critical

Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Har- court, 1971. 801-16.

Galan, Frantisek William. Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985.

Genette, Gerard. Figures I. Paris: Seuil, 1966. . Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. ."Frontieres du r6cit." Barthes et al. 158-69. . Mimologiques. Paris: Seuil, 1976.

Jakobson, Roman. "Co je poezie?" Studies in Verbal Art: Texts in Czech and Slovak. Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic

Langs., U of Michigan, 1971. 20-32. . "Vers une science de l'art poetique." Preface. Theo-

rie de la litterature, textes des Formalistes russes. Introd. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1965. 9-13.

Jakobson, Roman, Sergej Karcevskij, Vilem Mathesius, et al. "Theses Presented to the First Congress of Slavic

n In M. 1. _*

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Philologists in Prague, 1929." The Prague School: Se- lected Writings, 1929-1946. Ed. Peter Steiner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 5-31.

Matejka, Ladislav, and Irwin R. Titunik, eds. Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Cambridge: MIT P, 1976.

Medvedev, Pavel. The Formal Method in Literary Scholar- ship. Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Pomorska, Krystina, and Ladislav Matejka, eds. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views.

Cambridge: MIT P, 1976.

Sherwood, Richard. "Victor Shklovsky and the Develop- ment of Early Formalist Theory on Prose Literature." Bann and Bowlt 26-40.

Sklovskij, Viktor. "Art as Technique." Literary Theory: An Introduction. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Lon- don: Blackwell, 1998. 17-24.

. "In Defense of the Sociological Method." Trans. Ann Shukman. Formalist Theory. Ed. and trans. L. M. O'Toole and Shukman. Russian Poetics in Translation 4. Oxford: Holdan, 1977. 92-99.

The New School of Literary History in Russia

SINCE THE FIRST YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH

century, there has existed in Russia a pronounced and continuously growing interest in the aesthetic appreciation of literary works. The succes- sor to journalistic criticism has been genuine literary criticism. But the critical and historical

essays inspired by this new interest remained scattered for a long time, and it was not until an

organized group of writers appeared that a school of criticism was created that devoted its efforts to a systematic application of the new trends.1

In 1916 Russian poetry experienced a crisis.

Symbolism was in decline, and the younger generation turned away from it to pursue sources other than a dubious philosophy expressing itself in vague creations and diffuse words. New schools of thought had just arisen-raucous, to

. "Resurrection of the Word." Bann and Bowlt 41-47.

. B 3anIMTy courOJIorlqeCKOrO MeToga." HOBbMI JIecl 3 (1927): 20-25; 4 (1927): 30-31.

Steiner, Peter. "The Roots of Structuralist Aesthetics." The

Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946. Ed. Steiner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 174-219.

Todorov, Tzvetan. "Les cat6gories du r6cit litt6raire." Barthes et al. 131-57.

- . "L'hritage m6thodologique du formalism." La poetique de la prose. Paris: Seuil, 1971. 9-31.

. "Some Approaches to Russian Formalism." Bann and Bowlt 6-19.

Tomagevskij, Boris. Teopa JIHTepaTypbi. Moscow; Lenin-

grad, 1925. 4th ed., 1928. Ann Arbor: Ardis, [1971?]. Moscow: Aspect, 1996.

Tynianov, Jurii, and Roman Jakobson. "Problems in the

Study of Literature and Language." Pomorska and Ma-

tejka 79-81.

