The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond 9781503609730

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T H E B IR T H A N D D E AT H O F L I T E R A RY T H EO RY

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THE BIR TH A ND DE ATH OF LITERARY THEORY REGIME S OF RELE VANCE

IN RUSSIA AND BEYOND

GALIN TIHANOV

S T A N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S  STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tihanov, Galin, author. Title: The birth and death of literary theory : regimes of relevance in Russia and beyond / Galin Tihanov. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018057691 (print) | LCCN 2018059673 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609730 | ISBN 9780804785228 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Criticism—Russia (Federation)—History—20th century. | Literature— History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Formalism (Literary analysis)—Influence. Classification: LCC PN99.R9 (ebook) | LCC PN99.R9 T54 2019 (print) | DDC 801/.950947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057691 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover image: Olga Rozanova, Non-Objective Composition. Oil on canvas, 62 cm x 84.2 cm, 1917. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

FOR ADELINA

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue: What This Book Is and Is Not About

1

Introduction: The Radical Historicity of Literary Theory

9

1 Russian Formalism: Entanglements at Birth and Later Reverberations

26

2 A Skeptic at the Cradle of Theory: Gustav Shpet’s Reflections on Literature

68

3 Toward a Philosophy of Culture: Bakhtin beyond Literary Theory

96

4 The Boundaries of Modernity: Semantic Paleontology and Its Subterranean Impact

134

5 Interwar Exiles: Regimes of Relevance in Émigré Criticism and Theory

152

Epilogue: A Fast-Forward to “World Literature”

175

Notes

187

Bibliography

217

Index

245

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been enriched not only by the works of the thinkers whose paths it follows, but also by the contributions—tangible and intangible—of many scholars, colleagues, students, and friends who have been part of my work on it. The book originates in a conference paper which subsequently became an article in the journal Common Knowledge, attracting many responses. Immediately after the conference, Caryl Emerson, Bill Todd, Katerina Clark, Irina Paperno, and Laura Engelstein began encouraging me to write an entire book on the birth and death of literary theory; for this encouragement—then and over the years—I remain deeply grateful to them all. I was skeptical at the time, because I believed that the article format is better suited to my argument and concise style of presentation. Time has proved them right: the need to demonstrate the radical historicity of literary theory and its embeddedness in a particular regime of relevance that valorizes literature in ways so different from those before and after that, just as the compelling question about the legacies of literary theory, could not be addressed within the confines of that original text. As my research in this field evolved, I felt increasingly empowered to expand and nuance my argument by drawing wider comparative parallels. Continuing to think as an intellectual historian, I have been at pains to discern the foundational paradoxes of literary theory, its time-limited manifestations concealed behind an illusion of timelessness. I am indebted for their knowledge, friendship, and collegiality over many years to Alison Finch, Ann Jefferson, Catriona Kelly, Jim Reed, Ritchie Robertson, Andreas Schönle, David Shepherd, Gerry Smith, and Andrei Zorin. For various gestures of kindness, large and small, I am grateful to colleagues and friends working in cognate fields, among them Sanja Bahun, Craig Brandist, Andy Byford, Catherine Depretto, Ben Dhooge, Rossen Djagalov, Aleksandr Dmitriev, Evgeny Dobrenko, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Vladimir Feshchenko, Lazar Fleishman, Susanne Frank, Matthias Freise, Boris Gasparov, Bruno

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Gomide, Jens Herlth, Anke Hennig, Ken Hirschkop, Stephen Hutchings, Tomi Huttunen, Valentina Izmirlieva, Ilya Kalinin, Soo-Hwan Kim, Ilya Kliger, Adam Kola, Ilya Kukulin, Vladimir Laptun, Anne Lounsbery, Mark Lipovetsky, Michał Mrugalski, Oleg Osovsky, Igor Pilshchikov, Kevin Platt, Nikolai Plotnikov, Fedor Poliakov, Irina Popova, Kirill Postoutenko, Sally Pratt, Dušan Radunović, Harsha Ram, Alastair Renfrew, Douglas Robinson, Maria Rubins, Gabriela Safran, Sergeiy Sandler, Irina Sandomirskaia, Irina Savelieva, Schamma Schahadat, Tamás Scheibner, Ulrich Schmid, Thomas Seifrid, Patrick Sériot, Nariman Skakov, Peter Steiner, Clive Thomson, Vera Tolz, Danuta Ulicka, Ekaterina Velmezova, Michael Wachtel, Anthony Wall, Annette Werberger, Georg Witte, Sergei Zenkin, Alexander Zholkovsky, and Andrea Zink. For their shared interest in comparative literature and world literature, their important research, and many good conversations, I would like to thank, among others, Alexander Beecroft, Vladimir Biti, Timothy Brennan, Helena Buescu, David Damrosch, Wiebke Denecke, Theo D’haen, César Dominguez, Angela Esterhammer, Oana Fotache, Marko Juvan, Djelal Kadir, Prafula Karr, Youngmin Kim, Dieter Lamping, Svend Erik Larsen, Laura Marcus, Aamir Mufti, Thomas Pavel, Martin Puchner, Bruce Robbins, David Quint, Haun Saussy, Igor Shaitanov, Robert Stockhammer, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Delia Ungureanu, and Robert Young. In China, I have learned from various colleagues, including Zhang Hui, Zhou Qichao, Nie Zhenzhao, Wang Ning, Fu Qilin, Weigui Fang, Hongzhang Wang, Luo Lianggong, Ling Jianhou, and Su Hui. For their friendship, which has helped me sustain the motivation to write this book, I am grateful to Mike Weaver, Anne Hammond, Philip Payne and his family, Philip Bullock, David Duff, Catherine Dille, Jay Wagner, Ventsislav Arnaudov, Ekaterina Temelkova, Ivo Vassilev, Nagore Calvo, Zoran Milutinović, Alan Kennedy, Piuzant Merdinian and his family, Charalambos Neophytou, Colin MacKinnon, and Habbo Knoch. I would like to record my profound debt to a number of people who are no longer with us but who have left lasting legacies: Sergei Bocharov, Malcolm Bowie, Svetlana Boym, Michael Holquist, Yuri Medvedev, John Neubauer, Anthony Nuttall, Nikolai Pankov, and Greta Slobin. Various institutions have supported my work over the years. My thanks to Queen Mary University of London, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and its Poletayev Institute, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. The “Cross-Language Dynamics:

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Reshaping Community” Research Programme of the AHRC Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) financed a number of research trips, especially my work on the Epilogue, as well as the compilation of the Index. I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Modern Languages at Queen Mary University of London, and to my fellow comparatists in the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS). Many colleagues and students have served as inspiration through their questions and contributions to discussions following my lectures as a visiting professor at universities in Brazil, China, India, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States. Finally, this book would not have materialized without the unconditional commitment, graceful patience, and helpful interventions of Emily-Jane Cohen, Faith Wilson Stein, and Tim Roberts at Stanford University Press. My most significant and ineffable debts are acknowledged in the dedication. *** Earlier versions of portions of this book—reworked, recomposed, and enriched by new research in the process of their incorporation here—have appeared in Common Knowledge, Poetics Today, Stanford Slavic Studies, in a volume on Bakhtin edited by David Shepherd, Craig Brandist, and myself for Manchester University Press; in a book on Gustav Shpet edited by me for Purdue University Press; in a volume on critical theory in Russia and the West that Alastair Renfrew and I edited for Routledge; and in my chapters and sections in the History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism, which Evgeny Dobrenko and I co-edited for the University of Pittsburgh Press. I am grateful to these journals and presses for their permission to draw on this material. GT, London, April 2019

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T H E B IR T H A N D D E AT H O F L I T E R A RY T H EO RY

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PROLOGUE Wh at Th i s Book Is an d Is No t A b o ut

This is a book about the foundational paradoxes of literary theory and the regimes of relevance in which it is embedded. The narrative I construct is as much an exercise in intellectual history as it is an attempt to grasp what thinking theoretically about literature involves over longer segments of time, which—because of their continuance and sheer duration—create an illusion of timelessness. Chronologically, the examination I offer is clustered around the interwar decades of the twentieth century, since I am interested in the twenty or so years in which literary theory first takes shape in competition with aesthetics and philosophy. Russian literary theory is the terrain I choose to explore, for there is no better and more compelling example of literary theory seeking to come into its own by trying to negotiate its space in constant engagement not just with philosophy but with pervasive grand narratives, such as Marxism and (to a lesser extent, and a point on which I do not dwell) psychoanalysis. This focus on the interwar decades, vital as it is if we want to understand how literary theory operates early on, is supplemented by attention to the present day: what happens once literary theory is no more, how can one capture its elusively seminal afterlives? The presuppositions of this book are partly Foucauldian, partly Derridean. The meaning I invest in the term “regime of relevance” harks back to Foucault, but here it has a more specific semantic compass: it refers to a historically available constellation of social and cultural parameters that shape the predominant understanding and use of literature for the duration of that particular constel-

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lation. I submit that literary theory is the product of one specific phase in the evolution of one particular regime of relevance. Methodical reflection on literature, known to have existed in the Western tradition at least since Plato, should not be confused with literary theory. Literary theory is only a particular shade of that phenomenon; disciplined, rational thinking about literature does not come to an end with the demise of literary theory as a unique and time-limited episode in that disciplined, rational reflection. What makes this episode both characteristic and important is that it unfolds within the bedrock of a distinct, equally unique and time-limited, regime of relevance that posits and circumscribes literature’s significance. To put it briefly, and in anticipation of the more elaborated argument I offer in the book, this specific regime of relevance sees literature as an autonomous discourse that tends to differ—in various ways and to a varying degree—from other discourses: journalistic, philosophical, quotidian, and so forth. This regime of relevance commences with the wider discursive formation we still refer to as Romanticism. But literary theory, I contend, was born later. Romanticism channels the notion of the autonomous worth of literature almost exclusively through the figure of the writer. With his doctrine of the literary field, Bourdieu has memorably rearticulated a long Romantic tradition of positioning literature as beneficially marginal, the product of writers who are both extraordinarily talented and unmistakably relegated to the periphery of society: prophets, madmen, outcasts. The Romantic notion of the writer as singled out, unusual, exceptional, and ultimately isolated—which casts its long shadow into the mid-nineteenth century (Carlyle, one example instead of many) and beyond (the potency of the writer-destroyer in Italian Futurism and in Dada is only the opposite version of this image)—translated the autonomy of literature through the language of personal autonomy that often assumes the form of painfully individual effort. Our modern notion of exile was, not by chance, born in the folds of Romanticism: not only because the nascent European nationalisms eventually drew the boundaries of belonging to, and exclusion from, the polis and its culture, but because it was in the literature of the long eighteenth century that the writer was first consistently cultivated as an exile, an outcast from the habitual conventions of that same polis, not through forceful removal from it but by dint of his or her newly acquired burden of exceptionality. Exile remains a key aspect in the formation of literary theory, as I demonstrate in this book; it does so because literary theory seeks, of necessity, to flee the constraints of thinking about literature through the prism of a na-

P rologue   3

tional culture and a single national language; it wants to go further and establish what constitutes literature beyond the singularity of the language in which it happens to be written. Literary theory begins to do all this about a century after Romanticism had become a wider European phenomenon: precisely one hundred years separate the publication (in London) of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813), which signals the expansion of the Western core of Romanticism beyond England and France, from Viktor Shklovsky’s public proclamation, in a Saint Petersburg’s cabaret, of his belief in the “resurrection of the word” (1913), as the title of his speech (to be published as an essay the year after) read. Literary theory thus emerges at a later stage in the life-span of this particular regime of relevance that defines literature and its significance with reference to its autonomy. What is so distinct about literary theory is that it contemplates this autonomy (and the resulting uniqueness of literature as a discourse) not through the figure of the writer per se, but through language. This, in a sense, is the great breakthrough of the Russian Formalists around World War I: literature presents a specific and autonomous discourse, not because of the exceptionality of the writer who writes it, but because of the specific way in which language functions in it. Of course, after Derrida, we know that this is a claim that is not always possible to uphold: not because language in literature is not metaphoric or figurative, but because it is so not only in literature. Yet what the Formalists did, amounted nonetheless to a veritable revolution: the writer was taken out of the equation; for the first time what really mattered was the text and its language. This regime of relevance, in which literature is valued for its autonomy and uniqueness as a discourse that is unlike other discourses, breaks with previous regimes of relevance in which literature’s significance is linked to its capacity to convey ideas, emotions, or knowledge of the world, or to instigate socially and politically oriented actions. Those previous regimes of relevance foreground forms of writing that still preserve the links of literature to an earlier state of symbiosis with philosophical, historiographical, pedagogical, and political discourses. Suffice it to point to the genre of the philosophical novel (recall Voltaire) in the eighteenth century, or the novel of education and the historical novel in the next century, and we promptly obtain a good sense of this different regime of relevance in which literature is still an allegory, a tool of cultivation, and a transmission mechanism for values and ideas formed elsewhere—with the language of literature consistently taking a back seat, seldom seen as the prime reason why literature itself should be taken seriously. Even the Romantic notion

4    P rologue

of the writer as a guarantor of the autonomy of literature—through his or her own position of freedom, often at the price of voluntary exile and marginalization from society—still bears the marks of this older regime of relevance: a seer and a prophet, the distance of the artist from the polis, his independence, is, paradoxically, a form of moral engagement, of serving the public good by enunciating painful truths and exemplifying an unpalatable stance. All this changed around World War I with the work of the Russian Formalists, which was concomitant with artistic developments that emphasized the value of language as such, making it “difficult” (think of the Russian Futurists, whose formative impact on Formalism is well known) or “absurd,” deliberately denying it the status of a medium that expresses logically advanced arguments (think of Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos, which celebrate the power of literature to contradict itself, to be a safe haven for the absurd and the illogical). This new regime of relevance, with its insistence on grounding literature’s significance in the autonomy it derives from the special way in which language is used in it, sustained literary theory’s dominant position among other modes of reflecting on literature into the late 1980s. Of course, no one regime of relevance is ever available in pure form; rather, it is an abstraction that has heuristic purpose: to highlight that particular regime among others that are co-present and compete with it. The story of literary theory as a historically bounded way of thinking about literature can thus be told as the story of adaptive interaction, often also competition, with other ways of thinking about literature nurtured by these co-present regimes of relevance. Things are further complicated by recognizing the fact that literary theory itself incorporates competing strands; it evolves through divergence away from what might—in retrospect—be identified as its prevalent version at any one time. My book, then, essays to tell the story of literary theory in the twentieth century by focusing on the formative interwar decades. Russia is the natural terrain to explore, since nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, sharing room with other modes of reflecting upon literature. In fact, until the 1940s, when global awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread,1 literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention (I write more about this in the Introduction). Under pressure from the grand narratives of Marxism—probably the most resilient manifestation of a regime of relevance hostile to recognizing the autonomy of literature and its presumed “literariness,” embedded in the workings of language—literary theory was eventually to be canonized in the Soviet Union in the 1940s as

P rologue   5

what it didn’t want to be: a perspective on literature that would go back to the old regime of relevance, highlighting the social and political significance of literature and attending to language as little more than technical matter. But I do not seek to essentialize the “Russianness” of Russian theory; as a matter of fact, in the Introduction I dwell at length on what I call the radical historicity of literary theory, and throughout the book I draw substantive parallels between intellectual and artistic developments in Russia, Germany, and Eastern and Central Europe. Alongside the Foucauldian presupposition, there is also, as I signaled before, a Derridean premise on which my narrative builds. When I insist that literary theory is a historically circumscribed mode of thinking about literature—a specific mode that has a birth date and a point of dissolution—this is not necessarily a call to rejoice in its transitoriness. The death of literary theory has to be met with the same sanguinity with which one should register its birth. For the historian of intellectual formations, radical historicity is the only credible approach; I would even submit that our understanding of literary theory has been greatly skewed and impoverished by our reluctance to historicize it. The temptation to think of it as a timeless procedure rather than a form of reflection on literature shaped by a particular, historically valid regime of relevance has meant that over many decades literary theory has been perceived and taught as a phenomenon that is divorced from culture and society at large; what is worse, literary theory had often been decoupled from literature itself, forgetting that the former tracks developments and innovations in the latter. When we thus talk of the demise of literary theory, an inevitable offshoot of one particular regime of literature’s relevance coming to an end by the late 1980s, we do so not in order to indulge in the art of composing its obituary (undoubtedly a morbid business), nor even to sound an elegiac note of nostalgic appreciation,2 much as this might itself be an act of intellectual gallantry, but in order to pose—with due sanguinity, cultivated by the resilient practice of radical historicism—the important question of its legacy. In recognizably Derridean terms, it is only by acknowledging the death of literary theory that we can open up the conversation about its continuous significance. This legacy, as I demonstrate in the Epilogue to this book, is not available in a pure and concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, and often fittingly elusive. The reason for this is that this inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and which it must negotiate. As the last part of this book argues, the

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patrimony of literary theory is currently active within a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly treasured autonomy. The enduring legacy of literary theory is present in a spectral way: instead of assuming reliably material form, it is available solely relationally; it disintegrates every time one forgets that it is the volatile product of a past regime of relevance still at work within a new regime vis-à-vis which it is no longer dominant. My book, then, is perhaps best read not simply as an account of various exfoliations of literary theory in Russia during the interwar decades of the twentieth century—although this, too, could be a profitable way of approaching it. Ideally, it ought to be read as a narrative that selectively highlights versions of literary theory that help us understand its work and multiple impacts at the cusp of intersecting, often competing, regimes of relevance. Perhaps one final note of caution might be in order. The project I pursue here is demonstrably different from recent attempts to locate the birth of Theory. I use a capital T, for these are projects that understand by “theory” an important but somewhat softly defined object of analysis that gravitates toward a full overlap with Continental philosophy. There are two versions on display here, each represented by a seminal recent work. One is the equation of “theory” with French post-Structuralism; in this version, “theory” with a capital T unfolded in France in the second half of the 1960s and migrated to the United States in the mid-1970s. François Cusset, who has studied the process of this migration, has written persuasively about “French Theory” (to quote the title of his book published in France in 2003, in which the words “French Theory,” in English, drive home his point about the transformative power of Theory). Cusset makes an excellent argument about the possible reasons for this equation, or substitution. On reaching the shores of America, dominated as it was (and still is) by the traditions of analytic philosophy, French philosophy was appropriated not as philosophy per se but as a powerful method of analyzing (and putting in question) narratives: literary, religious, legal. Theory, in Cusset’s words, became “mysteriously intransitive”: no longer a theory of something, but “above all a discourse on itself.”3 The second version is the equation of Theory with the dialectical method, honed by Hegel but detectable before him (right down to medieval philosophy and letters, in Andrew Cole’s reconstruction). The linguistic element here remains as significant as it is evasive; what matters most is that Theory, in this second version, allows one to perform a move within philosophy away from philosophy, as Andrew Cole would have it

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when he associates the birth of Theory with Hegel.4 Again, the ensuing claim is all-encompassing: “theory historicizes thought, studying its materialization across disparate forms of human expression—music, literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy—either in a diachronic or synchronic analysis—or, aspirationally, both at once.”5 My narrative evolves differently. It wants to tell the multiple story of emergence, disappearance, and trace that focuses on a particular time-limited episteme. In this account, theory is a specific mode of reflection on literature, and hence “literary theory.”6 I begin by locating the birth of this episteme in the work of the Russian Formalists; then I proceed to examine a situation of abortive inception, in which literary theory does not manage to emancipate itself from the master discourses of aesthetics and philosophy that continue to keep their hold on Shpet’s approach to literature; in the chapters on Bakhtin and on Semantic Paleontology I am interested in exploring another scenario, in which what begins as reflection on literature swerves into the domain of philosophy of culture. Across all these chapters, language and its peregrinations are a major protagonist. The final chapter seeks to explain how established regimes of relevance are maintained, reworked, and challenged in the diasporic being of literature, while the Epilogue reattaches the historical narrative to current concerns and our current debates on world literature. Throughout the book, as I reflect on the fortunes of literary theory, I am in fact at pains to capture the contours of that which, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance.”7

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INTRODUCTION The Radi c al Hi s t ori c i t y of Li t e r a ry The o ry

This book draws many of its examples from Russian literary theory; it is important to de-essentialize this presumed “Russianness” by placing the inception of theory in a larger—and more diverse—cultural context whose contours encompass a space far beyond Russia. At the same time, de-essentialization involves thinking about literary theory as marked by radical historicity: it is the product of a particular historical constellation of factors, and as such it has a nonnegotiable life-span. To account for the emergence of literary theory, then, requires nothing short of a chronotopic approach: an emphasis on place and time, and on thicker cultural and intellectual plotlines that crystallize in that continuum. Modern literary theory was born in the decades between the World Wars, in Eastern and Central Europe—in Russia, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland—due to a set of intersecting cultural determinations and institutional factors.1 Before specifying them, I ought to recapitulate the contribution of Russia and Eastern and Central Europe to later developments in literary theory.2 This contribution would be difficult to overstate. Indeed, the advances in literary theory in its second “golden age,” the 1960s and 1970s, were to a large extent elaborations and variations on themes, problems, and solutions worked out in the interwar period in Russia and in Central and Eastern Europe. French Structuralism depended as much on Saussure as it did (however reluctant it was at times to acknowledge this) on the attainments of Russian Formalism and (perhaps to a lesser degree) the Prague Linguistic Circle, as well as on the formulation of

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the principles of phonology by Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson in the 1930s.3 Narratology—notwithstanding the differences discernible in its later versions since the 1950s—never quite severed itself from the legacy of Vladimir Propp, whose Morphology of the Folktale appeared as early as 1928.4 The Continental version of reception theory in the 1970s was anticipated in works of the Prague Linguistic Circle, above all those of Felix Vodička, who borrowed somewhat freely from Roman Ingarden.5 Finally, Marxist literary theory in its later heyday was deeply influenced by György Lukács’s works of the 1930s. It is obvious, too, however, that there have been trends in modern literary theory that evolved away from the determining effects of Eastern and Central European theory. A particularly good case in point is hermeneutics, which was widely deployed in the German humanities before being put to use in literary theory by E. D. Hirsch in the United States. In Germany, hermeneutics was slower to become literary theory as such, for it has always been more than literary. Nurtured by its deep roots in German theology and philosophy, hermeneutics (especially as practiced by Hans-Georg Gadamer) has had the status of a philosophy of culture and a method of cultural history—and this was so even in the case of works more obviously oriented toward literary analysis, such as Wilhelm Dilthey’s Poetry and Experience. It was only with the explorations of Hans-Robert Jauss, and with Peter Szondi’s work on literature (specifically Hölderlin), that German hermeneutics unequivocally assumed the distinct profile of a literary theory.6 In other words, the emergence of literary theory was conditional upon the process of disintegration and modification of monolithic philosophical approaches that occurred around the time of World War I. Though hermeneutics did not develop into a literary theory during the 1920s and 1930s, other philosophical paradigms were transformed to generate theoretical approaches more specifically germane to the study of literature. That sort of transformation is one of the major ways in which modern literary theory came into existence. The strongest case is, doubtless, the reworking of Marxism in its application to the interpretation of literature in the 1920s and 1930s, most seminally by Lukács; equally crucial are the modifications, produced roughly at the same time, of Husserlian philosophy in the work of Ingarden, who rendered phenomenology pertinent to the study of literary art and later influenced the work of Wolfgang Iser.7 A second venue we need to explore when discussing the birth of modern literary theory is that exemplified by the collective efforts—and for some years,

