Russian Formalism

A Metapoetics

Peter Steiner

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780801417108
• eBook ISBN: 9781501707018
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

Russian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism to date. Steiner studies the work of the Formalists in terms of the major tropes that characterized their thought. He first considers those theorists who viewed a literary work as a mechanism, an organism, or a system. He then turns to those who sought to reduce literature to its most basic element—language—and who consequently replaced poetics with linguistics. Throughout, Steiner elucidates the basic principles of the Formalists and explores their contributions to the study of poetics, literary history, the theory of literary genre, and prosody. Russian Formalism is an authoritative introduction to the movement that was a major precursor of contemporary critical thought.

1

Who Is Formalism, What Is She?

History as a scholarly discipline recognizes only a single source of its knowledge—the word.

—Gustav Špet, “History as an Object of Logic”

These words of Špet’s encapsulate the historian’s dilemma. Writing about a school of literary theory from the past, I indeed have nothing but words at my disposal and no Polonius as a whipping boy. “Words are chameleons,” declared the Formalist Jury Tynjanov, whose own words I shall soon have occasion to reclothe in my own language; his phrase in turn is borrowed from a famous Symbolist poet, with whose generation the Formalists had locked horns in an animated dialogue. Words change meaning as they pass from one context to another, and yet they preserve the semantic accretions acquired in the process.

“Russian Formalism” is just such a locus communis out of which the history of ideas is made. Such terms are used over and over again until their repetition lends them the air of solid, universally accepted concepts whose referential identity is beyond doubt. A closer scrutiny, however, reveals a different picture. On sifting through the myriad texts in which “Russian Formalism” occurs, I discovered a wide diversity of functions the term was meant to serve: for example, as a stigma with unpleasant consequences for anybody branded with it, a straw man erected only to be immediately knocked over, and a historical concept that on different occasions refers to very different literary scholars. Given the wide divergence of these speech acts (the preceding list can be easily augmented), “Russian Formalism,” far from serving as a stable basis for scholarly discussion, resembles more an empty sign that might be filled with any content.

Let me illustrate this contention with some concrete examples. Those we customarily call Formalists always rejected the label as a grossly misleading characterization of their enterprises. In his tongue-in-cheek essay, “The Formal Method: In Lieu of a Necrologue,” Boris Tomaševskij described the baptism of this movement:

Formalism screamed, seethed, and made a noise. It also found its own name—“OPOJAZ.” In Moscow it was called the Linguistic Circle (by the way, the Moscow linguists never called themselves Formalists; this is a Petersburg phenomenon).

It is worthwhile to say a few words about the name. Only its future biographer will have to decide who christened it the “Formal method.” Perhaps in those noisy days it itself courted this ill-suited designation. [But] Formalists who rejected the very notion of form as something opposed to content do not seem to square too well with this formula.1

Boris Èjchenbaum voiced similar objections to the label “Formal method” in his gloves-off polemics with contemporary anti-Formalists:

First of all, there is obviously no “Formal method.” It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle cry but it failed as an objective term that delimits the activities of the “Society for the Study of Poetic Language” (“OPOJAZ”) and the Section for Verbal Arts at the Institute for the History of the Arts….

What is at stake are not the methods of literary study but the principles upon which literary science should be constructed—its content, the basic object of study, and the problems that organize it as a specific science….

The word “form” has many meanings which, as always, cause a lot of confusion. It should be clear that we use this word in a particular sense—not as some correlative to the notion of “content” (such a correlation is, by the way, false, for the notion of “content” is, in fact, the correlative of the notion “volume” and not at all of “form”) but as something essential for the artistic phenomenon, as its organizing principle. We do not care about the word “form” but only about its one particular nuance. We are not “Formalists” but, if you will, specifiers.2

Èjchenbaum was not the only member of the Formal school to suggest a more fitting name. “Morphological school,” “expressionist” approach, and “systemo-functional” approach are only some of the labels concocted. This wealth of designations, however, indicates not merely dissatisfaction with the existing nomenclature, but a fundamental disunity in the movement itself. In part this disunity was a function of geography. From its very beginnings, Russian Formalism was split into two different groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle with such young scholars as Pëtr Bogatyrëv, Roman Jakobson, and Grigorij Vinokur, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ, which included Boris Èjchenbaum, Viktor Šklovskij, and Jurij Tynjanov, among others. Even though their relations were cordial, the two groups approached literature from different perspectives. According to the Muscovites Bogatyrëv and Jakobson, “while the Moscow Linguistic Circle proceeds from the assumption that poetry is language in its aesthetic function, the Petersburgers claim that the poetic motif is not always merely the unfolding of linguistic material. Further, while the former argue that the historical development of artistic forms has a sociological basis, the latter insist upon the full autonomy of these forms.”3

The reorganization of scholarly life under the Soviet regime further encouraged these divergences. OPOJAZ was dissolved in the early twenties, to be incorporated into the State Institute for the History of the Arts in Petersburg. The Moscow Circle—transformed by the departures of Jakobson and Bogatyrëv in 1920 for Czechoslovakia—became part of the State Academy for the Study of the Arts in Moscow. In these two research centers, the original Formalists began to collaborate with other students of literature and entered into an exchange of ideas with significance for both sides. Many Formalist notions were accepted by non-Formalists, and in turn, the Formalists modified their views in response to the intellectual trends around them. This dialogue produced a wide spectrum of literary-theoretical ideas labeled “Formalist.”