Ustinov, D. "MaTepHaJIbi iMcnyTa <MapKCM3M 4M 4op- MaJIbHbIii MeTo?> 6 MapTa 1927 roAa." HoBoe JIHTepa- TypHoe o6o3peH4e 50 (2001): 247-78.

be sure-clearing the path through noisy dem-

onstrations, devoting themselves to "epater le

bourgeois" [scandalizing the public]. But under this exuberant exterior, for which the young writers were so sharply rebuked, behind the ex-

travagances and occasional simple mystifica- tions, there was a persevering drive to discover virile sources of inspiration, to create a "palpa- ble" art opposed to the effeminate poetry of the

symbolists and their cult of the approximate. Among the creators of the Russian futurist

school (which has nothing in common with the

homonymic groups in western Europe except for the name), there was a rallying cry: "The word as such!" (CJIoBo KaK TaKoBoe!). Attention fell on the means of expression, on the linguistic foundations of poetry. Some young men, poetry enthusiasts, united to construct a new theory that, first of all, would respond only to practical aspects [of criticism]; technique interested them

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much more than doctrine. For the most part students of Badouin de Courtenay, they were impa- tient to find new paths in the sphere of art as well as in research. Thus, the connection among research, art criticism, and poetry gave birth to the first installments of Collections of Studies in the

Theory of Poetic Language (C6opHKMH no Teo-

PMM n03TnHecKoro a3bIKa); and soon a group formed, its first members being V. Shklovsky, O. Brik, L. Yakubinsky, B. Kushner, and E. Poli- vanov. Around 1918, this group organized itself as the Society for the Study of Poetic Lan-

guage (06iecTBO M3yqIeHIa no3TIIecKoro

5I3bIKa)-or, following the custom of military and revolutionary abbreviations [to replace long- winded names of organizations with incompre- hensible acronyms], OPOYAZ.2 Some young literary historians, unsatisfied with the state of

philology and seeking to find in the Collections the components of a new conception of the lit-

erary work, joined the emergent movement. OPOYAZ was most lively during 1919-21. The same period saw the founding of the Moscow

Linguistic Circle (MOCKOBCK14i JI1HrBMCT4-

IecKMfi KpyXOK), where the young representa- tives of F. Fortunatov's school, presided over by Roman Jakobson, adopted a similar orientation.a

Those were three years of controversy. Lec- tures and articles in scrawny magazines stuck on walls (newspapers had disappeared for want of

paper) breached the fortress of the old academic

knowledge, and the "formalists" installed themselves, little by little, in the strongholds. The creation of a Faculty of Letters at the Leningrad Institute of the History of Arts, thanks to V. Zhir- munsky, made it possible to assemble a young audience that was not intimidated by the cold or the occasional lack of lighting. This was the era of "militant formalism." The victory, achieved as

early as 1920, resulted in some dissidence inside the school: debates over questions of method erupted; there was talk of a crisis, of the need for synthesis, for revision, and so forth. But this was not a good time for these quarrels; abstract questions of methodology no longer attracted the re-

searchers. They set about the task without linger- ing over disputes. The argument with the socio-

logical school (Marxist), occurring a little later, likewise subsided of its own accord, for the same reasons, without having aroused great passion. Essays summarizing the formalists' research appeared. New problems presented themselves. There was a sense that the periods of Russian literature needed to be known more thoroughly, that precursors had scarcely pursued the subject; the aim was to reconstruct the development of lit-

erary forms in our literature. Only today can one

finally grapple with these essential problems and

get ready for great and broad research projects: the first researchers are surrounded with young people, prepared entirely differently for the work that falls to them and whose energies were not exhausted in the fight against traditionalists.

The first ideas of the new school bore the

stamp of the polemics amid which they appeared: often exaggerated, paradoxical, they forcefully expressed certain general trends opposed to those of the traditionalists rather than the precise sentiments of those who formulated them. Equally, the ideas of A. Potebnya or A. Veselovsky were not called into question, as

having in large part inspired the tradition of lit-

erary history.3 Despite the frequent mention of these scholars, the dispute was less about ideas than about traditional practices. It was against these practices that war was declared, concern-

ing the three principal directions that constituted literary history: biographical criticism, social history, and philosophical history.