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the joint efforts—of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle. The emergence of literary theory in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s followed a path different from those of Lukács and Ingarden. In Leningrad, Moscow, and Prague literary theory reflected a need to confront, make sense of, and give support to fresh and radical modes of creative writing that were making themselves felt in the Futurist environment of the Russian avant-garde and the largely Surrealist milieu in Czechoslovakia. In Russia, Viktor Shklovsky made the cardinal discovery a theorist could hope to make: that the true Other of literary theory is literature itself. Thinking about literature, in other words, altered radically in the earlier twentieth century because of changes in literature itself, on the one hand, and changes in—exfoliations of—some important meta-discourses of Continental philosophy, on the other. The non-identity and separation of these two sets of factors is, of course, a heuristic abstraction that is convenient for our purposes, but also, to a large degree, verifiable. Before dwelling in more detail on these two scenarios, I should emphasize one vital point in my account. In three of these four instances (the Russian Formalists, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and Roman Ingarden), we are dealing with a resurgence of creative freedom in the aftermath of radical historical events. In both Czechoslovakia and Poland (if not in Horthy’s Hungary), the interwar years were a period of a secondary national revival after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is essential to realize that both Russian Formalism and, even more straightforwardly, the Prague Linguistic Circle were inherently linked to the process of constructing a new state with a new political identity. As I demonstrate in the first chapter, the Formalists’ engagement with leftist art was much more than a perfunctory demonstration of loyalty or a ploy designed to gain tactical advantages. After all, two of the most seminal and innovative theoretical pieces of the mature Formalists—Yuri Tynianov’s “On Literary Evolution” (1927) and Boris Eikhenbaum’s “Literature and the Literary Everyday” (1927)—were both published in Na literaturnom postu (On the Literary Guard), a journal of the radical leftist Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). (Eikhenbaum’s article indicated his departure from Formalism to sociology of literature, for which he was criticized both by fellow Formalists, such as Shklovsky, and by Eikhenbaum’s orthodox Marxist disciples, such as Vol'pe.) Yet the shaping force of the political environment should not be overstated. Modern literary theory developed at the intersection between national en-

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thusiasms and a cultural cosmopolitanism that transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia.8 For a number of years, the activities of the Russian Formalists took place in a climate of enhanced mobility and benefited from the exchange of ideas between metropolitan and émigré Russian culture. In equal measure, the foundations of Formalism were laid by scholars, many of them Jewish, who were steeped in more than one cultural tradition and felt at ease with the ethnic and cultural diversity of both Moscow and imperial Saint Petersburg: Jakobson, Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, and the Polish linguist (of French descent) Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, among others. Jakobson is a particularly important example: his emigration from Russia to Czechoslovakia was crucial in internationalizing the Prague Linguistic Circle, as was his cooperation with Petr Bogatyrev and the Russian émigré Nikolai Trubetzkoy (at the time already based in Vienna). We should also recall that Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and Bogatyrev were each writing in at least two or three languages, as were Lukács and Ingarden, who availed themselves of German as well as their native Hungarian and Polish. Lukács himself spent more than two decades in exile, in Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow. In the end Lukács would feel a stranger even in Budapest, as reports by those who knew him in the late 1940s suggest. Too Eastern for the West and too Western for the East, he seems to have exemplified the fluidity entailed in being a Mitteleuropäer, with all its blessings and predicaments.9 The lives of Lukács, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Shklovsky (during the time of his forced migration to Berlin), and also of René Wellek, compel us to consider the enormous importance of exile and emigration for the birth of modern literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe. The same pattern became productive again after World War II when, in the 1950s through the 1970s, the center of theory gradually shifted toward France and francophone theorists: the RomanianJewish Lucien Goldmann, the Lithuanian-born Algirdas Greimas, and—on the crest of another wave of emigration—the Bulgarian-born Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva significantly enriched semiotics, narratology, Structuralism (and post-Structuralism), Marxist literary theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Yet exile and emigration in the 1920s and 1930s differed—in their cultural status—from the parallel experience after World War II. Whereas the newcomers on the Paris intellectual scene (Greimas, Todorov, Kristeva) received their doctorates from French universities, the prominent figures of the generation active in the 1920s and 1930s were educated and had matured in their countries and cultures of origin (the exception is Jakobson, who received his doctorate

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in Czechoslovakia, although even he had arrived in Prague as an already accomplished philologist). Similarly, while Greimas, Todorov, Kristeva, and to a lesser extent also Goldmann, may be confidently described as culturally assimilated, Lukács, Jakobson, Bogatyrev, and Trubetzkoy, in what was one of the most productive stages of their careers, did not go so far in adopting their host cultures. More exiles than established émigrés, they were immersed in a genuinely heterocultural environment and, more important, made a point of preserving a fully bilingual existence as intellectuals. The second wave lost that bilingualism: its theory was produced almost exclusively in French. This interpretation of exile as an enabling factor that unlocks creativity can be reinforced and extended by examining the birth of a related field of enquiry in the interwar decades. In equal measure, one could argue, modern comparative literature begins life in exile, with the Istanbul works of Auerbach and Spitzer and their postwar continuation in the United States.10 The qualifier “modern” is not trivial here: I mean by this a comparative literature that has moved beyond the nineteenth-century model of examining cultural bilateralisms and exchanges between nations11 and has instead embraced, as with Auerbach and Spitzer, a wider perspective that focuses on larger supranational categories: modes of representation, style, genre, and so on. Auerbach and Spitzer behaved, of course, differently in Istanbul. Spitzer was eager to learn Turkish and to immerse himself in the local culture; Auerbach hardly looked further than German and French in his communication with colleagues and in his teaching. But despite that, he wasn’t a total stranger either (contrary to the propensity to portray him, in the Romantic vein, as an example of creative solitude), working as he did in a city where Atatürk’s indigenous—and rather proactive—revival of humanist values marked the scene at the time.12 But to argue from exile alone would leave out of the picture outstanding Central and East European theorists like Roman Ingarden, Jan Mukařovský, and Felix Vodička. We require a more inclusive account, one that explains the conditions that shaped the work of both the exiles and those who stayed behind in the newly formed independent states. Although these countries gained independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and in Poland’s case also from Germany and Russia), national pride and zealous labor on behalf of the new states did not in any sense mean a break from the German cultural orbit. In Prague, a German university continued its activities; intellectuals educated in Germany remained leading authorities in various spheres of Hungarian and Polish social life. German periodicals and bilingual editions were printed and

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freely circulated. The Hungarian German-language newspaper Pester Lloyd, in which Lukács as a young man published several texts, appeared in Budapest for eight decades from the 1850s until World War II. Now on firmer ground, more stable, and enjoying support from the young independent states, the Czech and Polish intelligentsia regarded the German cultural presence with less anxiety. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Linguistic Circle distanced itself from the parochialism of anti-German purism; it also recognized the existence of Slovak as a separate language, though the constitution of the new republic spoke of a single “Czechoslovak” nation and a single “Czechoslovak” language.13 It was not by accident that the new departures in linguistics and literary theory in Czechoslovakia should have originated in Prague rather than Bratislava, whose scholarly community feared that Czech influence might overwhelm the Slovak language. More reassured of its own strength and possessed of a more stable position in society, Czech academia was better placed to mediate between its own inheritance and the new developments in European, including German, thought. Indicative of the new terms of the Czech-German dialogue after World War I was the polemic on the place of the smaller Central European nationstates in the political future of Europe: while Germany wanted to see them subjected to German cultural supremacy and strategic goals, these countries were prepared to harness the German legacy to the advantage of their own refashioning as uncompromisingly modern, forward-looking, independent states. Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa (1915) and Tomáš Masaryk’s The New Europe (1918) seem to be the clearest statements of these divergent views. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary (though in Hungary’s case, for different political reasons) thus attentively followed German intellectual developments (and in the case of the Prague Linguistic Circle also Russian ones), but they did so from a pragmatic perspective consistent with their independent political existence. After World War I, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary shared the cultural identity of countries that, due to their Austro-German heritage, were more than circumscribed nation-states, albeit not in themselves empires; this ambiguous status meant that cultural intersections and heteroglossia were a matter of course in these countries. They found themselves neither too close (with the exception of Horthy’s Hungary) nor too far from German (and Russian) culture—and in thinking about language and texts, this cultural location was apparently propitious for the rise and cultivation of new directions. The possibility of “estranging” the sanctity and naturalness of one’s own literature by analyzing it in another language or by refracting it through the prism of

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another culture seems to have been of paramount significance for the emergence of modern literary theory. Appropriating literature theoretically meant being able to transcend its (and one’s own) national embeddedness by electing to position oneself—through a journey in and among languages, if not necessarily in space—as an outsider contemplating its abstract laws. Symptomatically, Fritz Mauthner writes in his memoirs about the propitious condition of polyglossia in Prague, long before World War I, that was to trigger his later interest in language psychology and philosophy: “I don’t even understand a Jew born in a Slavonic region of Austria not being driven to [take up] linguistics; he would learn to understand no fewer than three languages simultaneously” (German, Czech, and Hebrew).14 (It seems equally indicative the first international journal of comparative literature, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum [1877–88], was edited by Hugo Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai in another multicultural and heteroglot city, Klausenburg [Hungarian Kolozsvár, Romanian Cluj].) This process, though, was uneven. It was hampered by monological and chauvinistic trends in Hungary (where there was a strong populist, antiRomanian, anti-Slovak, and anti-Semitic current), as well as in Poland under Piłsudski’s regime. Jakobson, in an article titled “About the Premises of the Prague Linguistic School” (1934), presented the strengths of Czech and Central European interwar intellectual life somewhat idealistically, choosing to disregard the harsh reality of cultural competition (and often conflict or oppression) in the region: “Czechoslovakia lies at the crossroads of various cultures and its distinctive cultural character throughout history . . . has consisted in the creative merging of streams whose sources are at some distance from one another. The great charm of Czech art and social ideology during the most productive periods of its history stems from the masterful crossing of diverse, at times even contradictory, currents.”15 Still, however beset with difficulties and countered by adverse political conditions, Central Europe between the world wars resembled a subcontinent with its own distinct culture: more than a conglomerate of mere nation-states, less than an empire; a true commonwealth of multireligious experiences, a realm of dislocation, cosmopolitanism, and diasporic noncoincidence between national and linguistic boundaries. It was here that the impulses of the dominant Western philosophical traditions could be bent and transformed without facile irreverence, but also without timidity and imitative self-abnegation.

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First Scenario: Re-forming Philosophy, Going beyond Aesthetics The dynamic relationship between the metadiscourses of philosophy and modern literary theory, which I hinted at earlier in this Introduction, is perhaps especially relevant to the work of Lukács and Ingarden, both of whom set out to make contributions to Continental philosophy and ended up practicing literary theory, at times still amalgamated with, and bearing the birthmarks of, aesthetics. (Early literary theory, especially in Central Europe, never managed to emancipate itself entirely from aesthetics; one can observe this as much in Mukařovský’s work from the mid-1930s on as in that of Lukács—especially his later work—or Ingarden. The Russian Formalists, on the contrary, were more consistent in their divorce from aesthetics.) Typically, Ingarden, writing The Literary Work of Art in Lviv, proclaimed in the preface that “although the main subject of my investigations is the literary work, or the literary work of art, the ultimate motives for my work on this subject are of a general philosophical nature, and they far transcend this particular subject.”16 Phenomenology was the guiding star of Ingarden’s investigations, yet in a fashion suggesting a critical appropriation and alteration of Husserl’s premises. When discussing the gradual disintegration of philosophical metadiscourses such as phenomenology and Marxism, we need to be careful to discern their traces in the subsequently emancipated theoretical narratives of literary theory and/or aesthetics. The weight of phenomenology varied from environment to environment. Its influence was of the first importance for Ingarden, but less systematic and powerful in the case of Russian Formalism, where Gustav Shpet was the main intermediary between German phenomenology and the Formalists; nor was the impact of phenomenology especially strong on the Prague Linguistic Circle.17 Jakobson was the one clear exception in both schools.18 His theory of rhythm and verse was underwritten by a phenomenological understanding of “poetical time” as “time of expectation” (Erwartungszeit), a concept forged on the frontier of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.19 But returning to Lukács and Ingarden, neither thought of himself consistently as a literary theorist. Certainly the intellectual traditions that Lukács inherited or adopted through his Hungarian-Jewish-German milieu in the first two decades of the twentieth century were those of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture. His later attention to literary theory, in the 1930s, in particular the theory of genre and the novel—and even his self-definition at the time as

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a literary theorist—were the result of frustrated hopes to accommodate art in a larger philosophical framework. Lukács’s early career, his attempts to fit into the Heidelberg environment of predominantly neo-Kantian aesthetics and philosophy of culture, ended up in disillusionment with the systematic philosophy of art (to which he would return, but from a Marxist perspective, only in the 1960s); instead, Lukács’s attention was now claimed by work specifically on literature, reinvigorating his early exploration of genre in his History of the Development of Modern Drama. Both Lukács and Ingarden, each in his own way, sought to break free from the neo-Kantian philosophy of art. Ingarden did so by embracing a modified Husserlian approach, which allowed him to include in his account of the literary work of art the layer of “represented objects,” to which he thought the neo-Kantians gave inadequate prominence. Lukács followed a different path. His most significant contribution to literary theory—his work in the 1930s on realism and the novel—followed his engagement, in a rather unorthodox way, with Marxism as a philosophical metadiscourse in need of further “concretization.” His History and Class Consciousness (1923) laid the foundation for an understanding of Marxism that was compatible with more holistic and culturebased approaches that challenged crude materialism. It is this “revisionist” strain in Lukács’s Marxism that enabled him to reclaim classic examples of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as models that the new (socialist and proletarian) novel should try to emulate. Lukács’s writing on realism and the novel, done mostly during his time in Moscow, became part of an internationally constituted field of literary theory to which he had not before fully belonged. This field was shaped by the Prague Linguistic Circle’s deliberations on realism, most notably Jakobson’s article of 1921, “On Realism in Art,”20 but also by the lingering presence in the 1930s of a fatigued Russian Formalism (above all, by Shklovsky, who polemicized openly and covertly against Lukács)21 and by Mikhail Bakhtin’s powerful responses to Lukács’s theory, which remained unpublished (if not unheard) at the time. Lukács’s theory of the novel was, in John Neubauer’s apt phrasing, an “inscription of homelessness,” cultural, social, and—I would add—methodological.22 In the late 1920s and early 1930s in Moscow, Stalinist orthodoxy meant (as Lukács’s friend Mikhail Lifshits later recalled) that it was extremely difficult to promote unsanctioned disciplines such as Marxist aesthetics, let alone literary theory, as autonomous branches of scholarship.23 With Lukács’s articles on realism and the historical novel, literary theory on the Left finally gained firmer

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ground and visibility: it joined an established mode of inquiry, pursued internationally beyond the level of political expedience. Characteristically, Lukács’s concept of realism was more than a weapon in the political struggles of the Left in the 1930s: he was responding to Hegel’s notion of totality, which had featured prominently in History and Class Consciousness. Lukács was in equal measure replying to the neo-Kantian juxtaposition of essence and appearance, and to the feeble attempts of Lebensphilosophie to reconcile form and life, a problem central to Lukács’s theorizing from the start. He saw in realism a literary form that cancels itself (a paradoxically creative act, according to Engels) in order to give way to the vigor and richness of life; realism offered the ideal situation in which the writer neither imitates reality nor departs from it. If realistic forms, on Lukács’s enthusiastic reading, voluntarily surrender their specificity and importance in order to facilitate transparent access to reality, then realism attains in the process nothing less than the much desired (but never before achieved) reconciliation of culture and life. But we also need to look beyond Lukács’s and Ingarden’s experience. In Russia, which is the immediate focus of this book, aesthetics was also very much the starting point for all distinct (and non-Marxist) modes of reflection on literature in the interwar period. Lukács and Ingarden, Shklovsky, Shpet, and Bakhtin all began with a vivid interest in aesthetics, and their future trajectories as thinkers were determined by how they related to aesthetics as a point of departure: Shklovsky and Bakhtin, as I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters, moved away from it (Shklovsky toward literary theory, Bakhtin toward philosophy of culture); it was only Shpet for whom aesthetics remained not just a starting point but an enduring and methodologically central framework. Rather than seeking to modify, or diverge from, aesthetics as a master discourse, Shpet was at pains to retain it; as far as literary theory is concerned, his work was a case of abortive inception.

Second Scenario: Re-forming Literature Having briefly explored the facilitating role played by the disintegration and transformation of philosophical metadiscourses and the move away from aesthetics (however incomplete), we may turn to our second premise or scenario: that modern literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe as a response to radical changes in literature and its social relevance. The history of the interaction between literary theory and literature, and between theorists and writers,

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among the Russian Formalists and in the Prague Linguistic Circle is by now well known, which makes it possible for me, without further rehearsal, to concentrate on one resilient misapprehension. It has become customary among students of this period to claim that both Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle were born out of avant-garde experiments with form that demanded scholarly rationalization. It has not been sufficiently acknowledged, however, that the programs and ideas of these two groups reached back to preoccupations emblematic of the Romantic literary and critical tradition. Jakobson understood Structuralism as a synthesis derived from “European Romantic scholarship” (serving as a thesis) and Positivism (antithesis).24 He credited Fedor Buslaev, a Russian scholar in the Romantic tradition, with passing on to the young Formalists some of its essential ideas and principles: “The tradition of tying the study of language closely to that of literature was established at the University of Moscow in the eighteenth century, and was particularly cultivated by one of the greatest Slavicists of the last century, Fedor Ivanovich Buslaev (1818–97), who had inherited from Romanticism the idea of the existence of an intimate link between linguistics and the study of literature in both its aspects, written and oral.”25 (“Philosophy of language” would have been more accurate than “linguistics.”) In light of this recognition, we can better understand Jakobson’s and Mukařovský’s critique of Saussure, and especially of the opposition that he posed between synchrony and diachrony. By making room for the historical modifications that language and literature undergo in the process of their dissemination and appropriation, the Prague Linguistic Circle attempted to explain language from the dialectical perspectives of product and function, identity and change, thus taking up and fleshing out Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea of language as always both ergon and energeia. This theoretical baggage could be “borrowed” from Romanticism and rendered relevant only by means of a parallel engagement with Romantic poetry and prose. A significant number of the key Formalists’ studies dealt with Pushkin and Lermontov, while the Prague Linguistic Circle rediscovered the Romantics Karel Hynek Mácha (the object of important studies by both Mukařovský and Jakobson) and Karel Erben.26 Another Czech Romantic poet, Milota Zdirad Polák, though today regarded as minor, drew the attention of Mukařovský, who analyzed his poem “The Sublimity of Nature” in a major treatise published in 1934. This persistent interest in Romanticism, among both Russian and Czechoslovak theorists, may have been grounded in the intrinsic links between Romanticism and the avant-garde, whose experiments the Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle held in high

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esteem. More important still, it seems to me that the underlying link here is the fact that—beyond differences concerning national contexts—Romanticism asserted the idea of the autonomy of literature. In Germany, England, and France, the novelty of this regime of valorizing literature was acutely felt. For the first time, literature was accorded significance for being unlike other discourses— not because of its language (this was to happen only in the work of the Russian Formalists) but because of the unique status in society the Romantic writer was projecting through his or her protagonists: at once a madman and a prophet, a transgressor and an outcast at loggerheads with philistinism and utilitarian attitudes. This early version of the autonomy of literature inaugurated a new regime of relevance, preparing the ground for the Formalist account: literature’s relevance does indeed reside in its uniqueness, but that uniqueness cannot be deduced from the exclusive social position of the writer; rather it must be located in the special way in which language is deployed in literature. This intimate link between Romanticism and the inception of modern literary theory is once again suggestive of the dialectic between national and cosmopolitan tendencies in Eastern and Central Europe. Historically, in these countries, Romanticism (and the various strains of post-Romanticism) became the chief provider of literary texts for the new national canons. No other literary movement was able to institute a better diet of local pride, national enthusiasm, and, indissociably from this, offer a whole catalogue of universal human experiences. And very often, in response to the realities of foreign political domination, these canon-filling texts were written in exile, hovering between nostalgia and resilience, between overexposure and estrangement of the familiar (Adam Mickiewicz and Ivan Vazov should be sufficient examples).

Regimes of Relevance The history of ideas about literature can be told as the history of attempts to conceptualize the changing regimes of its relevance. By “regime of relevance,” a term that I coin here in full awareness of its Foucauldian provenance (recall Foucault’s régime de savoir and régime de vérité), I mean the prevalent mode of appropriating (both interpreting and using) literature in society at a particular time. Any such regime or mode is in competition with others, and at any one point a constellation of different regimes is available, shaped by a plethora of factors (social and institutional, factors to do with the accumulation and distribution of disciplinary knowledge, etc.). I submit that the rise in the years

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around World War I of literary theory as an autonomous discourse and field of enquiry that thinks of literature in terms of its uniqueness (informed by the notion of intrinsic “literariness”) was tracking the transition to a new regime of relevance in which literature—for the first time—began to matter not because of what it can do for society or the individual, but because of what it was: a discourse taken to be original and different from other discourses, essentially because of the self-sufficient way language works in it (the Futurists’ glorification of the “self-sufficient word” readily comes to mind here). To appreciate the radical nature of this change, we need to take a brief detour into the institutional history of literary studies. The exceptional respect for literature as a social tribune and national voice in Eastern Europe was reflected in the early professionalization of its study. At the university level, the first chair of Russian literature in Russia was established in 1835 (though survey courses were offered even earlier).27 For comparison, the first chair of English literature in England was not established until 1852 (at University College London), and the first chair at Harvard was not occupied until 1876. There was no School of English at Oxford until 1894; at Cambridge, undergraduate degrees in English were not awarded until 1916.28 Anglophone discourses on literature were determined by a regime of relevance somewhat different from that in Eastern Europe: while the idea of the social value of literature was firmly shared in both cases, the study and teaching of English literature was viewed from early on less as a tool of nation-building or a channel of political influence and more as a practice that contributes to the well-being of society by enhancing the life of the individual.29 In I. A. Richards’s practical criticism, a pedagogy more than a theoretical program, this difference is particularly evident. Even though Richards, like the Russian Formalists, was adamant that criticism should be freed from its traditional preoccupation with biography and that the assumption of a direct link between author and text should be skeptically reexamined, his overall principles differed significantly from theirs. He shared with the Formalists an interest in what the early Shklovsky called the “devices” of literature; but Richards approached the device from the point of view of its potential social utility, much more so than the Formalists. For example, poetic synesthesia, which fascinated Richards, was said to mobilize all human faculties and contribute to improving “intimate relations with other human beings.”30 Even when Richards moved to Harvard and, in his later years there, experienced the influence of Jakobson, he never embraced the notion of a “poetic function” distinguishing literature from other discourses. Richards’s

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recommendation of “the lure of high mountaineering” as an activity providing stimulation not substantially different from that obtained in any other undertaking echoes Bentham’s utilitarian equation of distinct practices and discourses.31 By developing the method of “close reading,” Richards may have introduced—within the Anglo-Saxon context—a “revolution” of sorts,32 but when the Russian and Eastern European contexts are taken into account, especially the work of the Russian Formalists, his break with tradition appears as no more than a compromise. He did indeed suggest that closer attention be paid to the text and that the focus be shifted from the context of creation onto the context of reception, but he was very far from the radicalism of the Formalists, and continued to insist that literature matters not for what it is linguistically, in an autonomous and self-sufficient way, but still above all as a tool of practical education and cultivation. To some extent, his work reminds one of the very early work of Shklovsky, which still considers literature from the dual perspective of artistic autonomy and public utility: at the cusp of two different, conflicting regimes of relevance (more on this in the next chapter). Given the widely shared belief in the practical value of literature—however differently that value may have been interpreted in Eastern Europe and the anglophone West in the early twentieth century—the Russian Formalists’ writing about literature from the perspective of pure literariness, beyond the horizon of immediate utility, appeared to be such a crucial change that it concealed an otherwise important continuity. The practice of modern literary theory, like any other mode of reflection on literature before that, was enmeshed with the workings of a specific (and new) regime of relevance that was shaping the way literature mattered. Modern literary theory—let me state this with due clarity—came about at a certain point and dwindled away at another point in time as a form of conceptualizing this new regime. Just as there are historically distinct regimes of relevance, so too there are distinct forms of conceptualizing these particular regimes and the transitions between them. A new form of conceptualization (which modern literary theory undoubtedly was at its birth in the years around World War I) is the reliable, if often belated, sign of the arrival of a new regime of relevance, as whose product it eventually takes shape. We can thus say that literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe in the interwar decades as one of the conceptual by-products of the transition from a regime of relevance that recognized literature for its role in social and political practice to a regime that valued literature primarily for its intrinsic qualities as art. Significantly, literary theory was only one such form

