No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution arrives together with a few remarkable centennials in the field of literary studies: Viktor Shklovskii's "Resurrection of the Word" appeared in 1914; his talk on "Art as Device" at a Petrograd café dates to 1916; the Moscow Linguistic Circle was founded in 1915 by a group of students led by Roman Jakobson, Petr Bogatyrev, and Grigorii Vinokur; and OPOIAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) formed in Petrograd a year later on the initiative of Viktor Shklovskii and Osip Brik (Boris Eikhenbaum and Iurii Tynianov would join shortly after). In this connection, it is worth noting how Formalists themselves were keen on joint anniversaries.In his pamphlet "5 = 100," published in Book Corner in 1922, Boris Eikhenbaum looked back at the first few years of Formalist activity in parallel with the recent social and political upheavals, and he compared the deep renovation that the OPOIAZ circle was bringing about in the field of literary studies to the revolutions that had shaken and transformed the country in 1917. He defined the emergence of the Formal method as a revolution in its own right: "I decided to write in a tone that is not commemorative, but celebratory. What are we celebrating? . . . the revolution; and philology. Russia certainly comes out of the revolution with a new science of the artistic word." In "On the 'Formalist' Question," he would restate that "[w]ithin literary studies Formalism is a revolutionary movement, since it clears the field of old ossified traditions and prompts it to reassess and reformulate all its schemes and fundamental principles." 2 The "filologicheskaia revoliutsiia" (philological revolution) saluted by Eikhenbaum would have long-term repercussions on the way literary studies would be conducted and understood for the next hundred years in western institutions. To spell out the foundational role of the Russian Formalists in formulating literary theory as we know it and in setting the direction of western cultural studies over the past century would equate to stating the obvious. The Formal method, its protagonists, and their formulations were steeped in a specific historical moment and cultural milieu, of which the Russian Formalists were a product and which they in turn shaped consistently. At the same time, the longevity of their methodologies transcended all major historical contingencies-the increasing questioning of an exclusively text-centered poetics, the turn of the screw in the arts, and the waning of the avant-gardes, to which the earlier phase of Formalist formulations and statements were indissolubly tied-and carried their legacy remarkably far in time and space. Both these dimensions-the circumscribed sphere of their cultural production, and the universality of their theoretical claims-ought

No abstract