The biographical school, whose number of followers has swelled in the past few years, sees in the literary work only the author's personal act, a fact of the author's intimate, private life. It seeks there a clue about such purely personal details; the work is "explained" through incidents in the author's life. The formalists opposed these mistaken ideas with two arguments. (1) The historian's analysis, they said, should not leave the domain to which the work belongs-that is, the

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domain of literature. That which is given in the work itself should be enough, and one is entitled to consider only that in determining the true literary value of that work. Whatever is hidden from the reader need not intervene and can only falsify our impression. (2) A biographical fact, even when it is the source of a poetic inspiration, does not explain the poet's work at all, just as the biography of a model does not explain the

picture created by a painter. To explain the work is to show its literary value, its influence on literature, its relation to the literary milieu in which it was created. Biographical facts can furnish

only a chance impulse preceding the creation; the profound causes of the work reside (and should be looked for) in the entire development of literature, which determines the paths and

poses the problems. Historian-biographers were

compared to low-level agents in the secret police who inquire in the servants' quarters about mi- nor facts in the life of the master, but who do not dare approach him openly, face-to-face. For- malists went so far as to deny the usefulness of

biographical investigations, and biographical information finds no place in their writings (except occasionally, if need be, in the notes).

Journalists regarded literature as an as-

sembly of documents on social history. They (D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, Ivanov-Razumnik) indulged in writing the history of Russian soci-

ety from the works of our novelists. They treated the heroes of Pushkin, of Lermontov, of

Turgenev as historical personages, as types rep- resenting political, social, and moral ideas dif- fused in the different classes of society. The formalists, on the other hand, considered literary works bad historical documents. Real life is not reflected in novels; it is deformed there. The poet combines the facts of life from his artistic point of view. Art leads him to falsify reality, to depart from nature, or at least to make a selec- tion following the proprieties and needs of his time. One cannot extract positive knowledge from a literary work without knowing how the poet reacted to impressions and to external facts

or what the intrinsic laws of literary genres, the conditions of literary illusion, are. The history of ideas should be written on the basis of au- thentic documents and not on the basis of the

sayings and stories of the heroes of novels, who are nothing but phantoms of real life.

The philosophical school, represented by the symbolists (V. Ivanov, L. Shestov, D. Me-

rezhkovsky, M. Gershenzon), ventured to inter-

pret the esoteric meaning of works: they found there religious and philosophical doctrines, dressed in symbols and allegories. The formalists felt that research of this sort led only to arbi-

trary commentaries, fanciful and contradictory, and ironically characterized them with the figu- rative expression often used by disciples of these

philosophers disoriented by the superficial per- suasiveness of their reasoning: "the multifaceted soul of the poet" (MHororpaHHmaa ymua no3Ta).

The new school undertook to study literature as a special phenomenon having its own laws. From its beginning, several ideas have served as the original marks of its method-the 4opMaJIb- HbIi MeTOA ("formal method"), as it was called.

The title of the Collections published by OPOYAZ indicates one of these ideas: to wit, the distinction between poetic language and practical language. Scrupulously observed in the first writings of the formalists, this distinction came straight from the works of Potebnya and Vese- lovsky (in particular from chapter 3 of the latter's Historical Poetics), although one had to abandon the theory of inner form. Thus, one tried to build a new doctrine on a purely linguistic basis: prose, as practical and utilitarian language, was opposed to poetry and distinguished from other languages that have their own laws and whose principal characteristic is that they offer an expression not as a simple means or as the play of an automatic mechanism but as a feature that has acquired an original aesthetic value and become an end in itself of language.

Considered from that angle, poetic language was defined and studied in a series of arti-

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cles by L. Yakubinsky. The author limited him- self to phonetics, principally to the phonetics of verse. He stated that certain phonetic facts, of

purely mechanical origin, having no semantic value in practical language, played an important role in poetic language and were consciously observed and used by poets. Such is the case with certain phonetic shades by which poetic language draws near to emotional language. This was the point of departure for a series of studies on the role of sound in verse. Among these is 0. Brik's on "the repetition of sounds"

(3ByKOBbIe nOBTOpbI), which develops ideas of Maurice Grammont on harmony in verse and at-

tempts to classify the phenomena noticed; it has served as a model for later studies. This direc- tion of research benefited from Sievers's ideas on "auditory philology" (Ohrenphilologie) and the ideas of the experimental French school (Ver- rier, Landry), as well as some English studies by E. W. Scripture. The notion of poetic language naturally prompted one to search, in the linguistic analysis of [poetic] works, for a scientific ex-

planation of their literary significance. Literature itself was termed a dialect and considered an ob-

ject of study to which dialectology should be ap- plied (see Jakobson's work on Khlebnikov).