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of conceptualization, though probably the most representative and interesting: the regime of artistic relevance (as opposed to that of social and political relevance) had been in evidence, after all, since long before the nearly eighty years during which literary theory flourished. This regime emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as a response to the changing status of art in the bourgeois marketplace; as we have seen, it was in the work of the Romantics that it was first engaged, promoted, and reflected upon (however self-contradictory and not always consequential some of their moves may have been); it continued through the years of aestheticism and l’art pour l’art, down to the first decades after World War II, with American New Criticism as its high point and death knell. Modern literary theory must thus be seen as but a moment (and instrument)—admittedly intellectually the most condensed and powerful such moment—in a much longer engagement with this particular regime of relevance that, in the West, lasted for about two centuries, beginning around the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The demise of literary theory has by now confirmed the transition to a third regime of relevance, where literature is increasingly recognized not for its social and political weight, nor indeed for some presumed discursive uniqueness, but, in a rather low-key way, for the (largely individual) entertainment and therapy it can provide. In any one period, different regimes of relevance are of course simultaneously available. Instead of working in isolation, they are engaged in forms of exchange and competition. This competition is reflected, for example, in the turf wars between Russian Formalism and Marxism over the interpretation of literature, which I discuss in the first chapter. But this competition of different regimes is also at work within Russian Formalism itself, informing its inner diversity. Thus, the Saint Petersburg–based Opoiaz group was more uncompromisingly inclined to judge literature on the basis of literariness, while the Moscow Linguistic Circle was interested from early on, to an extent, in the sociological aspects of verbal art.33 A good example of this interpenetration and competition of regimes within the space of a single article is Jakobson’s 1919 piece “The Tasks of Artistic Propaganda,” where he uses Marxist parlance and arguments to champion a Formalist and Futurist agenda.34 This interaction of regimes of relevance also explains, to a degree at least, the attempts of the Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle to participate in the struggle for the distribution of social and cultural capital in the new states. (Needless to say, in Russia, the regime of social and political relevance was eventually imposed by force at the expense of the regime of relevance recognizing in literature its

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discursive autonomy and specificity.) Similarly, in the 1960s, we can begin to discern the complex overlap of all three regimes that I have just described: a lingering appreciation of literature on the basis of literariness; the eruptive sway of literature in activist social and political debates on campuses in Paris, Prague, and Berkeley; and finally, the withdrawal into a private consumption of literature as a largely escapist practice in the face of increasingly mediated forms of communication and the enhanced commodification of leisure. Today, the regime of relevance validating literature as a source of therapeutic experience and entertainment overlaps with the freshly transfigured regime of direct social relevance exemplified in the struggles of “identity politics” and the battles over “representative” minority, national, and global canons. What one needs to bear in mind is that, while quite different regimes of relevance coexist at any one time, often one of them comes to the fore—whether manifestly or obliquely—as the leading component in the mix. Modern literary theory, then, is the product of a regime of relevance that validates literature for its presumed artistic uniqueness and originality. That regime emerged as primary in interwar Russia and Eastern Europe because historical conditions happened to be most propitious there and then. A chronotopic summary of these conditions would single out three basic points. First, in none of the four countries involved (Russia, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia) was there a particularly strong domestic tradition of philosophy that could impose its authority and thereby prevent the purposeful transformation and modification of established philosophical discourses into tools of literary theory. The intelligentsia in these countries lived after World War I on borrowed philosophical capital, mainly of German-Austrian provenance; and it was intellectuals from these four countries that were most active in the process of creatively transforming the various mainstreams of that philosophy (phenomenology; neo-Kantianism; Marxism) in the direction of literary theory, via a divorce (at times incomplete) from aesthetics. Second, having been parts of (by then defunct) empires before World War I (or having been an empire in its own right, in the case of Russia), each of the four countries was a natural locus of polyglossia and heterotopia (exile), providing—sometimes at the cost, and in the form, of bitter ethnic conflicts—a painfully beneficial environment for theoretical contemplation of literature beyond the presumed naturalness of native tongues and traditions. Third, in all four environments, there was a facilitating sense of belonging to new state formations and grasping the chance of participating proactively in their construction, with fresh energy released in the wake of

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momentous historical change. This process enabled the negotiation between inherited and new regimes of relevance that would inform the emerging battles over how one should interpret literature’s significance. It was only because of the confluence of these historical conditions that avant-garde literary practices—not at all specific to Russia and to Central and Eastern Europe—demanded and triggered their rationalization in literary theory precisely in those countries. The centrality of Russian and Central and Eastern European literary culture to that process was thus a product of both deeper structural trends and context-bound contingencies. We should keep in mind this insistence on the radical historicity of literary theory, which marks its birth and death not as genealogical points but as epistemic effects, as we proceed to examine in the following chapters various manifestations of literary theory in interwar Russia, always with a view to discerning the distinct regimes of relevance that sustain them, and trying to highlight their most significant afterlives.

1 RUSSIAN FORMALISM E ntang l emen t s at Bi rt h an d La t e r Re v e r b e ra t io ns

This chapter is an exploration of the complex relationship between Formalism and Marxism, and between the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature—and their respective argumentative logics—at work in Formalism and Marxism. Unlike previous discussions of this fraught relationship, I am interested here in revealing the competition between two modes of ref lecting on literature engendered by two different ways of understanding its relevance. When looked at through this prism, Russian Formalism exhibits the inner dynamics of a recognizable transition from one regime of relevance (the inherited notion of literature’s utility grounded in its benefits to society, be they cognitive, aesthetic, social, political, etc.) to a new, different regime of relevance that valorizes literature through its autonomy and specificity as a discourse. Tracking this trajectory of change allows me to capture not just the many radical innovations Russian Formalism brought along (readily acknowledged by previous commentators), but also its multiple accommodations, its dynamic interaction with established institutions and discourses of power, and—crucially—its own inconsistencies, its own deradicalization, its own position of precarious equilibrium between these two different regimes of relevance. My analysis is ultimately geared toward demonstrating that the dispute between these two different regimes of relevance proceeded within a shared framework of objectivity and a scientific drive toward establishing binding laws and patterns; this is the common ground that

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made the rivalry between Formalism and Marxism possible in the first place. To detail this wider picture, I offer three case studies framed by the question of Formalism’s impact and its encounters with intellectual formations that had their own (larger) stake in the political debates of the time: the 1927 public dispute between Formalism and Marxism; Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement and its multiple echoes; and the mediated presence of Formalism in Eurasianism, a Russian exilic movement that sought to reconcile Formalism and Marxism, as well as the distinct regimes of relevance within which they operated. The entire chapter is thus centered on the question of Formalism’s impact and reverberations. This question runs through all three sections, as it is solely through this impact that the circumscribing and determining effects of the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature in relation to literary theory can be truly registered.

Formalism and Marxism in the 1920s The significance of Russian Formalism and our continuous fascination with it derive in large measure from the fact that Formalism initiated modern literary theory in the years immediately before and after World War I. Has this importance diminished, now that we have come to see the limitations of literary theory as a historically circumscribed mode of reflecting on literature? Or are we rather facing the need to rediscover Russian Formalism by contemplating its legacy beyond literary theory per se, attending to the more substantive underlying principles that align Formalism with other modern epistemes? Is it not the case that, historically speaking, literary theory is only the by-product of a larger articulation of interest in specificity and autonomy, through deliberate neglect of subjective agency that is deemed idiosyncratically unsubsumable under objective laws and patterns, and—not infrequently, but rather controversially—a concomitant exclusion of context and sociopolitical dynamics? By giving Formalism a pride of place as the originator of modern literary theory, are we not at the same time concealing its immersion in a much wider—and more consequential—agenda that sought to redefine the status of human agency beyond the crumbling foundations of humanism? To begin to answer these questions, one must ask the question about the cultural genesis of Formalism and its place in Russian—and European—intellectual history. To do so, I will evoke and contextualize the important dispute between Formalists and

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Marxists that took place in Leningrad in March 1927. My ultimate goal is to reexamine and see in fresh light the relations between Formalism and Marxism during the 1920s, circumscribed as they were by two different notions of the relevance of literature—and yet embedded in a shared framework of aspiring to objectivity and scientific rigor. Russian Formalism: The Inception of Modern Literary Theory

At the outset of the twenty-first century we seem better positioned to recognize and admit the vanishing of literary theory as a distinct discipline of scholarship. In retrospect, one could locate literary theory within a period of nearly eighty years, from its inception in the second half of the 1910s as a modern intellectual project grounded in assumptions of autonomy and specificity, until the early 1990s. The beginnings of the discipline were marked by the activities of the Russian Formalists, its end by Iser’s turn in the late 1980s and the early 1990s from reception theory and phenomenology of reading to what he called “literary anthropology”1 and by Yuri Lotman’s death in 1993 at the end of a career in which he gradually came to embrace semiotics as a global theory of culture rather than a specifically conceived literary theory. In the French context, Lotman’s turn away from literary theory toward semiotics as a theory of culture had been anticipated by Roland Barthes; Tzvetan Todorov performed a similar turn away from literary theory in the early 1980s, signaled by his book The Conquest of America (1982) and his later work on intellectual history and moral philosophy. The Russian Formalists were the first to see literature as an autonomous and specific domain of theoretical inquiry, steering away from aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and history and seeking support in linguistics. In Germany, there were earlier attempts to apply a similarly autonomous approach to music and the visual arts. Heinrich Wölff lin’s dream of a history of art without names was later echoed in the Russian Formalists’ and (later still) Bakhtin’s embrace of a literary history driven by anonymous discursive powers stronger than the individual writer. Such was the sway of Wölff lin’s innovation that when Oscar Walzel essayed to free the study of literature from the dominant framework of cultural history, he fell victim to parallels with art history. In proclaiming the theory of the “mutual illumination” of the various arts, 2 Walzel was escaping the dangers of social history at the expense of letting arthistorical categories interfere in the interpretation of literature. The

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Russian Formalists, however, were determined to discuss literature in terms of “literariness,” that presumed feature which they hoped would explain what was distinctly literary. If a pun be allowed, by concentrating on the literary “device,” especially in the early phase of their work, the Formalists were leaving literature to its own devices, uncontrolled by, and irreducible to, ethics, religion, or politics. The upper chronological limit, the early 1990s, is drawn primarily with developments in philosophy and cultural theory in mind. If the 1910s had signaled precisely the ambition of literary studies to pursue emancipation from the master discourses of philosophy—still not infrequently through tactical collaboration with aesthetics—from the mid-1970s on, and especially in the 1980s, literary theory was once again swerving back to the bosom of philosophy through the powerful impact of deconstruction. In championing ideas originating in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, deconstruction was setting a new agenda, on which literature was no more than an item of business among others. Thinking and writing about literature thus lost the edge of specificity and uniqueness, and the boundary between literary and nonliterary texts, so solemnly guarded ever since the Formalists, was rendered porous and eventually insignificant. Similarly, Feminism, postcolonialism, and New Historicism were all modes of reading more than just literary texts; they were strategies of cultural theory and history, something literary theory had always been wary of, lest it get swamped in what it believed to be the morass of the old Geistesgeschichte. By that point, however, even within literary theory itself there were clear signals, particularly in the writings of the Tartu School, that in a growingly ambitious union with semiotics, literary theory would try to assume the ultimately self-destructive role of a general theory of culture. This is why the early 1990s were the last stage of the protracted demise of literary theory as an autonomous branch of the humanities: the abandonment of literary theory for projects in semiotics as a form of cultural theory (Barthes; Lotman) or for forays into philosophical anthropology (Iser) was a symptom of poor health and lack of self-sufficiency on the part of literary theory. The main reason behind these transformations was, of course, the changing status of literature and its consumption in an increasingly globalized postindustrial society dependent on an incessant flow of information and image-based communication. Over the past three decades, the economy of leisure has also changed dramatically, especially in the more affluent West, which fell into the grip of increasingly mediated forms of entertainment, whose commercial

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viability has made the experience of private reading ever more demanding by comparison. Reading, as teachers within and outside the classroom have come to appreciate, has to compete with sources of information that simultaneously mobilize a wider range of senses and present the information in a more “consumer-friendly” manner. Thus “the literary work of art,” to evoke the title of Roman Ingarden’s important but nostalgically dated project (carving out a border space for literary studies between philosophy and aesthetics), 3 is no longer endowed with special status; it competes for attention as one of the many commodities of the leisure industry. This status of literature as another tool of personal therapy or entertainment mirrors a different regime of relevance in which literature’s utility is no longer tied to its autonomy and specificity as a discourse. It is this new regime of relevance that cancels the feasibility of the Formalist project as such, even as it continues its spectrally dispersed presence within the new set of currently available modes of reflecting on literature. The recent infatuation with “New Formalism” in English departments in the United States is a good example of the impossibility of sustaining a coherent and theoretically consequential emphasis on form in the present climate. The term “New Formalism” was apparently coined in 1989, by Heather Dubrow, and it is clear from the chronology, and from the interventions of those who embraced it (or its later modifications, such as “historical formalism”), that this was not a resumption of the radicalism of the Russian Formalists—that radical understanding of form was impossible to take up and assert in the new epistemological climate after the demise of literary theory—but substantially an attempt to supplement, nuance, and revive New Historicism, the powerful trend in the study of English Renaissance literature that had developed earlier in the 1980s (the New Formalists rarely mobilized the Russian Formalists as their predecessors; references to New Criticism and to Richards and Empson were much more frequent and significant).4 As I demonstrate in the Epilogue, it is in an altogether different terrain that the beneficial impact of Russian Formalism is still felt today. Russian Formalism in the Bedrock of Late Modernity

All this helps us to discern the exceptional significance of Russian Formalism as the first moment in the history of thinking about literature where literature is asserted as an autonomous object of study. But it is precisely this enormous significance of Russian Formalism in twentieth-century European intellectual history that has obscured the complexity of its genesis.5 We need

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to remember—or rediscover and reassert with all the vigor this requires—the fact that Formalism was a phenomenon and an offspring of late modernity. As such, it shares in a wider framework of aspiring toward scientism, objectivity, and positive knowledge. So far both Russian and Western scholarship have been preoccupied with highlighting the unmistakable differences between Formalism and Positivism, but one has to be aware that the Formalists’ distantiation from Positivism was, as a matter of fact, often a symptom of emulation. Russian Formalism in a way wanted to be more positivistic than Positivism. It disliked the Positivist obsession with historical facts and environment precisely because it wanted to be as rigorous as Positivism, yet with regards to literature alone, distilling its specific features beyond contextual interference. Scientific soundness (nauchnost') was a paramount value for both Positivism and Formalism, and the Formalists proved this by their rigorous concentration on the quantifiable aspects of verse and metrics (Jakobson, Brik, and others), and by the ascertaining of verifiable typologies of narrative in the work of Propp (cf. Trotsky’s well-known, somewhat vulgar but not far off the mark, characterization of Formalist analysis as “essentially descriptive and semi-statistical”). It is this legacy of Formalism that later lived on in French Structuralism and narratology, little as some of the Paris Structuralists were inclined to admit that. In other words, we have to begin to think of Russian Formalism as a typical brainchild of modernity. It is as technical, precise, meticulous, scientific, and cold as Positivism itself, but it differs from Positivism in that it abandons the trust in encyclopedic scholarship and genetic explanations inherited from the Enlightenment tradition of attention to climate, environment, race, and the “moment.” (In his essay “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style” [1919], Shklovsky quoted at some length from a text by Ferdinand Brunetière published in 1898 that had clearly inspired him with its insistence on studying, still within the traditional horizon of attention to influences, above all the influence of “one literary work on another literary work,” not so much “the influences of race and environment.”)6 To locate Russian Formalism properly, we also need to look at its close typological proximity to contemporary intellectual developments that occupied the stage in the years around World War I. A very important relation to classical psychoanalysis emerges here. Freud adamantly demonstrated that we are not altogether masters of our own inner lives. His project, however different, was designed to show that our psychic life is governed by rules that are independent

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of us. The dream, the joke, the verbal slippage all come to denote this inevitable breakthrough and validation of laws that operate independently of, but are nevertheless knowable by, us. Equally, Formalism insisted that the writer is unseated from her writing desk by forces that are perhaps not transparent to her, but nevertheless totally amenable to scientific study and rationalization: what governs her work are the intrinsic laws of plot, device, rhyme, and rhythm. On the plain of history, authorial agency is similarly bracketed out; here it is worth recalling Osip Brik’s (in)famous assertion that had Pushkin never existed, Eugene Onegin “would all the same have been written”; or Shklovsky’s pre-Foucauldian understanding of authorship beyond individual agency: “art is not created by a single will, a single genius. The individual creator is only a geometric locus of intersecting lines, of forces born outside himself.”7 It is this new understanding of human agency that makes Formalism so important after all. In an essay all too well known to be quoted extensively or referred to bibliographically here, Foucault speaks of Freud and Marx as dealing a mortal blow to the serene humanistic belief in the omnipotence of the self. Freud proves, as we saw, that we cannot govern our own psychic lives, although we can hope to know what governs them. Both Marx and Freud gave up faith in the centrality of the individual while preserving the last mainstay of modernity: trust in the possibility of getting to know and rationalizing what otherwise lies beyond human control. This is why both Freud and Marx were summoned to serve—often following dramatic modifications, notably in the works of Lacan and Althusser—in the vanguard of Parisian (post)Structuralism, as were the Formalists by the early Todorov and Kristeva. Late modernity, to sum up a story told many times over by now, was marked by this specific crisis of worldview, in which man was no longer capable of seeing himself at the center of history—or even at the center of his own inner life—and his last resource of dignity remained the reliance on the infallible power of science and his own ability to embody and exercise that power. Much of this is certainly well known, but the fact remains—however surprising it may sound—that we have so far failed to see Russian Formalism as part of this wider crisis. It is only after placing Formalism in this context that we can begin to grasp the historical proximity of Formalism and Marxism in the 1920s, which has been, until now, left out of sight. Despite the fact that Russian Formalism was grounded in a new understanding of the relevance of literature, it actually shared a larger epistemic framework with Marxism (even as Marxism was reflecting a very different—and historically older—understand-

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ing of the significance of literature as a public force). Formalism and Marxism, then, should be seen not simply as foes, as has been the case so far, but rather as competitors in the field of rational enquiry into the objective laws that govern human agency. After the October Revolution, both Marxism and Formalism hoped and strove to embody the ideals and values of scientism (nauchnost') in a society that had succumbed to the breathtaking lures (and risks) of rapid modernization. In this sense Marxism and Formalism were competing on the same ground; it was no accident that Boris Eikhenbaum was so irritated when Lev Pumpianskii suggested in their conversations that the Formalists were close to the Marxists.8 This hidden competition never amounted to true dialogue, however. The reasons are historical and methodological. There is one basic asymmetry that characterizes the relationship between Marxism and Formalism. From a science-orientated discourse describing the laws that inform the functioning and evolution of society, Marxism evolved into a globally prescriptive discourse that calls for specific political action. Marxism never quite came to terms with this internal contradiction: history allegedly follows certain objective and unchangeable laws, yet the proletariat has to mature into an active subject of historical action in order to implement these laws; without the subjective factor, the objective one wouldn’t quite materialize. Formalism, in contrast, never became a prescriptive discourse. Admitting that Eugene Onegin would have been written even without Pushkin or discovering the rules of form, rhyme, and rhythm never really amounted to formulating recipes for writing (good) prose or poetry. Thus, while Marxism endeavored to become a discourse supplying a holistic (supposedly still scientific) interpretation of the world that could, at the same time, guide concrete action, Formalism preferred, for most of the time, to stay within the realm of description and interpretation. (Shklovsky’s memoirs of the 1920s, especially his A Sentimental Journey, to which I turn in the Epilogue, are probably the one salient example of deliberately transgressing the boundary between literary theory and creative writing, and thus also between reflection and practical involvement.) This methodologically seminal divergence precluded a genuine dialogue between Marxism and Formalism, despite the significant common ground they shared. Instead, the two competitors were involved in a number of polemics, usually initiated as attacks on Formalism by Marxist ideologues. The first and certainly best known example is Trotsky’s critique of Formalism in Literature and Revolution (1923). Note here that Trotsky was not against the formal method

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as such. On the contrary, he welcomed it, and precisely because of its potential to explain form scientifically. What he objected to was spreading the use of this method too far: “The methods of Formalism, if confined within legitimate limits [emphasis added], may help to clarify the artistic and psychological peculiarities of literary form.” This appeal for restraint and confinement is very suggestive of the emerging turf war that Marxism felt it necessary to wage against Formalism already in the early 1920s. Formalism was to be tolerated as far as the scientific explanation of certain aspects of artistic form was concerned, but it should not try to encroach on other realms of enquiry, and certainly not on the study of social affairs. One has to stress that this turf war was also waged with a view to securing a larger share of public attention and credit. In the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Marxism was still not irreversibly enthroned as public dogma, and the principle of competition was very much alive and operative. Here the crucial issue about the relationship between Formalism and political power enters, a question that must be revisited. Despite its reticence when it comes to converting theory into a blueprint for social and political action, Formalism was not that indifferent to power (Shklovsky, Tynianov, Brik, and Jakobson immediately come to mind), nor was it driven to gestures of political significance solely as a means of survival. The turn to a more active presence in the sociopolitical context tracks Formalism’s inner transformation away from its more radical early phase (which lasted until about 1919). As we shall see when we discuss Eurasian responses to Russian Formalism, left-minded (but not necessarily Marxist) commentators on Formalism were keen to rewrite its biography in order to present its entire history as a continuous story of more or less direct activism. In 1924, despite the vociferous and largely primitive accusations mounted in the well-known responses to Eikhenbaum’s article in the journal The Press and Revolution, no one could yet enforce Marxism in a way such that the Formalists would feel in danger of being removed from the scene. Yet it was precisely in 1924 that the Formalists published a number of interconnected articles devoted to Lenin’s style and language.9 However plausible the interpretation of this action as merely pragmatic, if not ironical or cynical, might appear, it fails to account for the fact that (some of) the Formalists’ engagement with Constructivism, the literature of the fact, and other developments in left art was much more than a perfunctory demonstration of loyalty or a ploy to extract tactical advantages.10 (Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Linguistic

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Circle decided in 1930 to honor the country’s president [and philosopher] Tomáš Masaryk’s eightieth birthday with a volume entitled Masaryk and Language, featuring contributions by Jan Mukařovský and Roman Jakobson.) It is essential to realize that Russian Formalism and somewhat later also the Prague Linguistic Circle (the latter much more straightforwardly than the former), were inherently linked to the processes of constructing a new state with a new political identity. There was a certain neo-Romantic pride in belonging to the vanguard of these novel trends in the humanities, thus taking part, however indirectly, in the transformation of the inherited social and cultural order, and doing so in a way that would seek to preserve, in Soviet Russia, methodological and aesthetic pluralism in the face of Marxism’s totalizing ambitions. Jakobson’s and Brik’s close association with Mayakovsky, as well as the gravitation of some of the most distinguished Formalists toward the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) and its journals LEF and Novyi LEF (New LEF), furnish incontestable proof. Thus, both Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle were emerging as significant players on the cultural scene and as avid participants in the construction of the new societies taking shape after the October Revolution and in the wake of World War I. In hindsight, their attitude to political power, even in the case of the Formalists, whose attempts to find a contributory modus vivendi with the regime were largely frustrated, ought to be reevaluated; Eikhenbaum’s desire to see “the revolution and philology” as mutually supportive and invigorating entities (cf. his 1922 article “5 = 100”) was indicative of the determination, with which the Formalists were trying to inscribe themselves in the new social order. Some of them (especially Tynianov, and to some extent also Shklovsky) proved more successful than others in these attempts. The moral of the story, then, points to the need to grasp the inner evolution of Russian Formalism as tracking the shift between two different regimes of relevance, each of which is reflected in the work of its representatives: the dominant (new) regime of anchoring the significance of literature in its autonomy, specificity, and self-sufficiency, and the competing (earlier but, with Marxism there to stay, very much ongoing) regime of relevance that sees the utility of literature in its potential role as a vehicle for formulating and voicing public agendas with a degree of social and political urgency. The innovation of the Formalists, in a sense, was sustained so long as they foregrounded the former of these two regimes of relevance; their advocacy of the latter regime (increasingly prominent from the early 1920s onward) was a sign, not as much of external pressure, but rather of a proactive accommodation, led by a growing

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realization that the novelty they had proclaimed was bought at the expense of sidelining other important factors shaping the evolution of literature. The work of the Russian Formalists, then, straddles and replicates the conflictual overlap during the 1920s of two powerful—and very different—regimes of relevance, each of them offering a different version of the worth and import of literature. The 1927 Dispute between Formalism and Marxism

