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The early-twentieth-century Russian debate on the place of tragedy in Dostoevsky's novels included interventions by the leading figure of the symbolist movement in Russia, Vyacheslav Ivanov; by the philosophically minded literary historian Lev Pumpyansky; and by the author of the most formidable analysis of Dostoevsky's poetics to date, Mikhail Bakhtin. From the perspective of a certain widespread vision of modernity, the project of thinking the modern novel and tragedy together is paradoxical. It is thus noteworthy that such a project seemed urgent to major Russian intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s and that it frequently relied on the articulation of an implicitly exceptionalist narrative about Russian modernity and its proper forms. Additionally, staging the three-way debate among Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin allows us to see that Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky as a modern novelist par excellence is conceptually tied to the largely occluded theory of the tragic.

This essay explores the manner in which the persistence of literary forms in history has been addressed by the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics (Alexander Veselovsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian Formalism) and within a certain strain of Western Marxism (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson). The discussion is in part descriptive and in part programmatic: a reconstruction that does not pretend to do full justice to any one of these thinkers independently but strives to outline a field, the various inflections of which produce complementary perspectives and points of emphasis. The focus is on the central problematic of the paradigm: an attempt to construct a universal history of literary forms in their relation to the social conditions — and modes — of their production on the basis of a certain understanding of the past's vitality and mobility in the present.

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