While this research on poetic language was

being pursued, Viktor Shklovsky devoted several papers to the structure of themes-to em-

plotment.b He studied a series of novels to discover the intrinsic laws of their construction; he was especially fond of using Sterne's works. Unlike Veselovsky, he concentrated on the entire work rather than on the details of the themes that happened to be brought together. He thus

gave rise to a number of ideas that took their

place in the doctrine of the new school. The first of these was that of emplotment.

The plot was no longer conceived as the sum of the events presented in a work. Shklovsky opposed the amorphous mass of facts and incidents (the 4a6yJIa [fabula], in his terminology) to the way that the author put them to work- the disposition of the materials imposed by the

artist-in a word, the emplotment. In his view, emplotment is nothing other than the mode in which the events are used, through which the writer orders the development of the work. It is in the working out of this development that the writer introduces this or that fact, uses this or that aesthetic procedure. Shklovsky proposed to examine the conditions under which the plot of the novel unfolds. He formulated the idea of de-

ferral or of suspension of the action as a law re-

quiring a certain distribution of the motifs in

play. He showed the role of motivation for the incidents introduced.c He also made evident the aesthetic usefulness of baring the devices of art (i.e., the introduction of unmotivated events

only for the specific interests of the narrative it-

self). He brought to light the merits of difficult form, which requires of readers an effort of pen- etration that makes them more aware of the work's meaning. The goals of finding a difficult form and giving an impression of innovation lead the writer to look at known or even familiar

objects through an outsider's eye, in order to describe them in an original manner. (For this, Shklovsky invented a new word: ocTpaHeHwe [making strange].) Thus, for example, Guy de

Maupassant sometimes describes the life of

peasants as a world entirely unknown; thus, Tol-

stoy [in War and Peace] describes the Council of Fili through the incomplete understanding of a young girl (likewise in "XoJICToMep," where the writer seeks less to evoke the psychology of a horse than to describe human life from a new

point of view). Here, then, are some of the no- tions related to the study of the emplotment as an essentially aesthetic process and which exert no influence on the events featured in the narrative [i.e., on its fabula].

The name of the new method ("formal method"), although often disavowed even by its followers, leads us to the third problem that faced them. The traditional school ordinarily based its works on the somewhat vague distinction between form and content and believed that

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studying these two aspects of a writer's work exhausted it. The entirety of the ideas, feelings, themes, and subject of the work-in short, its ideal element-was called the content. Form was understood to mean the language, the

rhythm, and such-the material element. Un- derstandably, in these circumstances, the critic willingly neglected the material for the spiritual and tended to be interested only in analyzing ideas. He could be observed directing all his attention to the subjects confronted by the author and studying them as realities, heedless of their

literary incarnation. The critic passed right through the work without noticing it, not knowing what to do with aesthetic facts, indifferent to the constructive principles of poetic creation. We are indebted to the symbolist school for the rehabilitation of the problems of pure art in the study of literature. The critical and historical es-

says of Andrey Bely,4 of Vyacheslav Ivanov, of

Valery Brusov drew our attention to the element that the traditionalists left in the shadows.