It is with this dynamic of power and social adjustment in mind that we need to approach the famous Leningrad dispute of 1927, which exhibits the fault lines in the fraught encounter between Formalism and Marxism. The dispute took place in a different ideological climate, where freedom of speech was still possible, but the ideological consequences of dissenting from Marxism were already noticeably harsher. Even so, one thing of crucial importance has to be clearly stated at this point: both Marxism and Formalism arrived at this debate with the baggage of a certain methodological fatigue, part of which was the recognition (stronger among the Formalists, who were by then taking stock of the school’s recent history) that neither of the two methods would work in isolation and without some form of mediation (isn’t that the truth most competitors eventually arrive at?). As early as 1924, Eikhenbaum had registered in his diary that a student at the university read out to him a comical poem, in which the young man ridiculed the Formal method. Marxism, in turn, was seeking to establish its own “sociological poetics,” a platform that Jakobson believed was a contradiction in terms.11 The efforts to develop a “sociological poetics” were a symptom of Marxism’s own realization that it needs to work on the cusp of the two different regimes of relevance analyzed above: retaining the emphasis on the external determination of literature, while at the same time acknowledging its intrinsic—and rather specific—discursive organization, its “poetics.” We have at least four published accounts of the 1927 dispute, which help us reconstruct, to some extent, what exactly happened there: those of L. Stavrogin,12 N. Zagorskii,13 and V. Orlov,14 as well as an account more likely than not by Boris Eikhenbaum.15 Stavrogin’s is the richest of these four accounts.16 He notes that the audience was evenly split: one-third were Marxist sympathizers and one-third sided with the Formalists; the rest must have been more or less neutral or undecided. Eikhenbaum, Tomashevskii, Tynianov, Shklovsky, Derzhavin, Gorbachev, Iakovlev, and Seifulina spoke at the debate. Of the Marxists, the most interesting statement by far is that of Gorbachev, who insisted on tracing the reception of literature in the milieu of social psy-

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chology and ideology, the latter terms having been borrowed by Gorbachev from Plekhanov. Interestingly enough, this is one of the main ideas that occur slightly later in Pavel Medvedev’s critique of Formalism, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), and, even more prominently, in Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). Gorbachev was ironical visà-vis the Formalists; their attempts to engage with the study of the “literary everyday” (literaturnyi byt) and the sociology of literary production were now seen as a belated adoption of Marxism “through the chimney rather than through the door.” Again rather caustically, Gorbachev elevated Shklovsky to the “Marx of the Formalists,” thus suggesting that leadership and authority cannot be thought of in terms other than those posited by Marxism. The Soviet writer Lidiia Seifulina, although not representing the Marxists, venomously addressed Eikhenbaum as “Mr. Eikhenbaum,” rather than “Professor,” thus refusing to respect his scholarly title and status. Eikhenbaum took Seifulina’s speech very badly, interpreting what had happened as a “veritable scandal” (Kornei Chukovskii’s diary testifies to Seifulina’s militant mood continuing the day after the dispute).17 The audience was so loud and unrestrained that the speakers often could not hear each other. The debate finished, Stavrogin tells us, at 2 o’clock in the morning, and the reverberation over the next weeks was very strong indeed. Institutionally, Eikhenbaum was gradually sidelined and eventually ousted as university lecturer; from a scholarly perspective, however, he was confirmed in his conviction that talking about literary “devices” was no longer serious scholarship but merely a “business” for students, as he put it in a letter to Shklovsky. The 1927 debate became possible mainly due to the internal evolution of the Formalists, particularly of Eikhenbaum and Tomashevskii, and their recognition that the study of other, extraliterary series (riady) is unavoidable and essential. However, the Marxists apparently took this not as a serious sign of natural methodological transition but as admittance of weakness or even past guilt. Characteristically, when Eikhenbaum set out his program for the study of the sociology of literary production and stressed the necessity of studying the history of honoraria, among other elements of research on the “literary everyday,” Gorbachev quipped that it was in all likelihood precisely the honoraria that had made the Formalists abandon their anti-sociological purism (cf. the report in New Lef ). Instead of publicly admitting the need to temper the crudity of sociologism, the Marxist participants tried very hard to conceal a

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sense of methodological deficiency, which their more sophisticated supporters had come to recognize and were now attempting to surmount by evoking the mantra of “poetics.” Thus what had begun as a charity event to raise money for poor students—as Orlov’s account reveals18—ended up in a rather uncharitable refusal on the part of the Marxists to engage in a real conversation with some of their most serious competitors. This reluctance to engage in a dialogue with Formalism on an equal footing was a clear sign of Marxism’s growing appetite for supremacy at all costs. It was also a sign of the resilience of an older regime of relevance that bestowed significance on literature for its affinity with wider social agendas and ideas rather than for its presumed specificity and autonomy.

The Estrangement Effect In the previous section, I have established the principles of discursive autonomy and specificity that inform the particular way in which Russian Formalism assigned value to literature; but I have also demonstrated that Formalism worked at the intersection of two different regimes of relevance and was actively engaged in polemics with Marxism. In this section I wish to go further by suggesting that this constitutive ambiguity was present in the writings of the Formalists from the start, even at a time when Marxism was not yet a dominant ideological presence in society. In Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, formulated in a number of texts written before the October Revolution, the regime of relevance that operates with notions of discursive autonomy and specificity coexists with a regime of relevance that sees literature as valuable due to qualities drawn from the larger domain of aesthetics and a diffuse social utilitarianism. The concept of estrangement can only be grasped if the early Shklovsky is placed in his proper context, that of World War I; we need to begin to see him as an author shaped by the war and participating in the larger constellation of brilliant European essayists who responded to this momentous event. To this end, I draw parallels between his writings and those of Georg Simmel and Ernst Jünger. More important, I uncover the conservative—epistemological, and on occasion also political—aspects of Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement and analyze his contradictory attitude to democracy and modernization. As the section unfolds, the focus shifts onto the fortunes of Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement—its afterlives—at the hands of its most significant critics, Brecht and Marcuse.

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The notion of estrangement (ostranenie) has persisted in recent literary scholarship; an anthology of scholarly texts published in 1984 in Germany, in the canon-building series “Paths of Research,”19 signaled the ultimate acceptance of estrangement in the conceptual repertoire of literary history.20 Among Slavists, the theory of estrangement has come to be considered by many a mere synecdoche of Formalist aesthetics, a pars pro toto substitute for the latter. There have even been attempts to deduce the quintessence of Russian Formalism and understand its complex evolution solely from the principle of estrangement.21 At the same time, a growing awareness of the multiple and intricate sources of the concept, and of the complex philosophical traditions underpinning it, made itself felt and began to shape the discussion.22 This trend was strong enough to compel Shklovsky in the 1960s to examine the limits of his own originality and to place the theory of estrangement in a line of aesthetic inquiry that went back to Novalis (whom he explicitly quotes in his Tales about Prose).23 In Lidiia Ginzburg’s words, cited by Shklovsky himself in a context that oddly reconciles self-ironic humility and refreshing playfulness, “Had Viktor Shklovsky known then what he knows now, he would have never done what he did.”24 Indicatively, estrangement is back on the agenda amid renewed interest in Russian Formalism, increasingly noticeable during the second decade of this century.25 Shklovsky’s estrangement theory has not just been dogged by suspicions of inflated originality; worse still, some of the more careful readers of the Russian Formalists have been able to demonstrate that—far from lending Formalism its distinctive features—young Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement was never properly adopted by his fellow Formalists and, while remaining interesting and inspirational in the early stages, didn’t quite make its way into their mature literary theory. Tynianov and Jakobson eventually found Shklovsky’s concentration on the device and the internal dynamics of its (de)automatization unproductive, of little system-building power, and too obsessed with isolated characteristics at the cost of neglecting complex intra- and extraliterary relations, as their famous 1928 theses (“Problems in the Study of Literature and Language”) all too clearly suggest.26 Lotman, too, distanced himself in the 1960s from Shklovsky’s attention to the estranging capacity and the allegedly autonomous status of the literary device.27 Jakobson in particular appears to have been dissatisfied with Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement all along: the young Jakobson disliked “The Resurrection of the Word,”28 and half a century later, in his preface to Tzvetan Todorov’s anthology of texts by the Russian Formalists,

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Jakobson counted Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement among those platitudes galvaudées (hackneyed concepts) whose significance for Formalism’s later evolution should not be overrated.29 In other words, the early Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement—despite its emphasis on the beneficial nature of the reader’s encounter with the new, the unfamiliar, and the strange, despite its forceful rhetoric and flamboyant claims to completely overhauling the then prevalent notions of the significance of art, finally despite the popularity in the 1920s of Shklovsky’s own narrative prose that rendered this theory into practice (those interested in his books included Lenin, Trotsky, and Walter Benjamin)30—appears to have failed to become an integral part of what the Russian Formalists, and later the Soviet Structuralists, embraced and promoted as their principal tenets. It seems to me much more important to capture the underlying significance of Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement as part and parcel of the larger dilemma of his early period, that of radical innovation and conservatism: a dilemma that reflects his work on the cusp of different regimes of relevance that endow literature with significance for different reasons and from different perspectives. The first horn of this dilemma was confined to the defense of a new artistic language and new forms, while the second one manifested itself in Shklovsky’s belief that art can reawaken and regain the substance of things, but also in his political choices (skepticism vis-à-vis, and for a while active resistance to, the Bolshevik Revolution), and in his occasional doubts (which would at times compromise his otherwise confident aesthetic radicalism) regarding even the worth of the new poetic language. A more complex and ambiguous Shklovsky is thus bound to emerge from this engagement with the concept of estrangement: constituted in the precarious space between innovation and conservatism, Shklovsky’s theory partook of both, and it sometimes argued in favor of one of these modes in a way that reinforced the other. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I limit myself to Shklovsky’s prerevolutionary years, focusing on four statements produced before the autumn of 1917: “The Resurrection of the Word” (published in 1914); “Mayakovsky’s Book ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ Is Out” (published in 1915); “On Poetry and Trans-Rational Language” (published in 1916); and “Art as Device” (published in 1917, but completed before 24 December 1916). 31 While reading portions of these texts closely and engaging in an analysis of their often contradictory messages, I attempt a reinterpretation of Shklovsky

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that foregrounds his embeddedness in the context of World War I. One of my main points is that Shklovsky is an essayist and literary theorist whose work can only be properly grasped if taken to be part of the larger wave of European literature and thought called into existence by the war. As I hope to demonstrate, the Bolshevik Revolution did play an important role, but it should not be overrated at the expense of the crucial impact of the war. This new emphasis on Shklovsky’s war contexts has implications for the dual regime of relevance (moving between autonomy and instrumentality) at work in his early writings on literature. It also poses limitations to the resonance of his concept of estrangement beyond literary theory, as I argue in the final paragraphs. Euphoric Conservatism: On the Way to Resurrecting the Word

The trouble with Shklovsky is that we have not been paying sufficient attention to his political biography, which is an indispensable key to his texts. Much as one might hope that one day someone will research and present Shklovsky’s life in its entirety, that expectation already seems doomed by the speedy change of agenda in literary studies and intellectual history. Nonetheless, the fact is that if there were to be one single, indispensable biography of a Russian Formalist, it should certainly be Shklovsky’s.32 He was a key witness to, and an immediate participant in, Russia’s turbulent postrevolutionary history, whose endeavors exemplify and give us a flavor not only of the deeper meaning of resistance and exile, but also of his adaptation and conciliatory work at home upon his return from Berlin. His standing, as well as his sheer longevity, makes his life a crucial, privileged source of information. Without Shklovsky’s intimate insight into the dynamics of political and cultural change after the Revolution, and thus into the complex negotiation of ambition and adjustment that marked his and the other Formalists’ careers and writings, our understanding of Russian Formalism would remain incomplete (as our knowledge of how Formalism traveled abroad and what alterations it underwent outside Russia would without a serious biography of Jakobson). There are a couple of features informing Shklovsky’s early years that cannot fail to attract attention. Probably the most important one is Shklovsky’s enormous energy, his élan and the euphoria of an outsider seeking to break into the inner circles of Petrograd’s intelligentsia, often relying in his public statements on a quaint mixture of disparate facts, incompatible perspectives, and bizarre turns of phrase. This was noted by many a contemporary: Vladimir

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Piast, in Encounters, calls him “a young scholar-enthusiast”; Eikhenbaum, in 1914, before becoming a Formalist himself, refers to a speech by Shklovsky as a “stream of impermissible nonsense” sounding like “the talk of a madman.”33 Whether an “enthusiast” or a “madman,” Shklovsky gives one the unmistakable impression of a young man making light of the professional norms of scholarship but seriously aspiring to be treated on an equal footing with those recognized as the heralds and advocates of the new trends in Russian culture. The unregulated, ever-flexible, often semi-Bohemian forms this formidable energy assumed, not to mention its captivating intensity, have blurred for later commentators the fact that while ardently supporting formal innovation and the euphoric shattering of life routines by the Futurists, the early Shklovsky remained ensconced all along in a deeper-seated aesthetic and political conservatism. This conservatism takes us to the second essential feature of Shklovsky’s early career: the enormous significance of the war for his formation as an intellectual. One has so far tended to take without due seriousness, or even completely disregard, the vital fact that most of Shklovsky’s early essays were written during World War I. This is a factor of colossal explanatory power. It was the war that shaped the early Shklovsky and his career up until the mid-1920s more than anything else; the Bolshevik Revolution amplified its underlying effects, superimposing its own dynamics. This may seem little more than a truism, but it actually unlocks a whole new, so far unheeded, dimension to his work: Shklovsky’s early essays bear the imprint of an outlook not uncommon among a generation of European intellectuals (Ernst Jünger is probably the most apposite of a few likely representative examples) who witnessed or took part in life on the front. To argue this point, let me sketch the principal positions fought out in Shklovsky’s early contributions. But before that a word is needed on why “conservatism” is an apt term rather than a misnomer in Shklovsky’s case. To start with, conservatism is not meant, and is not employed here, as a term of abuse; nor is it an ahistorical or context-independent designation. On the contrary, by “conservatism” here I understand a context-related propensity for deriving values and standards from the past in resistance to trends embedded in the present. Conservatism is in this sense opposed to radicalism and cognate with traditionalism. It believes in the permanent and unalterable substance of things and in their particularity; it prefers the optics of a jagged singularity that remains true to the object over that of totalizing cognitive generalizations. In Shklovsky’s image from “Art as Device,” “the task of art is to provide

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a sensation of the thing that is like seeing [vídenie], and not like recognition [uznavanie]” (63). “Recognition” bears the numbing overtones of repetition and mental generalization; it oversimplifies the thing and disregards its uniqueness. (Shklovsky reminisced in his old age that when he invented the term “estrangement,” he discussed it with Eikhenbaum who proposed that it be replaced by “simplification.” Shklovsky strongly disagreed; cf. Panchenko, “Iz perepiski,” 185.) Shklovsky’s early writings exhibit facets of conservatism to the extent to which he espouses this logic of singularity, and a belief in the recoverability of unalterable substances verified in past experiences. The particular embodiments of Shklovsky’s conservatism were not contextneutral. On the eve of the war and in the years before the October Revolution, his conservatism was manifest in the disavowal of his allegiance to both (a) Futurism (by embracing pre-avant-garde modes of writing or simply expressing doubts in Futurism’s viability) and (b) a radically Formalist focus on the literariness of literature (in favor of a traditional attention to its social functions), as well as in (c) his distrust of democracy as a specific product of modernization. The second point—Shklovsky’s distance from a radically autonomous understanding of literature in favor of a more traditional notion of its relevance—is especially significant for the overall argument of this book. After the October Revolution, and until about 1923, Shklovsky’s conservatism, evolving as it did in an essentially different context, manifested itself differently: it was above all the political conservatism of an intellectual opposed to the Revolution; he was also frequently against the Futurists—but not so much aesthetically as out of fear that they were becoming part of the new establishment (a conservatism, one should note, that on this count took the form of anarchism). None of these meanings of “conservatism” is, let me repeat, either offensive or debasing in relation to Shklovsky’s originality and intellectual prowess; they simply help us recognize the complexity of his thought and, perhaps equally important, the fundamentally unsettled relations between Russian Formalism and the avant-garde (seen previously solely as mutually enabling and supportive entities).34 For a writer who earned himself the reputation of a radical, the young Shklovsky’s platform was indeed strikingly conservative. In his prewar essay “The Resurrection of the Word,” Shklovsky, despite the title, mourns the death not just—and not as much—of the word but also that of the object; he pleads for the resurrection of the thing (veshch') and for restoring the freshness of one’s dulled sensations. There is an implicit norm of authen-

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ticity lurking in this essay—still weaker than what would follow in his essays written during the war but nonetheless noticeable—that compromises Shklovsky’s proclaimed radicalism. The tacit expectation of authenticity extends to both the reader’s perceptions and the objects themselves; the norm of truthfulness appears to be set by one’s past experiences of reliving the object as both singularly new and reassuringly the same. (Shklovsky is here caught in the staple dilemma of conservative thinking: is it just an insistence on that which was, or is it in favor of that which has always been?) The past makes itself felt through its potential to remind us of what the true being of things might consist in—when the artist manages to awaken them (and us as readers) from the current coma of automatism. In the same breath, Shklovsky recommends the creation of “new, live words” and “the restitution [emphasis added] of the former glitter to the olden diamonds of the words” (41). His faith in the reality of resurrection—first of the words, then also of the objects—rests ultimately on his nostalgic belief in the temporarily lost, but no doubt still retrievable, intimate proximity of word and object, which is posited as an ideal and set as a pressing task for the artist. Crucially, Shklovsky seems to maintain that the word may indeed cease to be an adequately forceful representation of the object, and therefore the reservoir of words a writer draws on needs to be refreshed and restocked to take account of time’s wear and tear, yet the object itself and its substance stay unchanged over time. It is only our sensations of the objects, and of the words that mobilize these sensations, that appear to be exposed to historic change and are thus in need of constant stimulation, adjustment, and updating in order not to depart too tragically from, or obscure too much, the presumed identity of word and object. The substance of the thing remains unalterable, as does the challenge of attaining it in the work of art. In the end, Shklovsky’s motivation for capturing this substance through an ever-renewable series of affective verbal representations is not so much to celebrate the power of art qua art, but—ultimately—to help people “kill pessimism” (40). 35 It is thus a broadly conceived socio-psychological mission of art that matters most to Shklovsky in this early essay. His theoretical radicalism proves to be considerably moderated by this much more traditional understanding of art as contributing to the emotional balance and well-being of humanity by fostering its cognitive abilities. In this context, it becomes perhaps easier to grasp why an ardent supporter of Futurism should be availing himself of examples and authorities redolent of a nineteenth-century tradition (Carlyle

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and Hebbel, among others, quoted approvingly in “The Resurrection of the Word”), so saliently incompatible with the claim to radical modernity and the Russian Futurists’ desire to “throw overboard” the cultural canon of the nineteenth century. Vacillations: The Mission of Art in the Face of War

Although the notion of estrangement is already there—Shklovsky makes a clear reference to Aristotle’s advice from Poetics that authors lend their language an outlandish feel (41)—the term itself does not appear in “The Resurrection of the Word.” Shortly afterward, in his brief review of Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Trousers,” Shklovsky once again brings to the fore the values of authenticity and singularity. He disparagingly calls the poetic images deployed by the Symbolists (his example comes from Viacheslav Ivanov) “grandchildren of the original sensation of life” (42), seeking thus to expose the Symbolists’ alleged role in the automatization of art. Equally important, in this text, written and published in 1915, Shklovsky produces for the first time a significant connection between World War I and the mission of art. The passage is rather telling, and so I shall quote it in full: “The world, having lost along with art the sensation of life, is now committing a monstrous suicide. The war bypasses consciousness in our time of dead art, and this explains its cruelty, greater than the cruelty of the religious wars. Germany did not have Futurism, but Russia, Italy, France, and England did” (43). The passage is so elliptic that it lies open to a whole range of interpretations; nor do we have any evidence as to how, precisely, it was read by Shklovsky’s contemporaries. Nonetheless, two striking points deserve attention. The first one is Shklovsky’s tremendously attractive, and yet misplaced, suggestion that the cruelty of the war be seen as a result of the malfunction of art. The war, presented by Shklovsky from a humanistic perspective as a terrible act of suicide, appears to be the consequence of the world losing the freshness of its perceptions and lowering its sensitivity to pain. Art has been complicit in this process in that it failed to provide mankind with an awareness of life’s true value, thus making acceptable the atrocities of the war. Without the failure of art, the war might not have taken place, or so Shklovsky seems inclined to intimate. This link between art and the war, whereby the latter is thought to be the product of the inability of the former to serve the imperative of human self-preservation, points again to Shklovsky’s still recognizably instrumental understanding of art. Despite his and his fellow Formalists’ many claims (recurrent in their early

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writings) to art being a process of exclusively formal innovation, the stoppage or failure of this process is implied to generate potentially dangerous sociopsychological consequences, going far beyond the realm of artistic form. Art’s capacity for incessant formal novelty and reinvention, so flamboyantly asserted by the Formalists at the time, is understood to be ultimately subservient to the function of securing stability by contributing to a healthier humanity that hones its awareness of pain and danger on good literature, thus learning (or not forgetting) how to avoid war. Shklovsky was not alone in this delusive analysis of the relation between art and the war. In the middle of the war, from a different perspective, very much guided by a humanistic concern for the fate of the European cultural tradition, Georg Simmel wrote his essay “The Crisis of Culture.” Simmel’s text still reads as a masterfully astute critique of the malaise of early Western consumerism and the stifling forces of bureaucratization. More than that, it is a lasting appeal against the substitution of means for goals in the life of society and the individual. But there is at the same time something profoundly disturbing in Simmel’s philosophical instrumentalization of the war in this short essay, just as there is in the link between the war and the failure of art produced by Shklovsky. World War I, Simmel suggests, must have taken place in order to correct—on behalf of life—the “disintegration and perversion” of culture, which had reached an extreme. The parity between life and cultural forms had been put in danger by the accumulation over time of ossified forms that hamper the development of culture and cripple life. Now the war, with its dramatic return to the basics, offers life the chance to regain its primacy over these ossified forms. The war, with its “unifying, simplifying and concentrated force,” is reflected upon with an admiration that translates its horrors into sublimity: “We stand . . . before the magnitude of this crisis, which it is utterly impossible for the individual to take the measure of.” At the same time, the war is internalized and sublimated “in each of us” as “the crisis of our own soul.”36 Thus, although coming from different perspectives, both Shklovsky and Simmel regard the war as intimately linked to the failures—not least the ossification (Simmel) or the automatization (Shklovsky) of the forms—of European art and culture. Yet while Shklovsky sees the war as a concomitant result of this process and a confirmation sui generis of the failure of art to constantly renew its forms and devices in the name, ultimately, of an overall state of equilibrium and stability, Simmel puts the emphasis on the war as instrumental to life’s convalescence from the encroachment of inflexible, petrified cultural forms.