Though this dilution of “pure” Formalism occurred in both branches, it was the Muscovites who were most deeply influenced by the philosophical ideas propounded at the State Academy by Edmund Husserl’s pupil, Gustav Špet. This intellectual cross-pollination gave rise to what some commentators have termed the “formal-philosophical school” of the late twenties, within whose orbit belonged such literary scholars as Michail Petrovskij, Grigory Vinokur, and Michail Stoljarov.4 Rejecting the iconoclastic tenor of early Formalism, the members of this group rehabilitated many concepts and methods of traditional philology. The introduction to their 1927 anthology, Artistic Form, announced what the followers of Špet perceived as their special character: “In contrast to the Formalists of the ‘OPOJAZ’ type who usually confine their research to the sphere of outer form, we understand artistic form here as ‘inner form.’ Thus we pose the question [of artistic form] more broadly and seek its solution in the interrelations of various forms—logical, syntactic, melodic, poetic per se, rhetorical, etc.”5

Given the vicissitudes of geography and history, the identity of Russian Formalism might be sought more profitably outside its organizational structures. One possibility advocated by Tomaševskij in his informative survey, “The New School of Literary History in Russia,” was to focus on the protagonists of this movement in order to distinguish the core of genuine Formalists from the peripheral fellow travelers:

It is people that one should consider now, rather than a school constituting an intellectual unity. Contemporary historians of literature can be classified, according to their relations with the new school, into three groups: the orthodox, the independents, and the influenced.

The orthodox are those faithful to OPOJAZ. They represent the extreme left of Formalism. The best known among them are Šklovskij, Èjchenbaum, and Tynjanov. The independents took part in the creation of the Formalist school and contributed to its works, but did not accept its discipline and went their separate ways: thus, Žirmunskij and Vinogradov. As for the influenced, it would be futile to pretend to specify their number.6

The classification of the Formalists drawn by Tomaševskij has all the authority of an eye-witness account. Yet one wonders what the common denominator between Šklovskij and Tynjanov actually is. This question cannot be dismissed easily, for there are historians of the Formalist movement who see these key figures as quite dissimilar. Ewa Thompson, for example, divides the Russian Formal school into “idealistic” and “positivistic” trends, with Šklovskij gravitating toward idealistic aesthetics and Tynjanov a clear-cut representative of the positivistic orientation.7 For quite different reasons, Jury Striedter also maintains that the two leading Formalists are conceptually distant. Šklovskij’s notion of the artistic work “as a ‘sum of devices’ with the function of ‘de-familiarization’ to make ‘perception more difficult’” was, in Striedter’s opinion, rendered obsolete by Tynjanov’s more comprehensive definition of the artwork “as a ‘system’ composed of devices whose functions are specified synchronically and diachronically.”8 And although to their contemporaries the difference between the two men might have appeared unimportant, within Striedter’s developmental scheme it is of great significance. According to Striedter, Šklovskij stands as the orthodox Formalist, whereas Tynjanov turns out to be the John the Baptist of Structuralism.

There is yet another reason Tomaševskij’s categorization should be taken cum grano salis. His “state of the movement” is presented from a particular standpoint: that of the insider. This perspective might, of course, be instructive in some respects, for he was privy to information unavailable to strangers. But, at the same time, his point of view is that of the movement he belonged to, and this collective ideology inevitably slanted his presentation. Tomaševskij’s contemporary, the psychologically inclined critic Arkady Gornfel’d, for example, wrote in 1922 that “the Formalists are, of course, very diverse: there are among them simple-minded ones like Kušner and Šengeli clumsily parodying the method, talented thieves like Viktor Šklovskij, and cautious eclectics like Zirmunskij.”9 Boris Arvatov, the father of the “formalist-sociological” approach, cut the pie in the following way: “The researchers of OPOJAZ do not represent anything homogeneous. On the contrary, by now three different groups can be discerned in it: the extreme right which insists on the total separation of poetry and praxis (Èjchenbaum, Žirmunskij), the center adhering to a so-called linguo-poetic theory (Jakobson, Šklovskij), and the extreme left—sociological and technological (Brik, Kušner).”10 Wary of other critics’ triads, the Marxist Pavel Medvedev identified four trends in Formalism: “The first tendency is an academic Formalism characterized by its desire to gloss over contradictions and to avoid a formulation of problems according to a single principle” (Žirmunskij); “the second tendency amounts to a partial return to the psychological and philosophical treatment of literary problems” (Èjchenbaum); “a shift toward the sociological method characterizes the third tendency” (Tomaševskij, Jakubinskij); and “finally the fourth tendency is Šklovskij’s frozen Formalism.”11

This sampling of contradictory, incompatible classifications applied to the Formalists illustrates the futility of any attempt to pin down the identity of this movement by sorting out its central and marginal protagonists. Ultimately, it seems, one must come to the same conclusion as Medvedev, that “there are as many Formalisms as there are Formalists.”12 This conclusion, however, should not be interpreted as a sign of hostility toward the Formalist enterprise or of deliberate perversity on the commentator’s part. It corresponds to the methodological pluralism of the Formalist approach openly displayed by its practitioners. In his stock-taking article, “The Question of the ‘Formal Method,’” Viktor Žirmunskij characterized the Formal school in this way:

The general and vague name “Formal method” usually ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1 Who Is Formalism, What Is She?
• 2 The Three Metaphors
• 3 A Synecdoche
• 4 The Developmental Significance of Russian Formalism
• Index