The "formalists" deny the usefulness, from a methodological point of view, of this opposition of form to content. They still allow the opposition of material to form, but with the proviso that all elements of the work-the conception as well as the rhythm-are artistic factors and are active only as such, and consequently must be studied as such. In a natural reaction, they es-

pecially attached themselves to what their predecessors had ignored. Hence the impression that they studiedform at the expense of content, resulting from the old opposition of the two words. Furthermore, confusion with the linguistic school of Fortunatov (the formal school) also encouraged the use of the phraseformal method. Some followers of OPOYAZ seized the phrase for themselves; others tried somewhat timidly to decline that characterization. But the name remained and, unfortunately, influenced the vul- gar idea that the public often had of the new school's work.

The opposition of practical language to poetic language corresponds to that of prose to

poetry. Prose, devoid of aesthetic qualities, has automated means of expression. Poetry is an essentially aesthetic phenomenon, in which everything has its own value and must be appre- ciated and felt as an immediate object of an aesthetic impression. "Aesthetic impression" amounts to a formula: the end is nothing; the means are everything. Understanding a work of art depends on making the act of its creation alive again, not as originating in the author's

personal psychology but as the functioning of the author's art, or craft, as one used to say.5 We must concentrate our efforts of observation on the entirely artificial object that is the practice of this craft. The literary work is the sum of the artistic techniques that the poet has put at the service of his creation and that have left their

imprint on it. This idea-fairly vague, one must admit-

of artistic techniques or means (xy!oxKecTBeH- HbHI npHeM) plays a great part in the formalists' research. The young critics understood this term rather broadly: sometimes they used it to mean a simple technical device, sometimes all the elements constituting the work. They intended, above all, to define in a word their point of view rather than any definite subject matter. The techniques of the artist as they appear in a given literary work, as they are felt by the reader, became the true subject of literary criticism.

Traditionalist historians seldom considered a work of art in and of itself. They enjoyed ex- patiating about literature; they never dealt with literature properly so-called. The study of artistic procedures led them to grasp the connection between the diverse elements of the work and the secret of their equilibrium. But for want of more precise research, they noticed only simple phenomena that appeared to them neutral and determined solely by the ideas of the writer act- ing as a free arbiter making virtually sovereign choices. Thus, the specific evolution of literature escaped them, and they rejected even the idea of it. For them, literature was an amor-

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phous subject, and in complete sincerity they substituted for its study the study of external in- fluences, customs, social conditions, social spheres, as if they could find in these domains

explanations for the origin and development of plots and of stylistic features.

From the moment one conceived the need to allow for inner connections between the different elements of poetic creation, one concluded the following: On the one hand, the poet is not as free as we may think in distributing the elements in his work-each detail is subordinated to the ensemble, and one entails the other, such that the writer selects his artistic techniques not as units but in combination. On the other hand, the var- ied systems of these techniques are liable to evolve spontaneously because, with use, they get worn out, become automatic, and thus lose their aesthetic function, their dynamism.

This idea of inner causes and external influ- ences joining to instigate the spontaneous evolution of literature, together with the parallel contention that the age of literary devices provides the gauge of their aesthetic power, quite naturally directed researchers toward literary history, even though they had been absorbed in theoretical speculations until then. Now their historical conception of evolution had to be worked out, and that involved the influence of Ferdinand Brunetiere [the author of The Evolu- tion of Genres in the History of Literature].

Conventional [literary] historians contented themselves with following the dominant line in literature through the centuries. They studied only recognized figures, the great writers. In place of evolution, they put succession. Ler- montov came after Pushkin, Nekrasov after Ler- montov, just as, in French poetry, Hugo came after Voltaire, Leconte de Lisle after Hugo, and so on. Their analysis swung back and forth between the notion of influence and the idea of the absolute and hence incomparable individuality of a poet's work. Aside from the latter tendency-which led to nothing less than denying the possibility of studying literary history!-

there remained at least the notion of influence, always positive and based solely on the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of the human spe- cies. All great writers (and traditional history, once again, was interested only in great writers) were the universal heirs of their predecessors; they ascended to the throne of their forebears to collect their inheritance and preserve, develop, and perfect their works. In the literary arena, only the victors were noticed; the vanquished were mentioned only to be joked about (as the

sixteenth-century poets were in France, before [their rehabilitation by] the Romantics).