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The second point that demands attention is Shklovsky’s belief, closely related to his statements discussed above, that whether the countries fighting in the war did or did not experience Futurism as a cultural phenomenon somehow influenced their position in it.37 Against the background of wartime nationalism that had swept across Europe since August 1914, this line of argumentation was not very original: Shklovsky tacitly accuses Germany of both not having experienced Futurism and (also for that reason) becoming an enemy in the war. By contrast, he believed all other countries mentioned by him to have benefited from a Futurist stage in their cultures. Shklovsky implies that in all these countries, the relentless artistic innovation exemplified by Futurism at least tried to keep public consciousness wide awake and to sponsor a sharper sensitivity to the cruelty of war, which by the same implication must have been impossible in Germany, the wretched country without Futurism. Thus, Germany could not but set in full motion its militaristic machine and become the uncompromising enemy of those societies privileged to enjoy Futurism’s wholesome effects on public life (such as an enhanced awareness of life and its intrinsic value, induced by the shock the new artistic forms brought along). Germany, Shklovsky’s elliptic comment suggests, succumbed to warmongering because of the absence of an anti-war culture nurtured by the impact of Futurism, whereas the Entente powers were dragged into the war despite all this. Shklovsky’s glorification of Futurism rests here, as one could surmise, on rather shaky ground. Historically, the flaw of his argument becomes evident when one recalls that Italy was initially in the camp of Germany and the AustroHungarian Empire, and did not join the Entente until May 1915 (Shklovsky’s review appeared in December 1915, following the publication of “A Cloud in Trousers” in September; he would have had to write a very different story if Mayakovsky’s poem had been published just half a year earlier). His account of European Futurism is equally inaccurate and biased. Shklovsky appears to be stretching considerably England’s case, where the Imagists and the Vorticists defied their being subsumed under an international movement led by Marinetti, while Futurism and Expressionism proper remained casual and sporadic developments rather than a coherent and powerful trend. Similarly, Shklovsky does not tell the whole story in the case of France, where Futurism was treated with suspicion even by some of the avant-garde groups. Conversely, his confident denial of Futurism in Germany disregards Herwarth Walden’s role38 and the presence of Futurism in the German visual arts, as well as the crucial fact that

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the role of Futurism was often successfully played by Expressionism, which introduced to German culture the contradictory mixture of enthusiasm for urban life and a rediscovery of the primitive. By contrast, although German expressionist poetry was widely translated in Russia, the Russian version of the movement never took hold (Russian Expressionism remained confined to a group of seven minor poets, led by Ippolit Sokolov).39 On the other hand, it has to be conceded that Shklovsky was probably right in recognizing a certain pacifistic potential to Futurism that could conceivably play a part in changing the climate of public opinion. True, neither Italian Futurism nor Russian Futurist poetry, especially in its earlier phase, were innocent of glorifying militaristic violence. Marinetti’s manifestoes, known by then in Russia mainly in Shershenevich’s translations, would have revealed to a reader less opinionated than Shklovsky that the leader of the Italian Futurists was an admirer of militarism who makes no bones about it. In the first Manifesto of Futurism (February 1909), he considered war “the world’s only hygiene” (Marinetti repeated this statement in his 1915 book Guerra sola igiene del mondo). Yet it is also true that as the real war progressed, the militaristic enthusiasm of the Russian Futurists became more qualified, and by 1915 they commenced to convey longings for a world without war (cf. Hodgson, “Myth-Making,” 65–66). This was certainly the case in Igor' Severianin’s poetry, whose poems “Ballad XIV” and “Ballad XV,” both written in April 1917, were clear documents of anti-war sentiment from a poet previously known for his light-hearted, not to say cynical, attitude to the war. The pacifist stance was also visible in Khlebnikov’s cycle of poems “War in a Mousetrap” (1915–22). More important for a discussion of Shklovsky, Mayakovsky himself had moved in the same direction. In the fifth part of his poem “War and the Universe” (1915–16), which Shklovsky welcomed enthusiastically in 1916 (cf. Galushkin’s commentaries in Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 488), Mayakovsky painted a picture of the ensuing universal peace, where “every country came to man with its gifts” (Mayakovsky, “Voina i mir,” 60). All the major participants in the war were mentioned in this gift-bestowing procession, as were continents and countries that were not directly involved but stood symbolically for the richness and variety of human culture (Germany, France, Italy, Russia, America, Greece, India, Africa, and Tibet). Thus Shklovsky’s insistence on the beneficial pacifist effects of Futurism, while no doubt exaggerated, was certainly not entirely unfounded. Overstating the case for Futurism’s ability to generate and support an anti-war culture was the result of Shklovsky’s anxiety to restore confidence—sometimes

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beyond the point of credibility—in the healing potential of art that was supposed (but failed) to mobilize human sensitivity for the prevention of the war. Yet this is not the only logic at work in Shklovsky’s review. In sharp contrast to the protest against the cruelty of the war in the lines above, Shklovsky celebrates Mayakovsky’s Futurist poetry as a rejection of the “senile tenderness of earlier Russian literature—the literature of powerless people” (43). The dismissal of “tenderness” and the salient contempt for the “powerless” is difficult to reconcile with the humanistic tone before that. Shklovsky has never been renowned for the systematic quality of his thinking, and he often relied on paradox and contradiction to enhance the rhetorical effect of his prose. The lack of consistency observed here is of a different kind, however. It originates in Shklovsky’s own vacillations between radicalism and traditionalism (both political and, as we shall shortly see, aesthetic), nurtured by the controversial effects of the war that inevitably foregrounded the virtues of strength, courage, will, and of that subsequent “heroic realism,”40 the praise of which was bound to undermine pacifism and humanistic values. Shklovsky was thus determined to put the war on moral trial while still preserving his admiration for its stimulation of the fitter and the stronger. The tasks of literature, Shklovsky believes, have to grow in proportion with the enormity of the war—leaving little room for conceiving of literature purely in terms of its autonomy. The Paradox of Estrangement

Shklovsky celebrates Mayakovsky’s novelty by establishing a link between his poetry and the genre of the “heroic epic” (43), explicitly insisting that the tradition of prehistoric, unwritten folklore culture could be a better ally to the avantgarde than any of the defunct modernist currents of yesteryear. In “On Poetry and Trans-rational Language” (1916), Shklovsky’s contradictory position on aesthetic innovation is plain to see in a question he asks toward the end of the article. After having argued for trans-rational language’s right to exist, he displays distrust in its prospects: “Will there ever be genuine works of art written in transrational language, will this ever be a specific kind of literature acknowledged by all?” (58). Shklovsky’s skepticism betrays a still very strong reliance (that clearly tested his sympathy for Futurism) on, first, there being an invisible and unassailable essence of art that sets the equally invisible and unquestionable measure of genuineness its works can hope to attain; and second, on there being a more traditional literary language that determines the norm of common recognition

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and success. Boris Eikhenbaum replied to Shklovsky’s question in the same year (1916) in the negative (“To the author’s question we think it possible to answer definitely ‘no’”),41 reinforcing Shklovsky’s skepticism and giving him more reasons to question his own ardent support for zaum. It is with this mix of enthusiasm and doubt concerning the new art that Shklovsky arrived at the concept of estrangement in his major essay “Art as Device,” completed in 1916 and first published the following year.42 This is Shklovsky at his best43 and his worst. His concise and witty prose, his often brilliant formulations, and his elegant variations on the central thesis he defends are balanced by his typically nonchalant attitude to the work of his predecessors, his proclivity to rhetoric effects, sometimes at the expense of clarity and depth, and, last but not least, his delight in name-dropping. For example, Shklovsky refers twice to Herbert Spencer, once on the economizing of attention in general (61), without an indication of the exact source, and once on rhythm as a means of economizing physical effort (72). The actual source of these references is Aleksandr Veselovskii’s discussion of Spencer in his “Three Chapters from a Historical Poetics.” More specifically, the lines Shklovsky put in quotation marks in the second of these two instances are not a literal quotation, but rather a paraphrase of Spencer by Veselovskii,44 which Shklovsky borrowed for his purposes without feeling compelled to indicate its status as a paraphrase (or its source). Furthermore, when refuting the theory of the least effort, Shklovsky also took issue with Avenarius, admitting more than forty years later, with some humility, that he had done so without “wider knowledge” of Spencer’s and Avenarius’s “philosophical systems” (Shklovsky, Khudozhestvennaia, 6).45 “Art as Device” brings together, and to the fore, the two most significant motifs in Shklovsky’s essayistic prose of the late 1910s: the war reverberates here mediated through the central theme of estrangement. Picking up on his review of Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in Trousers,” Shklovsky once again denounces the process of automatization,46 which he holds responsible for “eating up things, dress, furniture, wife, and one’s fear of war” (63). As in Shklovsky’s other pieces of that period, it is the positive experience of estrangement in and through art that can restore these lost sensations of materiality, of fear and love, thus restoring the missing human dimension of life. Once again, Shklovsky’s claim can be properly grasped and appreciated against the background of wider European developments. In Germany, which, as we have seen, he implied to be artistically and morally handicapped because of the alleged absence of Futurism in German literature, Ernst Jünger’s writings

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about the war—the most potent example among many others—were driven by the same longing to go back to the substance of things that one detects at work in Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement. The comeback of the elemental on the wings of the exceptional, the appearance of truth in the guise of pain and danger that of necessity sharpen one’s feeling for the fundamentals of life is a recurring motif in Jünger’s prose about the war. Shklovsky, who in 1917 received the St. George Cross from General Kornilov’s hands for his courageous leadership during a difficult battle,47 and the even more richly decorated Jünger,48 both had a hunger for substance in common, stimulated and directed by the war. They shared a passion for reawakening and releasing the indispensable core of objects, which the outer layers of everyday life had rendered imperceptible. Shklovsky believed that this process would involve a concentration on form. The perception of form made difficult restores one’s sensations to their previous freshness; then, in a next step, these sensations get refocused once again on the form that had facilitated estrangement in the first place. Unlike Shklovsky, Jünger felt that the exceptionality of the war would itself sharpen and refocus human perception on the long-forgotten substance of things. His post-Romantic belief in the unstoppably spontaneous burst of the essential into the realm of the accidental was not uncommon at the time in other aesthetic quarters, especially among the Expressionists and in other streams of the avant-garde. Whether with the help of formal innovation or without it, the war was the crucial stimulus in this exercise of repossessing reality and rediscovering its materiality. Here is a revealing example from Jünger’s preface (written in December 1919) to his 1920 book Storm of Steel, the first of a series of works on the war that established his name as a writer: “One thing rises ever more clearly from the deluge of occurrences: the overwhelming significance of matter [Materie]. The war culminated in the battle of materials [Materialschlacht]; machines, iron, and gunpowder were its factors. Even man was valued as material” (Jünger, “Vorwort,” 9; my translation). Jünger’s 1919 emphasis on the material nature of war found its parallel in Shklovsky’s own preoccupation with material, which was to resurface—again in relation to war and its verbal representation—in his 1928 book Mater'ial i stil' v romane L'va Tolstogo “Voina i mir” (Material and Style in Lev Tolstoy’s Novel “War and Peace”). One may thus argue that while the concept of estrangement in Shklovsky may have had a number of sources in various scholarly and philosophical traditions, with which he may have been (often indirectly) familiar, the crucial formative

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factor that contributed to the rise of this concept and its pride of place in his prerevolutionary writings was undoubtedly World War I. The war was the propitious ground on which a materialist, substance-orientated view of the world grew strong and flourished, amid and out of—ultimately as a protest against—the cacophony and chaos of annihilation. Facilitating a return to the pristine nature of things seemed to be for Shklovsky, Jünger, and so many other writers of the World War I generation the greatest gift that the progress of technology, industry, and warfare, so evident on the eve of the war and during it, could give back to a frustrated Europe. Estrangement was a technique designed to assist this process by equipping the reading public with the required acuteness of perception. Making a virtue of necessity, Shklovsky and Jünger, alongside many other writers at the time, were out to refresh their readers’ sensitivity to matter and substance, and to aid them back onto the path to a protected realm of basic and enduring truths. All this means, let me reiterate this point, that the time is ripe to place the early Shklovsky—even more forcefully than this has been done on occasion in the past—in his proper context, that of the war, and to see him as an author participating in the larger constellation of European writers whose work and ideas were rooted in their wartime experience. At the same time, we need to be aware of the role the Russian Revolution played in Shklovsky’s development after 1917. The revolution no doubt added to his war experience, amplifying and throwing into relief his main dilemma, that of aesthetic innovation (ambiguous and at times shaky, as we have seen when analyzing Shklovsky’s texts on Mayakovsky and trans-rational poetry) vis-à-vis social and political conservatism. What is more, the revolution superimposed a new political dynamic that, while not cancelling the dispositions of the war experience, demanded different responses, which had to consider the energies of social transformation and construction. In other words, the war and the revolution are to be thought together without being conflated. A shrewd Marxist commentator on Futurism suggested in Russia in 1924, with reference to Marinetti, that his evolution was marked precisely by an inability to distinguish between the political significance of the war and that of the revolution: “Marinetti perceives the war aesthetically, outwardly, as an awakening from life’s slumber, as an element that disturbs the stale routine of the everyday, as an enthusiasm, a motion. . . . It escapes him that the war is not an active, but a reactive dynamic, an element that affirms, props, and guards the old forms of life from the element that negates and destroys them, the revolution” (Gorlov, Futurizm i revoliutsiia, 13).

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This failure of differentiation accounts, in Gorlov’s view, for the transformation of Marinetti’s revolutionary aesthetics into reactionary politics. With Gorlov’s interpretation in mind, even without accepting his accusatory judgment, one can more clearly appreciate the fact that up until 1923, Shklovsky’s uncertain political affiliations, too, unfolded in the framework of the superimposed but far from identical agendas of the war and the revolution—and so did his ambiguous theory of estrangement, where the new was hailed as the savior of the old or ever-extant. The drive toward rediscovering the substance of things, the desire to regain their true nature in art went hand in hand with a conservative epistemology of permanence and inalterability. Things are as they are, and art seems to be called upon to reveal or enhance their genuine character through estrangement (to make the stone stonier, in Shklovsky’s parlance)—not to change them or the social settings in which they occur. Any successful act of estrangement thus rests on a paradox: the end product is meant as a piece of innovation—arrived at through various artistic devices—that serves, however, to revive and make more palpable the old (and constant) substance of things. To conduct the procedure of estrangement properly and to the desired end means to bring to the fore the old in and through the new. Shklovsky’s early paradox of estrangement appears to be an epiphenomenon of Russian Formalism working on the cusp of two different notions of the relevance of literature: one that valorizes it for its autonomy and specificity as a discourse, and another that seeks to bestow significance on literature with reference to its socially and individually ameliorative capacity. The first of these two different notions focuses Shklovsky’s interest on form and the formal features of literature that draw attention to themselves; the second notion instrumentalizes form to enable a process of resistance vis-à-vis the fleeting nature of modern life, exacerbated by the war and the revolution, a process of, as Shklovsky put it, “fighting pessimism” by letting literature restage for us an encounter with the permanence of forgotten matter. Afterlives: Estrangement in Brecht and Marcuse

As we can see, Shklovsky’s early theory of estrangement contains clearly discernible social, ethical, and cognitive aspects. Shklovsky later modified his earlier notion of estrangement by focusing exclusively on its formal aspects, not least—I should add—as a result of seeking to solve the dilemma of the two

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regimes of relevance, which I have outlined here. In 1919, he already claims that the real task is to change our perception not of life “but of the artistic form itself, which has become automatized through our acquaintance with older works” (Steiner, Russian Formalism, 156). This later preoccupation with form, however, set limits to the impact his concept of estrangement was able to exert in the future among those who will have continued to interpret literature from the perspective of a regime of relevance centered not around its formal and discursive autonomy, but around its direct public utility. In “Ulla, ulla, Martians!” (1919), an article Shklovsky wrote, by his own admission, in reaction to some Futurists assuming positions of power in the Ministry of Education, he warned against “equating the social revolution and the revolution of the forms of art,” whose inexhaustible potential was not to be subjected to the former: Futurism and the practitioners of estrangement “no more needed a place in the history of the social revolution than the sunshine needs a three-bedroom apartment with a bathroom in the Nevsky Boulevard” (78). This later insistence on the primacy of estrangement as a formal act that must not be rendered subservient to the political tasks of reforming reality was to be rejected, without explicit reference to Shklovsky, but no less unequivocally for that, by Bertolt Brecht in his own theory of the Verfremdung effect, the outlines of which do not need to be extensively rehearsed here. Although the evidence in support of Shklovsky’s role in the genesis of Brecht’s Verfremdung theory has not been entirely conclusive,49 this role seems to be accepted by most Brecht scholars today.50 This acceptance is perhaps somewhat peculiar, given that the Formalists did not formulate (they didn’t even begin to) their own theory of drama. Jurij Striedter argues, not without reason, that the Verfremdung theory of drama was not—and perhaps could not be—worked out by the Formalists, for drama would have confronted them with the reality of a complex interaction between different media of expression, language being only one of them. Thus, a theory of estrangement applicable to literature, where the primacy of the linguistic is (more often than not) taken for granted, was inapplicable to drama (cf. Striedter, “Zur formalistischen Theorie,” xxv–xxvi). To Striedter’s argument that intermediality may have tested Formalism’s theory to the point where it begins to disintegrate, one has to add the role of the human body in the enactment of the dramatic text:51 an explicit treatment of the corporeal aspect is equally—and significantly—absent from the rather purist theory of discourse offered by the mainstream Formalists, with the major exception of the well-known discussions of voice and posture in contemporary Russian

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theory of declamation (and this under strong German influence). But—and this is an important qualification—I do not think the absence of drama in the writings of the Formalists should be seen as a cause for concern or lamentation; it actually falsifies, in Karl Popper’s sense, the foundations of Formalist literary theory, built as it is on the centrality of language, largely stripped of its corporeal or more widely semiotic aspects. It is, in the end, this single-minded focus that allows Russian Formalism to produce theory in the only sense in which theory is possible: by generating relational value, in other words an argument or statement that works in relation to one set of phenomena but is tested by, and demonstrated not to work in, other such sets. Whether or not Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung did indeed have its origins in an acquaintance with Shklovsky’s theory (mediated by Sergei Tretyakov, and/ or others), the fact remains that Brecht went beyond that theory by interpreting defamiliarization not just as a formal, but also as a didactic technique that would promote his audience’s better grasp of reality and would thus enhance its ability to fight for its political goals. Brecht’s theater encourages a dialogical approach to reality on the part of the spectator, whose ultimate goal is to change—not simply to rediscover, let alone reaffirm—that reality (cf. also Günther, “Verfremdung,” 143–44). Shklovsky’s own attempts at revising his theory of estrangement in the 1960s (he mentions explicitly Brecht’s Verfremdung principle in one of these attempts; cf. Shklovsky, Povesti, 2: 298–99) were a disappointment. If anything, the concept was bereft of its initial sharpness and muddled by Shklovsky’s only half-ironic use of the official ideological language; a conceptual breakthrough that would significantly alter his early paradigm was not forthcoming. In his late rewriting of his own theory of estrangement, Shklovsky’s return to the traditional regime of relevance that validates literature for its capacity to convey or address wider social concerns would not materialize, despite his efforts and despite the fact that he had himself in his youth, as this chapter demonstrates, reflected on literature, at least in part, within that regime. As Shklovsky was busy updating his theory, its more exciting original version reached Herbert Marcuse through an anthology of Russian Formalism edited by Tzvetan Todorov in Paris in 1965.52 Marcuse’s attention was arrested by two texts, Eikhenbaum’s “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’” and Shklovsky’s “Art as Device,” which he found relevant to his analysis of the place of art in the potential transformation of bourgeois society. In his 1969 book An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse, who in his earlier One-Dimensional Man (1964) had written sympathetically on Brecht’s theory of Verfremdung (Marcuse, One-

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Dimensional Man, 66–67; 70), quotes at some length from Eikhenbaum and Shklovsky, in French (Marcuse, Essay, 45–6), subjecting Shklovsky’s main thesis to an appreciative but critical interpretation that gives the concept of estrangement a twist that can be traced back to a Marxian theory of reification (on which Marcuse builds his argument in the relevant section of An Essay on Liberation, without mentioning either Marx or Lukács). Marcuse draws a close parallel between the automatism of perception and the deceptive immediacy of experience sponsored and maintained by ideology. All modes of experience, he reminds his readers, are in truth an outcome of history; they are imposed on man by society, regardless of—or even precisely through—their apparent “coalescence,” in Marcuse’s parlance, into a selfsufficient, “automatic” system. The problem is that art cannot break through the crust of reification that makes experiences seem immediate; even estrangement fails to expose the false immediacy of experience, its actual automatism. One expects in vain that sharper perception—the “fleeting product” of art—will be able to deal with reification and alienation, both of which are, according to Marcuse, the complex and durable products of history. If a brief paraphrase of Marcuse’s central argument may be allowed, estrangement cannot defeat alienation. The triumph of the artist over her material and the aesthetic transfiguration of the object remain “unreal,” in the sense of lacking any lasting social effect, and so does “the revolution in perception” (Marcuse, Essay, 50); all these false victories are but short-lived merriment in the face of a persisting and unconquerable reality. If the aesthetic can at all become a socially productive force, thus leading to the “end” of art through the implementation of the beautiful in life, then only in the conditions of what Marcuse sees as the seminal “negativity” of the advanced industrial societies. By seminal “negativity” Marcuse means here the process whereby technology and science, which he no doubt sees as supporting the negative trends in society by strengthening the ruling class’s power base, also give rise to various emancipatory developments by reducing the level of human dependence on hard physical labor and other primitive forms of exploitation. This dialectic evolution of the negative would result in more leisure, in liberation of the imagination and its growth (backed up by the achievements of science) to a “force of production.” On the crest of the 1968 student protests in France (although Marcuse explains in his “Preface” that he wrote the essay before that and merely added some footnotes “in the way of documentation”; Marcuse, Essay, 11), art becomes for Marcuse an ally of the “Great Refusal” of

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capitalism and its system of cultural production by the new agents of social transformation—but only to the extent to which art abandons the ambition to create its own parallel order that sublimates the pain and pleasure of reality. Art should not replace or rival reality; there has to be a dynamic balance between the two, whereby art is neither identified with reality nor put above it as an autonomous entity. Here Marcuse returns to Brecht (without naming him explicitly) to praise the Verfremdung effect, whose abrogation in the modern practices of street performance and happening allegedly “defeats the radicalism of today’s art” (Marcuse, Essay, 53); the happenings, for example, are said to create illusory communities within a society that in reality remains torn apart by antagonisms.53 Strangely, while recognizing the changes in the social makeup of advanced capitalist societies and taking pains to identify the new revolutionary forces, Marcuse proves more conservative in his approach to the new art forms that involve mass participation. For Marcuse, these new art forms furnish examples of the same false immediacy that art is actually called upon to expose and break through. On this count, they are on a par with Shklovsky’s estrangement, which, Marcuse believes, offers but an illusory solution to reification and alienation. In the face of the alternative provided by Brecht’s Verfremdung, which Marcuse sees as the finest antidote to an art that is either impotently identical with, or hopelessly detached from, reality, Shklovsky’s earlier theory of estrangement is abandoned as a beautifully romantic but overhauled phase in the project of human emancipation; his high hopes for autonomous art are filed away as an example of wishful thinking out of season. Thus, unsurprisingly, in the end both Brecht and Marcuse found Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement politically conservative, incapable of generating the radical energy required by the ambitious social transformations that art should embrace as its ultimate goal. This is not to disregard the fact that their own ideas of radicalism—in particular Marcuse’s—were tainted and compromised by a lack of feel for the power a whole range of new cultural forms held at the time. A passionate believer in the mission of art to make things strange in order to excite our sensibility and thus help us recover and even enhance their nature, the early Shklovsky’s enthusiasms seem to have been largely deserted in the present climate (unlike some other aspects of his work, which continue to exude intellectual power and attraction, and to which I will return in the epilogue to this book). The rich ambiguities and the contradictory subtext of his early theory of estrangement have played no small part in this story of

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intellectual survival and oblivion. Underneath this inconsistent trajectory of impact there lies the bigger picture of the imbricated workings of two different regimes of relevance that capture the significance of literature from the perspective of discursive autonomy and specificity, on the one hand, and of a more direct public utility, on the other. The early Shklovsky moved within and between these two regimes; unlike Brecht and Marcuse, he didn’t hoist the flag of politically committed literature. Ambiguity became his cultivated realm of freedom.

Impact through Triangulation: Formalism, Eurasianism, Marxism Throughout this chapter I have been tracing and interpreting in a new way the encounter between Formalism and Marxism (in the famous Leningrad debate of 1927 and in the ambivalent positioning and later impact of Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement). This encounter allows us to see the complex dynamic of negotiation between the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature at work at the time. In order to duly complicate the picture, I now want to offer a triangulation that brings in an important exilic ideological movement that sought to reconcile Formalism and Marxism, and also the wider regimes of relevance in which they partook. Thus, the following section explores previously neglected intersections between three major intellectual streams shaping the Soviet discussions on aesthetics, art, and literature in the late 1920s. In pursuit of this goal, I resort to the pleasures of detective reconstruction; my focus is on a hitherto unknown but significant episode in the history of the polemics surrounding Russian Formalism in the late 1920s. The main protagonists in this previously unheeded drama of ideas were Pavel Medvedev, a well-known member of the Bakhtin Circle and an author and scholar in his own right, and the obscure Russian émigré Emiliia Litauer. A critical assessment of what little is known about Litauer is followed by a longer digression examining the conditions that enabled the mutual mediation of Marxism and Formalism in the late 1920s and prepared the ground for their interpretation by Litauer as closely interrelated phenomena. The subsequent discussion of Litauer’s arguments highlights the choice of the Eurasians to engage with both Marxism and Formalism in a way that recognized the potential of each of the two currents without being uncritical

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of either. It was in this context that Litauer attempted to find a “third way” for Soviet aesthetics that would preserve the radicalism of Marxism while obviating its rejection of Formalism. Who Was Litauer and Why Was She Interested in Pavel Medvedev’s Work?

Russian Formalism and the polemics surrounding it have been the subject of scholarly inquiry for some six decades since Victor Erlich’s pioneering study was first published; yet so far insufficient attention has been paid to the views of those intellectuals who had left Russia with the first wave of emigration after the revolution of 1917. Exceptions to this tendency are a few articles analyzing the position of some of the more prominent émigré writers.54 But the circle of those following the Soviet debate on Formalism and taking sides in it was considerably larger. One of the most interesting—regrettably also least known—participants in this polemic was Emiliia Emmanuilovna Litauer, one of Shklovsky’s female students. Attention was first drawn to Litauer’s life and work in 1992, and the information then available was somewhat amplified later.55 Despite this, her life has remained shrouded in mystery. A short biographical note has even made the rather improbable (and implausible) assertion that her name was no more than a pseudonym for Emmanuel Levinas, the French-Jewish philosopher of Lithuanian origin.56 Not even her date of birth is entirely certain: internal evidence adduced by Irma Kudrova allows one to assume that Litauer was born in 1904 or 1905 (Kudrova, Gibel', 46, 257); from a letter by Shklovsky quoted further below one could infer that she was born in 1900 or 1901. Her father was a rich merchant, and after the revolution the family, including Litauer and her brother, was swiftly forced into emigration. In 1918, Litauer found herself in Germany, trying to enroll in a university. Apparently, one of her early stops was Berlin. In a letter to Maksim Gorky, written in late October or November 1922, Shklovsky apprises him of Litauer’s problems in Berlin and asks him to intervene: “My pupil Emiliia Emmanuilovna Letauer [sic], twenty-one years old, a student of Petrograd University and of the Institute of Art History, has found me in Berlin. She has written some good essays on Tolstoy. Now they aren’t admitting her to the University here . . . ”57 Litauer must have succeeded in obtaining a place as a student, though, since various accounts, each of them in need of further confirmation, locate her as a student of Husserl at Freiburg;58 as a student of Heidegger;59 and as a philosophy student at Marburg.60 In the

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end, she left Germany for France, continuing her education at the Sorbonne, in the Faculty of Letters, from which she graduated with a degree in philosophy. In 1927, Litauer joined the Eurasian organization in Paris and was also prompted to become a member of the French Communist Party, which she dutifully joined. Her behavior was not untypical at the time: the increasingly pro-Soviet stance of the Clamart group within the Eurasian movement (named after the Paris neighborhood where the newspaper Evraziia (Eurasia) was published between November 1928 and September 1929) was nurtured by the isolation of the Eurasians from real political power and their growing belief that the Soviet Union was the only promoter, however unpalatable and imperfect, of their dream of an imperial Russia straddling both Europe and Asia, without fully identifying itself with either. In 1928–29, Litauer was among the frequent contributors to Eurasia, where she published a host of reviews and short articles on philosophy, aesthetics, and history. Among the books she reviewed were some of the most significant works of Continental philosophy and social thought in the 1920s: Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Drieu la Rochelle’s Geneva or Moscow; she also wrote about Husserl, Lenin, and Croce, among others.61 She was expelled from France for a time in 1933, following accusations of Communist propaganda in French and émigré circles. Litauer submitted repatriation requests on two occasions, in 1932 and in 1933, but it was not until 1936 that her request to return was granted. Kudrova submits that Litauer’s friends tried to have her appointed on the staff of the French edition of Moscow News,62 but it remains unknown whether she actually worked for the paper. After Marina Tsvetaeva’s return to the Soviet Union in 1939, Litauer was sometimes in her company; a walk they took together in the summer of 1939 was retrospectively recorded by Tsvetaeva in her diary in the autumn of 1940.63 On 27 August 1939, Litauer was arrested and charged with espionage. Under interrogation, she said she had been assigned tasks by Sergei Efron, Tsvetaeva’s husband, who had allegedly ordered her to penetrate Soviet military installations. After being found guilty, along with Efron, she was shot on 27 August 1941. Litauer’s interest in the polemic between Marxism and Russian Formalism was certainly provoked by her early acquaintance with Viktor Shklovsky. But there are also other circumstances facilitating the attention she paid to Medvedev’s article “Formalism and the history of literature (fragments from the book The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship)”, which she subjected to

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careful analysis in Eurasia.64 As is well known from existing accounts of the Eurasian movement, in the latter half of the 1920s Lev Karsavin (1882–1952), by then in emigration, gradually became actively involved in its work.65 As a matter of fact, Karsavin was to contribute to Eurasia at the same time as Litauer; he was also, unlike Litauer, a member of the editorial board. In the not too distant past, Karsavin had been the target of a somewhat ironical and tactless remark by Pavel Medvedev in his article “Sociologism without sociology,” which was bound to awake a feeling of peer solidarity among Karsavin’s fellow contributors when Medvedev’s later article on Russian Formalism reached Paris and the offices of Eurasia, even though by then Karsavin had already left Paris for a post at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania.66 Litauer was not the only Paris Eurasian to follow the work of the Russian Formalists and the polemics surrounding their publications attentively in the 1920s. Petr Suvchinskii (1892–1985), one of the founders and most prominent members of the Eurasian movement,67 who in 1933 married Karsavin’s daughter Marianna (1911–94), had evidently taken a keen interest in the work of Eikhenbaum and Tomashevskii, resulting—if his own account is to be believed— in his reading of all of their books on Russian versification and metrics;68 he also knew Tynianov’s historical prose69 and sought to enter into correspondence with Zhirmunskii,70 admittedly after the latter was no longer considered a Formalist by the core members of the movement’s Leningrad wing. More important, in the 1920s Suvchinskii attempted to convert Tomashevskii into a promoter of Eurasianism, but this came to nothing despite Tomashevskii’s apparent interest.71 Among the Formalists and the scholars close to them, Eurasian ideas found a sympathetic reception only in Roman Jakobson’s linguistic work, mainly in the course of his cooperation with Nikolai Trubetskoy. Litauer’s engagement with Russian Formalism and its critics was thus more than an act of mere individual curiosity, and the product of more than just personal circumstances. In many ways, in 1929 the moment was ripe for a discussion that would bring the ideas of Formalism and Marxism closer together through the mediation of a particular section of the Eurasian movement. The duel between Formalism and Marxism, an early manifestation of which was the 1927 Leningrad dispute analyzed in the first section of this chapter, presented a window of opportunity for the Paris Eurasians to claim their own stake in the redistribution of the ideological capital taking place at the time in Soviet Russia. In this context, it was only too natural that in connection with the debate on Formalism they also over time discovered the

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work of the Bakhtin Circle. Not only Medvedev’s polemical piece, but also Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Bakhtin’s 1929 study of Dostoevsky were known among the Eurasians at different stages of the movement’s history.72 The dissemination of Medvedev’s work was no doubt helped by its merits. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), the most subtle left critique of Formalism ever produced in the Soviet Union, aspires to establish sociological poetics as an alternative approach in the study of literature. Medvedev is careful not to lapse into vulgar sociologism; he remains equidistant from both the Formalist obsession with the self-sufficiency of form and the crude parallelism between “poetic and economic style” à la Vladimir Friche. The degree of sophistication displayed in Medvedev’s theory of refraction—the creative process that by facilitating a constant interaction between art, society, and ideology shields the work of art from the sterile identity of reflection—is matched by his admirable breadth of reference. No other work to come out of the Bakhtin Circle before Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is more erudite, covering such a wide (albeit not infrequently at the expense of depth) range of Western (mainly German) and Russian thought in the overlapping domains of aesthetics, art history, and literary theory. Given Litauer’s own intellectual pedigree, Medvedev’s informed and thoughtful treatise could not but arouse her interest and respect, however qualified the latter was to remain when applied to an ideological adversary.73 With his key article, Medvedev was joining the small cohort of distinguished authors whose work Litauer elected to discuss in Eurasia. The appearance of his name among those of Lukács, Croce, Mannheim, Husserl, and Heidegger is indicative of the significance Litauer read into his polemic with the Formalists. That the Eurasians should turn their attention to the continuous struggles between Formalism and Marxism, and the different regimes of valorizing literature behind them, requires an explanation that takes into account the history and the state of all three movements in the late 1920s. Before examining Litauer’s take on Medvedev and Formalism, we need to remind ourselves of the internal dynamics of the encounter between Marxism and Formalism, which I analyzed at some length at the outset of this chapter. It is essential to recall their intrinsic interrelatedness and competition on the ideological scene of the 1920s, and the extent to which Formalism was embroiled in a contest with Marxism over the distribution of social and ideological capital in the young Soviet state. All this helps us understand why a Eurasian philosopher such as Litauer was

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interested not simply in Russian Formalism or in Marxism as such, but rather in their conflict, rivalry, and mediations. Litauer versus Medvedev

The Eurasians approached the polemic between Formalism and Marxism with the ambition to assert a third way for Soviet aesthetics, and for Soviet ideological life in general. This “third way” was to rest on a blend of reconciliation and competition with Marxism over the capacity to mobilize society for projects that were to highlight the uniqueness of Russia in an even more radical fashion. Art was to be seen both as a specific phenomenon, much along the lines of early Formalism, and as a domain possessing the potential to transform everyday reality in accordance with the activist spirit of Marxism. It was thus essential to maintain unobtrusive solidarity with the Marxist framework, while at the same time asserting the overall supremacy of Formalism in supplying impulses for an aesthetics that would, in Litauer’s own words, better promote a “stylistics of Russian modernity.”74 When measured against this robust agenda, Litauer’s analysis of Medvedev’s arguments appears to be as objective as it gets. Her preoccupation with upholding a unique third way issues in a constant vacillation between Marxism and Formalism, between positions for and against Medvedev; in other words, it ensues in a constant process of negotiation between the respective strategies of bestowing relevance on literature and art that we have seen at work when analyzing the 1927 Leningrad dispute. In the end, Litauer sought to reinterpret Formalism by accentuating its gradual drift away from literature’s autonomy and specificity, toward an understanding of literature that emphasizes its Productivist (and thus also activist) potential. Litauer’s main criticism of Medvedev thus concerns his lack of appreciation for what she saw as the increasingly socially proactive platform of Formalism. She was certainly right to stress the potential of Formalism to cooperate with the mainstream of Soviet ideology by lending credence to a whole range of new artistic forms that could be—and often were—effectively harnessed to assert the values of the dominant worldview. This potential was more fully realized in the later stages of Formalism, when, as we have already seen, several of its representatives (most notably Osip Brik and Shklovsky) became active promoters of the journal LEF, Constructivism, and the literature of fact. In the first issue of LEF (1923), Osip Brik made a point of emphasizing the expediency of Formalism for an activist aesthetics that works for the ruling ideology

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by overturning its clichés: “Opoiaz will come to the aid of proletarian creation not with misty talk of the “proletarian spirit” and “communist consciousness” but with precise technical knowledge of the devices of modern poetic creation.”75 Admittedly, Medvedev had failed to take into account the potential usefulness of the Formal method for the radical aesthetics of artistic production. Nor was Medvedev sufficiently attentive to the inherent evolution of Formalism; his criticism primarily addressed deficiencies revealed in the early work of the Formalists.76 Conversely, Litauer preferred to focus on the merits of the Formal method embodied in the later stages of its history, after Formalism had begun to evolve toward an accommodation of the multiple social factors at play in the evolution of literature. To lend support to her undertaking, she chose to reinterpret the opening stages of Formalism—with little evidence to support her view—as already furnishing the foundations of an activist method wholesomely focused on the “making” of objects rather than on their impartial, objective, and “scientific” analysis. Litauer was thus rewriting Formalism’s intellectual biography, asserting its take on literature as far more consonant, right from the start, with the ideology of social participation and activism. This willful reinterpretation of Russian Formalism places its work squarely (and solely) within a regime of relevance that bestows value on literature as part of a wider social project—to the exclusion of the dominant Formalist contribution in identifying a regime of relevance that sees literature as distinctly and autonomously “literary,” grounding this quality in the workings of language. In Litauer’s maneuver, Russian Formalism was called upon to affirm the spirit of Marxist commitment, while also outdoing Marxism in its radicalism and suitability for the Soviet agenda. Marxism was thus offered a confirmation of its overall importance without receiving uncritical approval. Ultimately, the same strategy was employed with regard to Formalism: Litauer declared it superior, but she did not withhold some serious criticism in the process. Litauer’s sophisticated, if somewhat hazy and at times muddled, compromise between Formalism and Marxism can be best observed in a passage weighing the attainments and the inadequacy of each of the two methods. Drawing on one of the crucial methodological disparities between Formalism and Marxism, she comments: Medvedev’s question [is] perfectly germane: how to connect the immanent aesthetic laws of development with the laws of general cultural development that influence artistic creativity most evidently in transitional and revolutionary epochs situated on the borderline of two cultures? With his Marxist in-

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stinct, Medvedev correctly sensed the helplessness of the Formalists vis-à-vis the task of uncovering the general cultural motivation of artistic creativity, but being a Marxist, he was unable to locate this helplessness. If Formalism is powerless against Marxism, then Formalism is also invulnerable to it, because the territory of specifically artistic creativity is totally inaccessible to Marxism, which demands that this territory be explained in general cultural terms. In order to comprehend art as a specific domain of culture, one has to comprehend it as a specific domain in the first place. From this point of view, the deficient aesthetics of Formalism is more useful for the philosophy of culture than the aesthetic deficiency of Marxism. (Litauer, “Formalizm,” 119)

Medvedev himself was certainly aware of the desirability of synthesizing the study of the ideological and the social (which Litauer calls “general cultural” here) with that of the immanent aspects of literature, but he found all existing attempts to do so rather perfunctory. Boris Arvatov (1896–1940), who in his collection of articles Art and Production and in a later text, suggestively entitled “On the Formal-Sociological Method,”77 proposed a scheme of reconciling Formalism and Marxism that became the platform of the so-called forsotsy (formalists-sociologists), receives special mention in Medvedev’s book, although his overall strategy is treated with skepticism (Medvedev, Formal Method, 66–68).78 Medvedev’s principal criticism of Formalism targets its inability to assume that “an external social factor acting on literature could become an intrinsic factor of literature itself, a factor of its immanent development” (67; 78). Hence Medvedev’s distrust of any attempt at wedding the two methods that still accepted the Formalists’ relegation of the social factor to a position of mere exteriority. The failure to produce a genuine blend of Marxism and Formalism is mirrored in the inflexible allocation of research tasks advocated by the forsotsy, who eventually opted for a mechanistic compromise rather than a proper synthesis.79 In Medvedev’s words, they tried to “reconcile Marxism and Formalism by way of an amicable division80 of the historical and literary material that amounted to saying: “‘You take the extrinsic, I’ll take the intrinsic’, or ‘I’ll take the content, you get the form’” (68). Litauer’s argument, however, was subtler than Medvedev’s. Although she did not mention Arvatov’s name, Litauer was clearly influenced by his cult of “making” and “production”: “Formalism, in contrast to all aesthetic theories, seeks the specificity of art not in the characteristics of the consciousness (in the type of contemplation, cognition, or in some other characteristic), but in the modes of making” (Litauer, “Formalizm,” 119). Yet the rigid opposition between

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form and content, so distinctive of Arvatov’s theory and so rightly criticized by Medvedev, is dissolved in her analysis in favor of a more refined Hegelian mediation: “The central category of Formalism is not the objectless device, but the form-thing [forma-veshch']. The specific artistic device directs itself not toward another device that ruled in the past, but was rendered automatized, but toward the material. . . . The device is thus not an empty, “formal” moment without content, but rather a moment of the forming process [oformlenie], i.e. of the making that is rich in content” (Litauer, “Formalizm,” 119). Still, Litauer was not blindly enthusiastic. She recognized the Formalist proclivity for juxtaposing art and life and the “extraordinarily low valuation of everyday practical making” (120) implied in this juxtaposition. The everyday aspects of production were portrayed by the Formalists, according to Litauer, as automatized and deprived of their “genuine material reality” (120). All these objections notwithstanding, she did ultimately choose to favor Formalism as a method closer than Marxism to the spirit of production and creativity that ought to be sponsored in Soviet society. For her, the Formalist endeavor to surmount automatization was not about arousing “strong sensations” in the reading public, an accusation leveled by Medvedev in his article and in the 1928 book (the addressee was clearly Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement), but rather a shaping effort to be directed at the everyday, “a pursuit of reality” (Litauer, “Formalizm,” 119). This process possessed a significant transformative potential that was growing in proportion with later Formalism’s willingness to lend its theory to the activism of the 1920s avant-garde. Litauer’s meandering between Formalism and Marxism—ultimately between the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature at play in Formalism and Marxism—and her search of a third way for Soviet aesthetics tends to conceal a deeper-seated and nonnegotiable difference in the way in which she and Medvedev evaluated contemporary Russian culture. The bone of contention here was the attitude to Futurism and the other avant-garde movements (Constructivism, Productivism) that stood for the larger—and crucial—question of how art relates to life. The proximity between Formalism and the avant-garde, and the Formalists’ support for Futurism and other avantgarde trends, provided even stronger motivation for Medvedev’s criticism of, and Litauer’s sympathy with, Russian Formalism. Litauer remains critical of Medvedev’s views, informed as they were by a rather skeptical stance toward the avant-garde. Medvedev’s book is sprinkled with caustic remarks about Futurism. His dislike is a matter more serious and fundamental than the usual difference

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in taste or philosophical baggage might suggest; it mirrors his determination to solve the theoretical dilemma of art versus life by resolutely rejecting the “purposeless” experimentations of the Futurists and other avant-garde groups. What does one gain from this extensive analysis of Litauer’s polemic with Medvedev, Marxism, and Russian Formalism? The benefit appears to be twofold. To start with, the contextualization and the close interpretation of Litauer’s text expand our knowledge of the relevance and the reverberation of Formalism beyond Marxist circles. Litauer’s response is particularly interesting, since it offers insight into the way in which Medvedev’s critique of Formalism was received on the Paris émigré scene. Secondly, this polemic unlocks a richer, more nuanced understanding of the dynamics and the complex ideological makeup of Soviet aesthetics in the late 1920s. Formalism, Eurasianism, and Marxism all come into view entangled in a competition over the power to determine the direction of art and the place it should occupy in society. This competition assumed the form of mediation and negotiation: the Formalists had to open their doctrine to the pressures of the so-called extraliterary “series”; the Marxists, or at least the more sophisticated of them, had to accept that the sociology of literature was best applied when married in some guise to poetics; the Eurasians, as Litauer’s engagement with Medvedev attests, preferred to have it both ways: to insist along with the Formalists on the specificity of art, but also to seek to place art in service of the people by stressing its potential to enhance the creativity of everyday life. Litauer sought a way out of this apparent contradiction by reinventing (more accurately, reimagining) Formalism as a movement possessing—from its very beginnings—considerable potential to endorse and guide the new forms of social activism and artistic creativity arising in Soviet Russia. Ultimately, this triangulating appropriation of Russian Formalism is informed, and made possible in the first place, by a constant renegotiation of the boundaries that set apart the two principal regimes of relevance and valorization of literature that were the proper playfield of Formalism and Marxism: declaring literature to be an autonomous and specific discursive phenomenon versus praising its capacity to serve an extrinsic agenda of social amelioration.

2 A S K E P T I C AT T H E C R A D L E O F T H E O R Y Gustav S h pet ’s Reflec t i on s o n L it e ra t ur e

This chapter takes the discussion of the different regimes of relevance and valorization of literature begun in Chapter 1 into a new territory. I am interested in revealing how a milder version of the traditional regime of relevance, which insisted on the wider social commitment and cultural significance of literature, facilitated during the 1920s an interpretation of literature not through the prism of literary theory—which would have entailed an insistence on the uniqueness of literature grounded in the specific way it uses language (the condition sine qua non for modern literary theory after its inception in the 1910s)—but rather through the less radical screen of aesthetics and philosophy of art. The reader would recall the Introduction to this book, in which I advanced the hypothesis that the gradual emancipation from philosophy was a central condition for the emergence of literary theory around World War I. Gustav Shpet (1879–1937) is very much a thinker who participated in this process, but his place in it remained contradictory and inconclusive: while foreshadowing some important tenets of Structuralism, as we shall see later, his ultimate loyalty tended to be with a philosophical and aesthetic approach to literature and the arts, rather than with a perspective that would have required recognition of their discursive autonomy and specificity. He rejected Russian Formalism (and thus also literary theory at its inception), and the Formalists repaid him in kind; a comparison with Bakhtin, later in this chapter, finds Shpet defending views on literature (especially the novel) that initially he and Bakhtin shared, but from which Bakhtin distanced himself

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in later years, leaving Shpet as a proudly staunch supporter of what were, by then, past approaches to literature. Neither a Marxist nor a religious thinker (despite some residual presence of these discourses in his writings), neither a Formalist nor a Bakhtinian, Shpet’s life and work must be examined closely if we are to appreciate the fluctuation of positions and the intersection of different ways of understanding literature and its regimes of relevance in the Soviet 1920s. In Russia, Shpet has by now entered the domestic canon of philosophy as the most significant Russian philosopher to emerge during the interwar period. The principal promoter of Husserlian phenomenology, while at the same time creatively modifying Husserl and departing from him on some essential points, Shpet was also an early advocate of modern hermeneutics. He left behind seminal work spanning psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, literary and theater studies, and the history of Russian thought. Notwithstanding his intellectual significance, Shpet’s contributions are yet to be appropriated in the West, where familiarity with his work hardly goes beyond a relatively narrow circle of Slavists and an even smaller number of committed phenomenologists. This chapter therefore begins by furnishing a “thick” description of Shpet’s involvement with literature, the theater, and the practice of literary translation, embedded in an outline of the main stages of his life and intellectual evolution, along with an account of the principal areas of his work. Once the larger context of his multifaceted intellectual endeavors has been established, the latter part of the chapter assesses the precarious balance between innovation and regression that marks his contribution to the study of literature and theater in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN); I am particularly interested in locating Shpet’s place in a force field shaped by the work of his contemporaries: the Russian Formalists and Mikhail Bakhtin.