To this official history of perpetual peace in literature, the formalists opposed a new history rich in wars, or at least in fights and quarrels. To "positive" influence, through attraction, they opposed negative influence, through repulsion. The formula "the inheritance of the nephew from the uncle" was popular. This implied that the primary driving force in literary evolution was repulsion-that is, the tendency to react against the dominant literary forms of the century. Romanticism was not the direct heir of classicism; it was its adversary. The throne in literature does not pass from the father to the son. Undoubtedly each new school has its precursors; the Romantics had Chenier, and today we are well aware of the pre-Romantic epoch as a preparatory period. But the precursors are never the masters of their own domain. They always appear as a minor line, as the younger and misunderstood brothers of the dominant school. The advent of a new school is often nothing but the canonization of the efforts of writers neglected during the preceding period. Minor literature passes into major, as, for example, French melodrama engenders Romantic drama, or as Mayakovsky's poetry is the daughter of the comic forms of Russian verse.

The study of diverse groups, of their antago- nisms and conflicts, thus became the order of the day. Attention was no longer confined to great writers; it extended to secondary writers, to mi- nor genres, to mass movements. One took care to

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examine in detail the polemics between groups, to fix the exact relation of literary facts to their set- ting, to bring forth the evidence of oft-neglected contemporaries, to trace accounts in the press and in correspondence. A group of studies emerged that used historical analysis in an effort to reconstruct past literary conceptions authentically. This tendency led quite naturally to interest in ap- plying the same method to the literary movements of our time. From this arose the conception of a sort of determinism in literary evolution.

Available in its entirety, contemporary literature is a domain rich in data, whereas the reconstruction, the restoration, of a total picture of the past, with the help of scattered evidence, presents the historian of remote epochs with a particularly difficult task. Contemporary literature also has the advantage of making experiments possible, so to speak: the critic is in this case an eyewitness who can see with his own eyes the mechanism of literary movements. It does not necessarily follow that the study of contemporary literature is the only type of research in which completeness is possible or that it is the easiest to carry out. On the contrary, it entails difficulties that purely historical studies are free from-lack of perspective, ignorance of what is to come (the past is always illuminated by acquaintance with later outcomes). But it is no less true that history cannot but profit immensely from a comparison of facts from the past with those from the present and that, in particular, acquaintance with the present provides a sure means of introducing, in the reconstruction of an epoch, necessary corrections of historical evidence.

The tendency to discover an intrinsic deter- mination of literary evolution is manifest in the great number of investigations into the forces and causes that intervene in that evolution. The declared objectives of diverse literary groups, their victories and defeats, are thought to ex- press a certain vitality of a given literary form, and this vitality turns out to be determined by the connection between an epoch's literary problems and solutions. The dominant literature

of an epoch will be that which has found the most acceptable solution to the problems posed by the literature of the preceding epoch.

Those researching national causes of literary revolutions have been especially drawn to this idea of an intrinsically determined literary evolution, which has led them to neglect foreign influ- ences somewhat. International literary relations are a subject of scrupulous study, but accounts of the transfer of ideas and literary facts from one

country to another focus on explaining the national causes that brought about the recourse to foreign models. For example, the study of Shake- speare's influence in France during the period of Romantic drama should rely on study of the de-

velopment of the French tragic tradition: a crisis in the latter induced dramatists to borrow certain elements of tragedy from the English. The evolution of the French theater, in other words, made borrowing necessary. Thus, the influence of Dos- toevsky and Tolstoy on the French novel is a problem in the national evolution of the French novel and not a fact imposed from outside that diverted French literature from its natural course. The as- similation of foreign elements is essentially an act of adaptation. Literature in translation must be studied as a constituent element of each nation's literature. Next to the French Beranger and the German Heine, there exist a Russian Beranger and Heine who answer to the needs of Russian literature and who were undoubtedly quite distant from their namesakes in the West.