Shpet’s Life and Intellectual Career In the absence of a serious book-length biography, piecing together Shpet’s life and sketching his intellectual trajectory is not an easy task. One can identify four major periods in Shpet’s career. The first one begins in 1903, when Shpet published his first scholarly reviews, and ends with his turn to phenomenology in 1912–13. The second period, Shpet’s most creative and fruitful, runs from

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1912–13 to 1923. The third period, marked by Shpet’s close involvement in the work of GAKhN, begins in 1923–24 (Shpet was elected vice-president of GAKhN in 1924) and ends in 1930 with his forced retirement from the Academy. The fourth and final period comprises the years between 1930 and his death in 1937. Born on 7 April 1879 in Kiev to a Polish mother (who never learned to write in Russian)1 and a Hungarian father who had disappeared before his son’s birth, Shpet finished classical high school in Kiev and then registered in 1898 as a student at Kiev University, initially in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics (inasmuch as he was classed as an illegitimate child, tsarist legislation prevented him from enrolling at university until he was formally adopted—less than a year before his enrolment—by his mother’s brother). In 1899, Shpet was expelled for participating in Social Democratic activities and exiled to Kherson for some five months.2 His knowledge of Marxism dates from this time (he read Engels, Kautsky, and Plekhanov in Kherson); although a sympathizer in his youth, he rejected it soon afterward, but continued to read Marx into the latter half of the 1910s (along with the writings of anarchists and reformist socialists). On being readmitted to the university in 1901, Shpet enrolled in the Faculty of History and Philology and began to attend the famous psychology seminars of Professor G. I. Chelpanov (later a patron and promoter of Shpet’s career). Shpet followed Chelpanov to Moscow in 1907, becoming a Privat-Dozent and undertaking teaching at Moscow University and in the Higher Women’s Courses. In 1910, he traveled to Germany to expand his knowledge of philosophy and psychology. This period of Shpet’s life and work is marked by the formative influence of European Enlightenment philosophy. Of particular importance in these early years were Hume and Kant, in whose orbit his thought moved for about ten years after 1903. The first mature works Shpet wrote were on the problem of causality in Hume and Kant, and on Hume’s skepticism and Kant’s response to it. In this early period, Shpet feverishly reviewed and translated works of and on philosophy and psychology. Shpet’s second, and most creative, period can be said to have commenced with his intermittent stays at Göttingen in 1912–14. It was there, in the autumn of 1912, that he met Husserl, an event of enormous significance for Shpet’s evolution as a thinker. Shpet’s embrace of phenomenology, but also his departure from Husserl in certain key aspects, are documented in his first major work, Iavlenie i smysl (1914; Appearance and Sense). Despite Lev Shestov’s advice

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that Shpet arrange for a German translation of the book, this was not done; an English translation appeared only in 1991. On his return from Germany, Shpet worked on the philosophy of history and the methodology of the historical sciences and on a book on hermeneutics, Hermeneutics and Its Problems, published in Russian only in 1989–92, which was an attempt at a synthesis of phenomenology and hermeneutics, moving gradually closer to the latter. At the same time Shpet remained interested in psychology and metaphysics, his essay “Consciousness and Its Owner” appearing in Russian in 1916. On 1 October 1918, the new regime abolished all academic degrees and titles and replaced them by the single title of professor. Following this decree, 175 privat-dotsenty at Moscow University, including Shpet, received the title of professor.3 The years immediately preceding and following the October Revolution of 1917 represent the peak of Shpet’s creativity, generating the ideas that would inform his later works. The important article “The Subject and Tasks of Ethnic Psychology,” for example, written in 1917–18, later became the nucleus of his Introduction to Ethnic Psychology, while the book on hermeneutics, mentioned above, bore on his later book Vnutrenniaia forma slova (1927; The Inner Form of the Word). It is in this period that Shpet wrote his most significant work on aesthetics and literary theory, “Esteticheskie fragmenty” (Aesthetic Fragments), the three parts of which took less than a month to complete (26 January–19 February 1922). Finally, during this period of his life, he published important articles on theater, the philosophy of art, and the methodology of art history, and offered his own interpretation of the early stages of the evolution of Russian philosophy, as well as seminal studies of two important Russian thinkers, Herzen and Lavrov. His Outline of the Development of Russian Philosophy (1922), of which only part 1 was published, provoked both enthusiasm (Koyré) and skepticism (Florovsky).4 The years 1922–23 saw the end of this extraordinarily fruitful stage in Shpet’s career and ushered in a period that was increasingly marked by diversity under duress. The propitious volatility of the first postrevolutionary decade, still tolerant and conducive to creativity, was about to be supplanted by a climate of ideological control and suppression, the brutality of which could not fail to leave its stamp on Shpet’s later fortunes. Generally skeptical of both Marxism and religious philosophy, the last—and at the same time the most pronounced and most persistent—Westernizer in the history of twentieth-century Russian thought, Shpet cut an ever-lonelier figure in the Soviet context. The Berlin-

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based émigré newspaper Rul' reported in early September 1922 that Shpet had been arrested in Moscow on the night of 16 August, together with the “entire Berdiaev Circle” (no other source has so far verified this information, nor was Shpet known as an exponent of Berdiaev’s philosophy).5 The closure of the Philosophy Department at Moscow University a year earlier had left him deprived of an institutional base, an academic without students or colleagues. With seemingly endless opportunities in sight, there appeared not to be a single worthwhile aim that could mobilize his energy. Shpet’s attention was now frequently claimed by more projects than he could have reasonably hoped to bring to fruition. The promised sequel to the first part of his Outline of the Development of Russian Philosophy was never completed, nor was the continuation of his Introduction to Ethnic Psychology. Shpet was engaged in theater discussions, in literary disputes, in the work of various professional societies (some of them of a trade-union nature), and in prize juries (in 1926, for example, he was on the jury in a competition for the best translation of Boileau’s Art poétique).6 At the same time he was closely involved with several educational and research institutions, most importantly with the Institute of Scientific Philosophy, where he served as founding director (1921–23), and—over a considerably longer period of time—with the above-mentioned GAKhN.7 But even GAKhN, increasingly isolated and under growing ideological pressure by 1927, was doomed to fall under Party control in 1929. In October 1929, Shpet was discharged from his duties as vice-president of GAKhN; in January 1930, his membership was terminated and he was forced into retirement. His personal library, at the time totaling five thousand volumes, freely accessible to his GAKhN colleagues, was broken up.8 None of this, however, could spare him the humiliation of a Party-led purge, to which he, along with twenty-four other members of GAKhN, was subjected in the summer of 1930. According to the resolution of the Commission for the Purge issued on 16 July 1930, he was banned from scholarly work and was only allowed to undertake translations if “proper ideological guidance is guaranteed.”9 All of this explains why between 1924 and 1929 Shpet was unable to produce much that was of substance and originality. His two important books of the third period, Vvedenie v etnicheskuiu psikhologiiu (1926; Introduction to Ethnic Psychology)10 and Vnutrenniaia forma slova (1927), revisited ideas formulated, as we have seen, in the late 1910s. In fact, after 1927 Shpet appears to have produced no more than an updated version of his short article “Literature” (on which more later) and an unfinished text on the philosophical sources of

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Chernyshevsky’s dissertation; Shpet abandoned this unfinished text in 1929, the year of his deposition as vice-president of GAKhN. The final period of Shpet’s life and intellectual career, from his forced retirement from GAKhN in January 1930 until his execution in 1937, was marked by constant insecurity. Although he was actively involved in translation and work for the theater, notably in the preparation of the prestigious eight-volume Academia edition of Shakespeare’s works, his belief in the meaningfulness of philosophy and scholarship had been irreversibly destroyed. He undertook adaptations, editorial work, and internal reviewing; his most significant accomplishment after 1930 was the translation of an imposing body of literature, mainly from the English Romantic and realist canon, as well as philosophical works by Berkeley and Hegel, most importantly the latter’s Phenomenology of Spirit (small portions of which he had translated in his youth as a private exercise in translation).11 Much of this work was done in Yeniseysk and Tomsk in Siberia, where Shpet was exiled following his arrest and trial in 1935, when he was accused of anti-communist bias at GAKhN and of participating in editorial work on the “fascist” German-Russian Dictionary.12 He was rearrested in Tomsk in October 1937 and shot there on 16 November. The precise date of his death remained unknown until 1989.

Shpet’s Literar y and Theatre Affiliations: Institutions and Networks Having briefly sketched Shpet’s intellectual biography, I must now turn to a detailed reconstruction of his participation in Russian and Soviet literature and theatre; a comprehensive account of this involvement would assist us in understanding his precarious position between different approaches to literature and different regimes of its valorization during the 1920s and the 1930s. I draw here on previously unheeded published and unpublished sources, bringing together strains of research that have so far remained unconnected, in order to establish the most significant aspects of Shpet’s involvement with Russian and Soviet culture, with a focus on the most relevant areas: literature, translation, and the theater.

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Among the Symbolists

Shpet’s literary and theater affiliations commenced in earnest after his move to Moscow in 1907. In Kiev, where he studied at the St. Vladimir University, he had published brief newspaper notes under the pseudonym “Lord Genry,”13 but Moscow, and Russian Symbolism, were the ground of his first serious association with a major literary and artistic circle, “The Society of Free Aesthetics,” also known simply as “Aesthetics.” “Aesthetics” was founded under the informal leadership of Valery Briusov; other distinguished participants included Andrei Belyi, Mikhail Gershenzon, and the artist Valentin Serov, the literary scholars Sakulin and Dzhivelegov, and the philosophers Fedor Stepun and Boris Vysheslavtsev, to name but a few. Shpet befriended several fellow participants, notably Symbolist poet Iurgis Baltrushaitis, who was to become a life-long friend, and the brothers Emilii and Nikolai Metner. A couple of years later, Shpet joined the group around the Musaget publishing house, dominated by Emilii Metner, Belyi, and Lev Kobylinskii (Ellis), the latter also a friend of Shpet’s. In this environment, Shpet’s most important interlocutor seems to have been Andrei Belyi. Although Belyi regarded Shpet as a latecomer, he evidently had considerable respect for Shpet’s taste and valued his background in philosophy.14 Shpet sarcastically warned Belyi on numerous occasions against playing with, or “parading,” philosophy in his poems; in Belyi’s words—reporting Shpet’s—in order to be a truly philosophical poet, one didn’t need to wear “a shabby tailcoat borrowed from [Heinrich] Rickert’s wardrobe.”15 Belyi confessed to being “in love” with Shpet’s “subtle and sophisticated mind” and regarded him as a potential contributor to the journal who could write on Johann Gottlieb Fichte and on Polish philosophy and culture (Shpet read Belyi the poetry of Słowacki and Mickiewicz in Polish).16 Nevertheless, a year later, in October 1910, Shpet’s outspokenness led Belyi to write to Metner that Shpet was “brilliant, but apparently hostile to us.”17 Despite this early difference, Shpet and Belyi worked together once again after the revolution. Belyi chaired the council of the Moscow branch of the Free Philosophical Association, established in September 1921; Shpet was elected one of his deputies. A few years later, in 1927, Belyi wrote to Ivanov-Razumnik that his gradual estrangement from Shpet had to do with the latter’s attraction to alcohol, which Belyi did not wish to share.18 Belyi briefly resumed the acquaintance in 1933, about a year before his death.19 Shpet was not the only philosopher to participate in the activities around the Musaget publishing house; Vladimir Ern, Sergei Bulgakov, Sergei Gessen,

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Nikolai Berdiaev and Mikhail Gershenzon were also frequently seen there. From 1910 to 1914, Musaget published the Russian version of Logos, the international journal of philosophy, edited by Fedor Stepun and Sergei Gessen. Within Musaget, there was a clear divide between those who were in favor of the line represented by Logos and those who opposed it as being too neo-Kantian and not sufficiently heeding other currents in contemporary philosophy. Shpet, Ern, and Bulgakov were in the camp of the opponents; in Shpet’s case, this was no doubt motivated by a rejection of neo-Kantianism in favor of phenomenology. Among the Symbolists, Shpet became more intimately acquainted not only with Belyi, Baltrushaitis, Ellis (and Nikolai Feofilaktov, the principal illustrator of Vesy), but also with Viacheslav Ivanov. Their contacts are yet to be studied in detail, but it would appear from the scattered evidence available that over time the relationship grew from Shpet’s respect for and interest in Ivanov the poet and thinker into a friendship in which Ivanov gradually came to acknowledge Shpet’s seriousness as philosopher and commentator on literature. Lev Shestov mentions captivating discussions with his guests Ivanov, Shpet, and Berdiaev at his home on the evening of 8 December 1914.20 Shpet’s letters to his second wife, Nataliia Guchkova-Shpet, reveal that in the summer of 1915 he and Lev Shestov often visited Ivanov to hear him read from his poetry, sometimes in the company of Bal'mont, Baltrushaitis, and A. M. Remizov (Shpet later received a brief mention in Remizov’s Vzvikhrennaia Rus' [Whirlwind Russia]), at others in Mikhail Gershenzon’s.21 Shpet described Ivanov’s poems read on one such occasion (7 June 1915) as “superb.” Ivanov was apparently an authority in Shpet’s eyes, not just as a poet, but also as a mentor inculcating in Shpet relentless work discipline.22 Shpet presented Ivanov with three of his publications, with a personal inscription on each occasion.23 Later, during Ivanov’s first years in Italy, Shpet was apparently instrumental in GAKhN electing Ivanov as one of its “member-candidates” in December 1926.24 Shpet endeavored to assist Ivanov by offering to buy his Moscow library on behalf of GAKhN.25 For his part Ivanov wanted to entrust Shpet with overseeing the final stage of publication, including the proofreading, of his translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy (the publication of which by GAKhN in the end did not materialize),26 thinking that this demanded so much knowledge and organizational talent that only Shpet could do it.27 Behind these personal ties to some of the major poets of Russian Symbolism, we have to see (and here only briefly refer to) the larger picture: Symbolism left its crucial imprint on Shpet’s subsequent aesthetic theory, contributing to

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the formation of his overall conservative platform.28 Shpet was shaped by the aesthetic values and preferences of Russia’s Silver Age, and this determined his rather mixed reception of the avant-garde. His appreciation of “seriousness” and his fight against “emptiness, utilitarian attitudes [utilitarnosti], [and] barbarism” found support in the philosophical ambition, gravitas, and decorum of Symbolism, whose praise he continued to sing into the 1920s in his “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” while at the same time rejecting Futurism.29 Involvement in the Literary Periodicals of the 1920s and in Translation

Shpet’s contribution to Russian culture—and his own embeddedness in it, which facilitated his reflection on literature and the theater—should not just be measured by the scope and the quality of his original work. He was an indefatigable promoter of Western philosophy, whose translations span an impressive range of authors from Berkeley to Hegel and Rickert. His single most important translation of a philosophical text, that of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, is a major accomplishment and the result of selfless work and perseverance during the last two years of his life (the translation did not appear until 1959). Here, however, I want to focus on Shpet’s multiple contributions as participant, sometimes also driving force, behind a number of literary periodicals, and as a translator of verse and prose, an aspect of his career that has remained largely unexplored. The added value of such research is threefold: it helps to reveal Shpet’s extensive network of contacts with a number of both significant and lesser-known twentieth-century Russian poets active as translators, notably Mikhail Kuzmin, as well as the (often leading) part he played in a string of journals and almanacs in the 1920s; even more important, Shpet’s work as translator after his expulsion from GAKhN assists us in grasping the practice of literary translation as an instrument of ideological power and a site of competing valorizations of literature during the 1930s; finally, research into Shpet’s work as translator of prose and poetry allows an insight into the mechanisms of canon formation and the theory of literary translation in the Soviet 1930s. Shpet’s first known translations of verse were a distich by Plato and a fragment from Alcaeus, published in the third issue (September 1923) of the obscure typewritten literary journal Hermes.30 The journal was launched in the summer of 1922 by a group of young men, most of them aspiring poets and philologists. The person behind the first two issues was Boris Gornung, a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in its later years. He formed an

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editorial board that included, among others, his brother Lev Gornung, the promising philologist Maksim Kenigsberg—to whose memory Shpet’s book Vnutrenniaia forma slova is dedicated—and Kenigsberg’s friend (later his wife) Nina Vol'kenau.31 The last two issues (out of four) saw a change in the editorial board, which was now chaired by Kenigsberg and was joined by Aleksei Buslaev (another member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and its chairman at the time the first issue of Hermes was published) and Viktor Mozalevskii. Kenigsberg’s untimely death in 1924 meant that only the first part of the fourth issue was prepared, already without Boris Gornung’s participation as a member of the editorial board. 32 At the beginning of 1924 a “scholarly-artistic” advisory board was formed, chaired by Shpet and including some of his GAKhN colleagues, notably Aleksandr Gabrichesvkii, Mikhail Petrovskii, and Aleksandr Chelpanov. Shpet and his colleagues had great plans for the second part of the fourth issue, which was supposed to contain a number of scholarly articles; instead, these were all published some three years later, long after the journal had ceased to exist. Shpet’s article on Humboldt evolved into a book, Vnutrenniaia forma slova; the articles that were to be written by Petrovskii, Zhinkin, Guber, and Volkov33 appeared in GAKhN’s 1927 collective volume Khudozhestvennaia forma (Artistic Form).34 Shpet’s close involvement with these young literati continued over the next few years, until around 1926–27. Along with Nikolai Berner and Aleksandr Romm,35 Boris Gornung conceived the typewritten literary almanac Mnemosyne (1924); he confirmed in a letter to Mikhail Kuzmin of September 1924 that Shpet had been the driving force behind the formation of the new group that launched it.36 Another almanac, Hyperborean, which saw the light of day in Moscow toward the end of 1926, was the result of collaboration, under Shpet’s guidance, between the Gornung brothers and several GAKhN scholars, including Nikolai Volkov and Boris Griftsov. A second issue of Hyperborean was in preparation in 1927 but was banned by the GPU.37 Shpet’s translation of Plato’s distich was reprinted in the Mnemosyne, and Hyperborean brought out his article “Literature,” the 1929 manuscript version of which was eventually published in Tartu in 1982.38 Since Hermes and Hyperborean were produced in just twelve copies each,39 the likely impact of Shpet’s contributions there was probably rather limited, although Boris Gornung did insist that these periodicals were read by hundreds of people in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kazan, and Nizhnii Novgorod.40 In the 1920s, Shpet was still translating sporadically, and mostly for pleasure; not

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so in the 1930s, when after his removal from GAKhN translating became his principal way of earning a living. Shpet was no doubt handsomely equipped for a career as a professional translator. He stated in a declaration to the Prosecution, written in 1937, that he had command of thirteen foreign languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Latin, and Greek; the number of languages he could translate from was even larger— seventeen.41 Shpet undertook editorial work on translations from English, Polish, German, and the Scandinavian languages; he also acted as evaluator of translations for various publishers, most frequently for Academia.42 More often than not, Shpet translated prose, Dickens being at the center of his work after 1930. Both Hard Times and Bleak House (the latter abridged for children and adolescents) appeared in 1933 in Shpet’s translation. His translation of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers was rejected, however, and Shpet had to resign himself to being allowed to compile a volume of commentaries published in 1934.43 Shpet was also considering a multivolume edition of Dickens, and even a Dickens Encyclopedia.44 While in exile, he tried unsuccessfully to get Academia to commission him to translate David Copperfield and to edit what was meant to be the first complete Russian translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin;45 he also translated Oliver Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer.46 Earlier on, he had served as the editor of a two-volume translation of Thackeray’s writings, for which he wrote the notes to Vanity Fair (1933–34), and had prepared a partial translation of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.47 Schiller’s letters to Goethe, on which Shpet worked in 1935–37, are his only known translation of German prose; Goethe’s letters to Schiller were entrusted to Mikhail Petrovskii (1887–1937), a literary scholar and Shpet’s former colleague at GAKhN, later an exile in Tomsk where he worked as a scholarbibliographer at the University Library before being rearrested and shot. The translation published in 1937 (with an introduction by György Lukács) did not carry the name of either Shpet or Petrovskii.48 It is, however, Shpet’s work as translator of verse in the 1930s that gives us access to the intricate politics of translation and the continuous debates over how to bestow relevance on literature under Stalinism. The 1930s saw the most sustained and energetic campaign to bring the works of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European canon to Soviet readers. The idea was initially Gorky’s, but his pet project (for which the publishing house World Literature was founded) lost momentum after he left the country in the autumn of 1921. It is not by accident that the idea was revived precisely in the 1930s.49 Establishing

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a new canon of widely read classic works was part of Stalin’s cultural politics designed to produce a sentiment of unity and a picture of public consensus built around the supposedly shared aesthetic (read, ideological) values embodied in the Russian and Western literary tradition of the past two centuries. This new canon was more inclusive of works previously stigmatized as representative of the “abstract” bourgeois humanism that Party-minded art had been encouraged to fight and leave behind. From the mid-1930s on, bourgeois realism was in fashion once again, protected by attempts to unite around a shared anti-fascist ideological platform. The new line did for a while soften the perception of rigidity that Stalin’s cultural policies produced abroad. In 1935, Ehrenburg, Babel, and Pasternak were able to participate in the Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture on an equal footing with their Western colleagues. Pasternak’s reluctance there to assign art that clearly defined political tasks was indicative of this freshly licensed humanistic outlook. At home, the subscription to the new canon was meant to conceal the deep rifts and the contest between the irreconcilably different national perspectives within the multinational, multicultural Soviet society; it also aimed at obliterating the differences between social strata: workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia were now exposed to the same canon that was projecting the same swath of values. To attain this goal, translation had to be a closely monitored activity,50 and it also had to be proactive and “practice-orientated,” that is, delivering not just samples of great literary style and craftsmanship but above all versions of the classics that would have a purchase on the everyday lives of their Soviet readers. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the practice of literary translation in the 1930s was marked by a serious discord between the principles of faithfulness (to the original) and usefulness (to the target audience). The former principle was eventually condemned as “literalism” and had to give way to a culture of translation based on lower artistic expectations and higher political returns. The political war over the principles of translation—ultimately, over the ways in which literature is valorized—was plain to see in the polemics surrounding two of the most ambitious projects of the 1930s: the multivolume editions of Goethe’s and Shakespeare’s works. The first two volumes of the Goethe edition, in the organization of which Shpet’s former GAKhN colleague Aleksandr Gabrichevskii was closely involved, were met with protests at the allegedly low use-value of the translations, which failed to provide the Soviet readership with much needed “current phrases” that could be of help to propagandists, philosophers, and scholars.51 Similarly, the Academia edition of Shakespeare’s works

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was attacked (notably by Chukovskii and Mirskii) for the misleading “precision” of some of the translations, which allegedly made the access of the Soviet reader to Shakespeare more difficult by obscuring rather than revealing his genius. Shpet brought to his work as translator of verse his baggage of unconditional professionalism and rigor that also marked his style of philosophizing. Small wonder then that he would often be reproached for siding with the “literalists.” Sometimes this was justified by his occasionally excessive faithfulness to the original; at others, he was simply the victim of an overarching ideological imperative—the “democratization” of the classics—which he felt unable to heed. Shpet’s translations of verse in the 1930s included Byron’s dramatic poems “Manfred,” “Cain,” and “Heaven and Earth,” as well as “Age of Bronze,”52 and Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” the latter translated in September–October 1935 and first published sixty years later.53 Not surprisingly, given the polemics on the philosophy of translation outlined above, his translations of Byron’s poems were met with some hostility. Anna Radlova, the wife of stage director Sergei Radlov and a poet in her own right, wrote to Lev Kamenev54 (in response to Shpet’s critical remarks on her translations of Othello and Macbeth) that she was not prepared to accept Shpet’s taste and translation techniques, demonstrated in his own rendition of Byron.55 Radlova meant by this Shpet’s unbending insistence on precision, which on occasion favored the literal over the creative. Shpet defended himself by responding to Kamenev that eminent poets such as Kuzmin and Pasternak had praised his translation.56 Accusations of “literalism” were also leveled by Chukovskii and Shklovsky. In February 1934, in a letter to Tynianov, Shklovsky ridiculed Shpet’s explanatory notes: “it seems that Shpet glossed the word ‘crocodile’ in Byron by adding a note giving the Latin for it.”57 For once, Shklovsky was neither exaggerating nor making things up.58 When considering Shpet’s career as translator of verse, one has to give prominence to his work on the prestigious eight-volume Shakespeare edition published by Academia in 1936–49, under the general editorship of Sergei Dinamov (himself a victim of Stalin’s purges, shot in April 1939) and Aleksandr Smirnov, a prominent literary scholar, the author of Shakespeare’s Work (1934), and in 1946 one of the three official evaluators of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dissertation “Rabelais in the History of Realism.” At the early preparatory stages of the edition, Shpet was confirmed as member of the editorial committee, alongside Bukharin, Lunacharskii, M. Rozanov, and Smirnov.59 In a letter to Stalin written in November 1935 in Yeniseysk (probably never sent), Shpet took pride in his role as a member of the working group preparing the edition and pleaded that he

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be allowed to resume his editorial duties. Before his arrest, he had read a number of draft translations by “experienced translators such as Mikhail Kuzmin and Osip Rumer” and had “subjected these to brutal correction,” although he knew that not everybody would agree with his demand for “super-philological exactitude.”60 In the same letter, Shpet cited Smirnov and the poets Mikhail Kuzmin,61 Boris Pasternak,62 and Pavel Antokol'skii as potential guarantors of the quality of his work. Shpet’s defensive mention of “super-philological exactitude” in this letter is an unmistakable response to those of his critics who favored the utilitarian principles of translation over precision and philological soundness. The tension between these two attitudes came to be felt acutely as work on the Shakespeare edition progressed. Over time, Smirnov and Shpet had established a smooth and efficient cooperation, with Shpet meticulously editing the translations of several key plays, including Macbeth (in this case his contribution amounted in effect to co-translating the play) and King Lear.63 The balance was disturbed when D. S. Mirskii was appointed a consultant to the edition, thus strengthening the positions of the utilitarian wing around Kornei Chukovskii. In his letters to Shpet, Smirnov objected to this appointment and to Mirskii’s written evaluation of the work that had been done so far. He even contemplated abandoning his editorial duties but was dissuaded by Kamenev. The situation turned truly unpleasant when Smirnov revealed to Shpet that Chukovskii was plotting to oust the philosopher from the edition.64 Diminished in stature and authority after the purges at GAKhN, Shpet was no longer able to defend himself. Shpet’s article-length response to Mirskii’s criticisms of Sergei Solov’ev and Shpet’s translation of Macbeth remained unpublished at the time; Shpet had to content himself with a letter seeking Kamenev’s understanding and support.65 The depressing irony in this otherwise banal story of ideological and personal rivalry is that Mirskii himself was soon to become an outcast; he perished two years after Shpet, another victim of Stalinism. Shpet and the Theater: Affiliations and Ideas