Thus, history and doctrine (the Russians call the latter "poetics") intersected and influenced each other in the research of the new school. Poet- ics oriented itself toward a study of the historical function of artistic procedures. History recognized the necessity of a prior description of the internal architecture of the work being studied.

Monographs related to technique were typical of the first stages on the formalists' path. They studied rhythm by itself, language by itself, as well as the melody of verse, the system of images, lyrical composition, rhyme, versifi-

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cation, and so forth. Worth remembering in this connection are Zhirmunsky's studies on the

composition of lyric poems, his comparative analysis of the poetry of Pushkin and Brusov, Eikhenbaum's investigation of the melody of

lyric poems, and a number of research studies on verse rhythm,6 Tynianov's study of the seman- tics of poetry, Vinogradov's fertile research on the stylistics of prose in Gogol and Dostoevsky, and others. The formalists looked for the dominant elements constituting the originality of the work and determined their distribution, and they stuck to that, neglecting, to some extent, the rest of the text. These critics were careful to specify the boundaries separating poetics from linguistics, and questions pertaining to these two domains of philology nearly always occupied the most important place in their writings.

But gradually they approached the problems presented by the conception of a work in its

entirety; monographs devoted to diverse writers sanctioned this development. It was necessary to

pass from the study of facts and distributions to that of entire systems, wherein the elements studied separately combined. From then on artistic methods were viewed in the light of their relative value in the system of the writer's

complete works. The notion of poetic function emerged in its full significance. The purely de-

scriptive studies of the first period were followed

by "functional" studies that connected particular observations to general conceptions. The mechanism of literary evolution became clear little by little: it presented itself not as a succession of forms being substituted for each other but as a continual variation in the aesthetic function of

literary techniques. Each work takes its coordi- nates from its literary situation and each element from the entire work. A given feature [of a literary work] possessing a determinate value in a certain epoch will undergo a complete change of function in another epoch. Grotesque forms, which were considered resources of the comic in the classical period, became one of the sources of the tragic in the Romantic period. In the con-

tinual change of function, the true life of the

components of the literary work reveals itself.

Nothing reappears in its original form and function. A repeated word is no longer identical to itself: recollection of its first articulation is

enough to modify its significance.

It would be difficult to follow the devel-

opment of the new school's doctrines any fur- ther. Assembled for the fight, its followers had marched in tight formation as long as the fight had lasted. Now that the controversy has calmed, all have gone on to their own work, their special research projects. It is difficult to get a clear view in the midst of scattered efforts and ideas that are still being formulated. It is important now to consider individuals rather than a school as an intellectual unity. Contemporary literary historians can be classified in three groups according to their relations with the new school: the orthodox, the independents, and those it has influenced.

The orthodox are those loyal to OPOYAZ.

They represent the extreme left of formalism. The best known among them are Shklovsky, Ei- khenbaum, and Tynianov. The independents took part in the creation of the formalist school and contributed to its works, but they do not

accept the school's control and have chosen a

separate path: for example, Zhirmunsky and Vi-

nogradov. As for those the school influenced, it would be fanciful to pretend to enumerate them. One may disagree about the value of formalism's ideas and the works of its disciples, but their influence is incontestably fertile and stimulating. This influence has two causes. The first one is social: the young have carried their doctrine from academic sanctuaries into the street; their discus- sions have mobilized the youth, awakening interest in literary questions among many readers; the word "poetics"-that is, "tenets of the art of poetry"-so pedantic some twenty years ago, has entered into use in teaching, and the younger generation, with a full knowledge of the facts, is better prepared than its forebears to assess questions of literature. On the other hand-and this is

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the second reason for the influence of formalism-the formalists carried out critical work that will make a difference: their revision of ideas

passed down by tradition reanimated literary his-

tory and brought historians back to literature considered in itself and for itself. We now know that it is impossible to neglect the specific components of a poetic work without falling into gross mistakes. We now know that facts can be determined, described, and interpreted with a methodological precision that guarantees ob- jectivity. "Poetics"-once a domain of entirely subjective sensations, of almost unconscious

personal impressions, inexpressible except in formulaic statements of appreciation-has become a subject of rational study, the concrete problem of the science of literature. It is not an

exaggeration to say that, seen from a distance, the movement created by formalism is nothing less than a renaissance of Russian philology.

NOTES 1 This article does not claim to present a complete pic-

ture of the works on the history of Russian literature that have appeared in Russia during the past few years. Only the so-called formalist school-and in particular its representa- tives in Leningrad, who constitute the school's most active group-will be considered. This school is not unified, but in a summary as concise as this one, one may neglect small differences to stress the ideas more or less shared by all. Since the evolution of literary concepts in the new school is quite rapid, it would be difficult to pin down today's ideas, and hence my account will have an essentially historical character. I did not think it necessary to delimit the part contributed by each person in the creation and development of our ideas. It goes without saying that what is said here is my responsibility and not that of the group to which I belong.

2 OPOYAZ has never been a regular society with a list of members, a registered office, and statutes. Nevertheless, during the most active years, it had a semblance of organiza- tion in the form of a committee consisting of a president, Viktor Shklovsky; his assistant, Boris Eikhenbaum; and Yury Tynianov as the society's secretary.d

3 The new school profited in several respects from ideas of Potebnya and Veselovsky (for Veselovsky, see B. Kazan-

sky's study on the idea of historical poetics in the collection Poetika, 1926; cf. the account of Veselovsky's ideas in B. Engelgardt's book on Veselovsky).

4 In his studies appearing in the collection Symbolism (1910), Andrey Bely, in certain respects, foreshadowed the formalists. His research on Russian iambic verse had a great influence on later studies. His idea of experimental aesthetics contained a germ of formalism. However, the system of Bely's ideas has never been accepted by the formalists, and his later studies (Glossolalia, etc.) have been sharply at- tacked by people who were doubtless his students.

5 One cannot help noticing this emphasis in the titles of the first studies published by OPOYAZ: "KaK cAejiaHa <<III- Hejib> roroJIa" ["How Gogol's 'The Overcoat' Is Made"] and "KaK cAeiiaH <<?AOH KHXOT>?" ["How Don Quixote Is Made"].

6 The old school studied rhythm apart from its actual use. Language was only the neutral material in the crucible of the musical principle. Our stress fell on the elements constituting verse and on rhythmic phenomena. Poetry is not the sum of certain rules and the language of prose: it is a language sui generis, with its own laws, which are different from those of everyday language; it is born from language itself and is essentially involved in the nature of speech, but speech is transformed by aesthetic use. Hence, what reveals the secret of verse to us is neither music nor some abstract principle but the art of speaking.

EDITOR'S NOTES a In fact, Moscow Linguistic Circle was founded in

1915. Tomashevsky became a member in 1919. b The Russian word is cIOxeT (sjuzet), whose dictionary

meaning is "plot." Shklovsky's usage alters and expands the term to mean the transformation and reordering of the social, psychological, biographical, mythological, and other materials guided by a specific artistic function dominant in the given aesthetic artifact. Thefabula-sjuzet distinction is a literary incarnation of the opposition between material and construction that, according to Shklovsky, delimits the work of art and sustains its identity. In parallel with his study of literature, Shklovsky used this methodological schema to theorize film, performance, the circus, painting, and eventually television.

c "Motivation," in Shklovsky's sense, refers to the justi- fication that a writer provides for a character, action, description, or event in a story. For example, if an event in a text is well motivated, the reader accepts it as believable.

d Having arrived in Petersburg when the State Institute of the History of Arts de facto replaced the classic OPOYAZ, Tomashevsky has been led astray by the informal spirit of the group. The Central State Archive of Saint Petersburg contains two lists of OPOYAZ membership and a registra- tion letter addressed to Petrosovet in 1921.

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