Aleksandr Tairov, later the founder of the famous Kamerny [Chamber] Theater, acknowledged Shpet’s beneficial influence on his formative time and first steps in the theater, so Shpet must have been moving in theater circles as early as 1905, while still in Kiev.66 Shpet, Tairov, and his spouse, the actress Alisa Koonen, preserved their friendship in later years; Shpet published his impor-

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tant essay “Teatr kak iskusstvo” (Theater as Art) in the Kamerny Theater’s journal, Masterstvo teatra (The Craft of Theater).67 Shpet’s pronounced preference for realism as an aesthetic foundation of the modern theater led him to a closer association with Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, at a time when its innovative force had admittedly been on the wane for a number of years. On 24 January 1928, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment approved the artistic council of Stanislavsky’s theater; since he was (still) at the time the holder of a high office at GAKhN, Shpet was appointed a member of the council from the “public organizations” quota (the renowned expert on Marx and Marxism David Riazanov and the prominent literary critics Viacheslav Polonskii and Aleksandr Voronskii were elected from the same quota).68 Shpet’s comments in this capacity are preserved in the minutes of the council’s discussions in 1928 on Leonid Leonov’s play Untilovsk and Valentin Kataev’s The Embezzlers, a stage adaptation of his better-known novel by the same title.69 At Stanislavsky’s invitation, in 1932, Shpet became professor and deputy rector at the Actors’ Academy.70 In 1933, he was one of the initiators of a small working group that read and commented on a book manuscript of Stanislavsky’s, eventually completed in 1935 and published the following year in English translation in the United States as An Actor Prepares.71 Shpet was also one of the organizers of the nationwide discussion of Stanislavsky’s bestseller My Life in Art.72 As late as 1938, unaware of his death, Shpet’s wife wrote to Stalin to ask for a favorable intervention on his behalf, referring, among other plans, to her husband’s projected nine-volume history of the Moscow Art Theater.73 Shpet’s immediate knowledge of the Russian theater scene also included an acquaintance with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose memoirs Shpet read while already in exile.74 These high-profile contacts in the Moscow Art Theater, but above all his friendship with Vasilii Kachalov and Ol'ga KnipperChekhova, two of its most famous actors, meant that Shpet was able to depend on the voluble concern of the theatrical profession when he was arrested in 1935. Kachalov and Knipper-Chekhova were among the signatories of petitions asking for Shpet’s relocation from Yeniseysk to Tomsk, a university town with a library and better conditions for scholarly and literary work, and for permission for his family to continue to reside in Moscow after he had been exiled.75 Moreover, not knowing that Shpet had already been shot, Kachalov alone wrote a letter to Stalin asking for his full rehabilitation.76 In 1936, already an exile in Tomsk, Shpet renewed his acquaintance, dating back to the GAKhN years, with the playwright Nikolai Erdman (1902–70) who

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had been involved in the early stages of his career with the Imagists. Erdman, too, was exiled and living in Tomsk at the time, working in the local theater as a dramatist from September 1935 to the end of October 1936. Shpet familiarly addressed Erdman as “Mandat,”77 the Russian title of Erdman’s most successful comedy, staged by Meyerhold in 1925. Erdman introduced Shpet to a younger stage director who wanted to do Othello for the Tomsk theater and who sought Shpet’s advice on the interpretation of the play. Having written copious commentaries on several of Shakespeare’s plays for the Academia edition, Shpet was undoubtedly well equipped to help, but the production failed to materialize—as did a plan to have Shpet appointed to Erdman’s position in the Tomsk theater after the latter’s departure.78 These rich affiliations with the theater of the 1920s, marked by Shpet’s pronounced interest in, and support for, the classical and realist repertoire, are the bedrock on which his views on theater and drama took shape. After the October Revolution, a theater department was established within the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment to regulate the work of theaters throughout the country. At its foundation in 1918, this consisted of four sections, administering, supervising, and studying: (1) theater history; (2) the organization and management of the existing theaters and circuses; (3) the repertoire; and (4) theatrical education. A section dealing predominantly with questions of theory was later added, then dissolved, and reestablished early in 1921, when the writer and critic Andrei Belyi, the philosopher Fedor Stepun, and Shpet himself were appointed as its only members.79 In 1921, discharging his duty of promoting the study of theatrical theory and disseminating the results, Shpet published a highly interesting and controversial short piece on the process of the differentiation of labor in modern theater.80 Historically, Shpet argued, the playwright and the actor were identical; the first step in the process of differentiation was the separation of the actor from the author. The next step meant that the author also lost the actual function of staging the play: the director and the set designer were born. Finally, Shpet insisted, the time had now arrived for the role of interpreting the meaning of the play to be entrusted to an independent agent—neither the author, nor the director, nor the actors should be entitled to impose their interpretations, which are in any case often, and quite naturally, in conflict with one another. The hermeneutic role is a difficult one to perform, Shpet claims; it requires a degree of specialization, education, and skills that neither the actor nor the director necessarily possess. Without a professional interpreter, the “intellectual sense of the play” (204) would be

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lost, and the actors would try to compensate for this by emphasizing the bodily techniques of the spectacle instead (note here the simplistic opposition between body and intellect). Shpet’s attention to the process of differentiation within the stage performance has been compared to Tynianov’s pronouncement in his 1923 article “Illustrations”: “We live in the age of differentiation of activities.”81 This appears to be an unfounded comparison, given the fact that, quite unlike Tynianov, Shpet posited the process of differentiation as a way of revealing what he called the “intellectual sense of the play.” In addition to the controversial ideological implications of this insistence on a single interpreter, and, by extension, a single correct interpretation, there is here also a hint of skepticism about avant-garde theater (cf. the protest against emphasizing the bodily techniques of the spectacle), not inconsistent with Shpet’s attack a little later on Futurism and the avant-garde in his “Esteticheskie fragmenty.” Shpet’s reservations toward the theater of the avant-garde became much more prominent in his main contribution to theatrical theory, the article “Theater as Art,” completed in September 1922. Published in December of the same year in an issue of Masterstvo teatra that celebrated the Kamerny Theater’s eighth anniversary, and preceded there by an article by Tairov, Shpet’s piece was an uneasy attempt at a compromise between, but also a critique of, the two wings of the avant-garde theory of theater (seeing theatre as independent vs. seeing it as fully merging with life). He distanced himself from Tairov’s radical insistence that theater be regarded as completely detached from the task of dialectically comprehending the world that exists outside art; at the same time, Shpet also sought to resist the demand that theater and life be completely fused. The very title of Shpet’s article, “Theater as Art,” signaled his insistence on theater being and remaining art, pace all activist aspirations at the time (regardless of their political provenance) that sought to erase the boundary between life and art. In the same article, Shpet criticized Wagner’s thesis of the synthetic nature of theater,82 which later theorists had taken up and consolidated into one of the cornerstones of avant-garde performance practice (Tairov, as is well known, wanted to rename his Kamerny [Chamber] Theater “Synthetic Theater,” an idea that completely contradicted Shpet’s theoretical platform). Liubov' Gurevich, one of Shpet’s GAKhN associates, noted that in his theatrical theory, rather than following Wagner and the avant-garde, Shpet was still a captive of Denis Diderot’s “paradoxe sur le comédien” (paradox of the actor—the contention that actors don’t themselves experience the emotions they depict);

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unlike Shpet, Tairov, she noted, in his Zapiski rezhissera (1921; translated as Notes of a Director) had rejected Diderot’s arguments.83 Shpet’s opposition to the synthesis of the different arts, which also reverberates strongly in his “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” involved him in battles on more than one front: it implied an attack not only on the avant-garde, but also, obliquely, on the religious notion of theater as an extension and modification of church ritual, an approach that had entered the scene of theater theory through Pavel Florenskii’s essay “Khramovoe deistvo kak sintez iskusstv” (1918; Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts). In the end, when it comes to theater theory, Shpet’s career was marked by a tormenting discrepancy: when he wrote on theater (in the very early 1920s), he wasn’t working in the theater; when, in the 1930s, he began working for the stage (both as translator and advisor), he had stopped writing on theater. Thus, the two streams—writing on theater and working for the theater—were never brought together in his career. Another salient paradox in Shpet’s theater affiliations—not so surprising when his theoretical stance is taken into account—is the fact that while he maintained close contact with two of the greatest innovators in the history of Russian theater, Tairov and Meyerhold, he never got involved in an avant-garde theater production. On the contrary, when Meyerhold decided to stage Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias (premiered on 19 March 1934), Shpet not only took on the translation (Meyerhold’s wife Zinaida Raikh and Mikhail Tsarev were listed in the program notes as Shpet’s co-translators),84 but also played an active role in directing the rehearsals, achieving a “miracle,” according to one of the actors: the inveterate theatrical experimenter Meyerhold staged the play in a realistic spirit85 that favored historical verisimilitude over experimentation.

Shpet and the Study of Literature in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and at GAKhN Thinking in broad philosophical terms about literature and the theater was clearly one of Shpet’s major preoccupations throughout the 1920s. His reflections on literature were shaped in no small measure by his early affinity for the culture of Russia’s Silver Age (especially Russian Symbolism), which, as we have seen, was perceived by Shpet as an antidote to the experimental work of the avant-garde (above all, the Futurists). The opposition between a serious, content-driven approach to drama versus the avant-garde emphases on inces-

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sant technical innovation remains very much alive in Shpet’s juxtaposition of the gravity of Symbolism and its philosophical baggage with the perceived civic disengagement (nay, frivolity) of modern art. The institutional centers of Shpet’s work on literature (and to some extent also on theater) were the Moscow Linguistic Circle and GAKhN; we thus must embed the study of his work on literature in a more detailed account of his involvement with these two institutions, whose fortunes became entwined after 1921. Shpet was elected a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle on 14 March 1920,86 following his presentation of a paper entitled “Aesthetic Features in the Structure of the Word,” in the discussion of which Osip Brik took part.87 Although Shpet attended only one more meeting of the circle (on 4 April 1920), he influenced its work in no small measure through his younger disciples. In an article on the history of the Moscow Linguistic Circle written in November 1976 for the Soviet Short Literary Encyclopedia (but only published twenty years later), Roman Jakobson noted that Shpet’s phenomenology of language left “an evident mark on the evolution of the circle in the concluding phase of its life”;88 elsewhere, he praised Shpet’s important role as an “outstanding philosopher of Husserl’s school,”89 whom Husserl himself considered “one of his most remarkable students.”90 In 1928–29, Jakobson would write to Shpet from Prague, inviting his collaboration in the journal Slavische Rundschau, and even declaring proximity to Shpet’s views on folklore.91 After Jakobson’s departure for Estonia and then Prague, Shpet’s (and through him GAKhN’s) influence on the Moscow Linguistic Circle had become so overpowering that it eventually led to its split in mid-1922.92 In the final stages of the circle’s existence, several of its younger members—Gornung, Buslaev, and Zhinkin—joined GAKhN; the circle’s library was also transferred to GAKhN.93 Shpet’s impact on the work of the Moscow Linguistic Circle flowed above all from the publication of his “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” which proved of immense importance to a group of younger scholars and literati in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and later at GAKhN, although his influence was visible even earlier. On 4 April 1920, Shpet had participated in a discussion on plot, where he and Petr Bogatyrev sided with Grigorii Vinokur’s insistence on the essentially verbal nature of plot, against Osip Brik’s insistence that in painting and sculpture plots of a nonverbal character are possible.94 This discussion bears early testimony to Shpet’s belief in language as the provider of a universal semiotic code that enables the processes of translation and expression between different sign systems (literature, painting, sculpture, etc.). Shpet’s approach is outlined

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most comprehensively in his article “Literatura,” which displays the cohabitation of Shpet’s insight into language as a universal semiotic matrix with his belief in the importance of literature as the “cultural [self-]consciousness of the people.”95 For Shpet, these two modalities of significance are organically linked, even if this link enfeebles the suggested universality of literature: literature is valorized semiotically, as a universal encoder; this allows it to serve as shared “cultural consciousness” for those steeped in the same cultural conventions that permit its proper “decoding.” The envisaged community of decoders coincides, for Shpet, with the nation. At a meeting of the Moscow Linguistic Circle on 21 March 1922, it was proposed that Shpet be invited to become a member of the editorial board of the linguistic section of its future publishing house (in his capacity as philosopher)—an idea that, after long discussions, the membership failed to approve (the publishing house did not materialize either).96 With the appearance of his “Esteticheskie fragmenty” (1922–23; Aesthetic Fragments), however, Shpet’s influence on the Moscow Linguistic Circle became much more pronounced. I wish to single out three moments of particular significance. To begin with, in the second installment of “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” Shpet offered, as has been noted before by others (probably most forcefully by the late Maksim Shapir), the first Russian definition of poetics as grammar: “Poetics in the broad sense is the grammar of poetic language and poetic thought” (my translation; emphasis in the original).97 This initially somewhat metaphoric use of “grammar” was later taken up by Roman Jakobson in the 1960s in his well-known program for the study of the “poetry of grammar and [the] grammar of poetry,”98 where “grammar,” purified of Shpet’s reference to “poetic thought,” evolved from a metaphor into a term with distinct scope and content. Significantly, Shpet also speaks here for the first time of the “poetic” (rather than simply aesthetic) “function of the word,” thus foreshadowing Jakobson’s later authoritative emphasis on the poetic function of language. The second of Shpet’s vital contributions in “Esteticheskie fragmenty” is his definition of the structure of the word and its differentiation from the notion of system, the latter applied by Shpet mostly to discourse in its entirety (the use of “structure” in Shpet vacillates between referring to isolated words or to whole sequences of words, the boundary between the two being blurred on occasion by the Russian slovo, which can mean either). Again in the second installment, Shpet writes: What is meant by “structure” of the word is not the morphological, syntac-

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tic, or stylistic construction—in short, not the arrangement of linguistic units “on the plane” [ploskostnoe], but on the contrary—the organic, depth-wise arrangement of the word, from the sensually conceivable [wording] to the formal-ideal (eidetic) object, at all levels of the relations located between these two terms. The structure is a concrete construction whose individual parts can vary in “size” and even in quality, but not a single part of the whole in potentia can be removed without destroying this whole.99

The system, on the other hand, is a set of structures where each structure preserves its own particularity. The biological organism—Shpet’s example—is precisely such “a system of structures,” where each structure (bones, nerves, blood vessels, etc.) remains concrete and distinct. This differentiation between structure and system was welcomed by some linguists in the 1920s, notably by Viktor Vinogradov, who read into Shpet’s argument a privileging of the notion of structure (depth) over that of system (horizontality), and—by extension—of the paradigmatic approach over the syntagmatic.100 Crucially, in their 1928 theses on research in literature and language, Tynianov and Jakobson developed the notion of a correlation between literature and the other historical series, which they called, echoing but also departing from Shpet, a “system of systems”; it was the “structural laws” of this correlation that they believed must be comprehended by the literary historian.101 In this context, we must refer to Shpet’s awareness of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Shpet encountered Saussure’s text around the end of June 1922, when he received the unpublished translation of the first part prepared by Aleksandr Romm.102 But we need to keep in mind that Shpet’s understanding of structure was also shaped by Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of the structured nature of the world of cultural objectifications. As Nikolai Plotnikov argues, in the course of the reception of Shpet’s thought, this hermeneutic dimension was submerged by the later (dominant and more technical) version of the concept elaborated and asserted by Structuralism (Plotnikov, “Kapitel,” 201). This dual genealogy is important to note if we are to understand that Shpet’s interpretation of what was to become a key Structuralist term was still very much rooted—much as it engendered a proto-Structuralist differentiation between system and structure—in a nineteenth-century hermeneutic paradigm of approaching and bestowing value on literature. Defining structure became for Shpet a battleground between an older, more traditional, and a modern framework; their struggle mirrors his own position as a harbinger sui generis of modern literary theory, whose work still remains, in large measure, arrested

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within a humanistic appreciation of literature and culture as manifestations of national consciousness. Finally, Shpet’s “Esteticheskie fragmenty” should be credited with anticipating the trend of detecting in scientific discourse traces of figurativeness and metaphoricity, a feature that brings the discourses of science and literature closer to one another than was customarily accepted. “Figurativeness is not only a trait of ‘poetry’ . . . it is a general property of language, which belongs to scientific discourse as well.”103 This statement questioned Husserl’s certainty that the discourse of science can be strictly differentiated from everyday discourse and offered an approach that—although not pursued further by Shpet himself—was revived in the 1970s and 1980s.104 But we can also see from this statement why Shpet was perceived as a foe by the Petrograd Formalists (especially Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum), and as insufficiently radical by Jakobson, who otherwise, as we have seen, fully acknowledged his significance. Despite the pioneering suggestion of a difference between the poetic and the aesthetic function of language, Shpet remained interested mainly in the latter. And although both in “Esteticheskie fragmenty” and in the Introduction to Ethnic Psychology he resolutely opposed—like the Russian Formalists—the psychological interpretation of the image (as practiced by Potebnia),105 Shpet nonetheless sought to assert—unlike the Russian Formalists—the importance of the image as hovering between an object and the respective idea, and to clarify its relation to the “inner form” of the word. Last but not least, he was also receptive to the subjective-biographical aspects of the literary work of art, singling out the importance of the individual authorial voice.106 Ultimately—and here lies the crucial difference between Shpet and Formalism—literature was for him not a self-sufficient system to be explained with reference to the specifically poetic function of language; literature for Shpet—even when all his semiotic inclinations are taken into account—is primarily just one of the spheres of creativity appropriated by what he calls “aesthetic consciousness.” As a phenomenologist, Shpet’s prime concern was to understand under what conditions an utterance becomes the object of aesthetic experience. This question is inextricably linked to the question of sense, so consistently ignored by the Formalists: “How should one express a given sense, so that its perception is an aesthetic one?”107 Equally, it presupposes attention to form in its necessary relation to content, as both Shpet’s “Esteticheskie fragmenty” and his article “Literatura” demonstrate. “Esteticheskie fragmenty” inspired some representatives of the younger generation of the Moscow Linguistic

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Circle to seek an alliance between a milder (diluted) version of Formalism and a more traditional philosophical aesthetics, an attempt resulting in the launch within GAKhN of the so-called formal-philosophical school, which was most successful in its work on art (especially with the volume Iskusstvo portreta [1928; The Art of the Portrait]), but far less convincing and original in its theoretical interpretation of literature. As witnessed by Boris Gornung, Shpet’s young followers in the formal-philosophical school distanced themselves emphatically from the “radical” Jakobson, Brik, and Shklovsky.108 In turn, the formal-philosophical school was insufficiently consistent for the Formalists; they saw in it no more than a weak compromise between their own theoretical creed and the traditional approach to literature as conveyor of ideas. To them, the formal-philosophical school nurtured and mentored by Shpet failed to recognize literature’s discursive uniqueness and autonomy.109 Small wonder, then, that the Formalists were largely hostile to Shpet’s “Esteticheskie fragmenty” and to the outputs of his younger followers in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and at GAKhN, who were perceived as traitors to Formalism and to the original linguistic fundamentalism of the Moscow Circle. Eikhenbaum wrote on 30 June 1924 to Grigorii Vinokur (who was very sympathetic to Shpet’s ideas, favorably reviewed “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” and openly acknowledged Shpet’s influence on his own work)110 that in the end he “doesn’t believe in Shpet, [ . . . ] it’s [all] empty rhetoric.”111 Shklovsky, too, maintained a highly skeptical and ironic attitude, as is clear from his reaction to Shpet’s work as translator of verse. Jakobson, while acknowledging Shpet’s role as a mediator between Husserlian phenomenology and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, thought Shpet insufficiently radical and incapable of fully embracing the nonnegotiable principles of linguistic fundamentalism that informed Jakobson’s own approach to literature. The value of “Esteticheskie fragmenty” is thus twofold. First, while on several counts Shpet presaged important developments in Structuralism and semiotics, his book also presented the most philosophically sophisticated and substantive, if at times oblique, polemic with Formalism, preceding both Engel'gardt’s and Medvedev’s later critiques.112 Second, and even more important, it offered a positive program for the study of the verbal work of art from the positions of phenomenological aesthetics (Shpet’s departures from Husserl notwithstanding), cross-bred with hermeneutics. Shpet’s crucial concept of “inner form” (formulated as early as 1917 in his essay “Wisdom or Reason?”) is of particular significance here. Harking back to

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Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language, it was sharpened in Shpet’s work on the history and current state of hermeneutics. It occupied center stage in both “Esteticheskie fragmenty” and the Introduction to Ethnic Psychology, not to mention Shpet’s 1927 monograph Vnutrenniaia forma slova (The Inner Form of the Word). Conveying the notion of deeper semantic stability, and thus positing a horizon of dependable interpretation, “inner form” was also an important theoretical instrument in the research of Shpet’s younger colleagues at GAKhN. In 1923, Shpet gave a paper on “The Concept of Inner Form in Wilhelm Humboldt” at GAKhN, followed in 1924 by papers from Buslaev (“The Concept of Inner Form in Steinthal and Potebnia”) and Kenigsberg (“The Concept of Inner Form in Anton Marty”). This direction was followed up in the afore-mentioned collective volume Artistic Form (1927), where Shpet’s disciples offered an exploration of form from the perspectives of aesthetics and semantics. Equidistant from both Marxism and Formalism, the volume was ultimate proof that this younger generation of scholars had little time or regard for either, a position that placed them, their mentor, and GAKhN itself in a very difficult position as Stalinism gradually tightened its grip on intellectual life. Shpet’s emphasis on “inner form” would also help us make sense of his extensive notes on the novel from 1924, a document of his theoretical preoccupations that brings into sharp relief the differences between his and Bakhtin’s approaches. The notes, which remained unpublished until 2007, were perhaps part of Shpet’s larger (also unpublished) work titled “Literary Studies,” announced in 1925 as one of GAKhN’s ongoing projects.113 Shpet here relies to a great extent on authors who also later feature prominently (explicitly or implicitly) in Bakhtin’s discussion of the novel, notably Hegel, Lukács, and Erwin Rohde. Shpet borrows the conceptual framework that juxtaposes epic and novel from Hegel and Lukács, as does Bakhtin (Shpet, Iskusstvo, 57–58).114 But while Bakhtin overturns Lukács’s scheme and emancipates the novel, transforming it from an underdog of literary history into a celebrated écriture that transcends the restrictions of a mere genre, Shpet abides by the old opposition and validates the role of the novel as a “negative” genre. For Shpet, the novel is marked by a string of fatal absences. It lacks “composition,” “plan,” and “inner form” (57), which makes Shpet doubt its capacity to produce serious, nonarbitrary versions of reality. The lack of “inner form” stands, more broadly, for a lack of necessity and compelling direction in the work of art. The novel is thus no more than a “degradation” of the epic (63): the epic offers access to an idea (in Plato’s sense), whereas the novel furnishes only doxa (66). The

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novel, with its arbitrary inventions, is the result of the disintegration of myth (84). It therefore has no “plot in the strict sense of the word,” only a “theme” which deals not with the “construction of an idea” (what plot should really do, according to Shpet), but simply with the “empiric commonality of the motif” (79). Lagging behind not just the epic, but also Greek tragedy, the novel knows no catastrophe, only irresolvable conflict, antinomy (67). In accord with his condescending evaluation of Russian philosophy, Shpet interprets the whole of Russian literature as a “novel,” for there has been, for him, no sense of epic reality in it (79); even War and Peace is called not an epic, but an ironic, and therefore, “romantic” novel, “romantic” being the damning label attached to any narrative permeated by arbitrariness. We thus begin to understand why in “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” as well as in his notes on the novel, Shpet gestures toward the novel as a mere “rhetorical” form: the epic is about an “organic embodiment of the idea,” the novel is all about “an analysis of opportunities” (81), about the multitude of equally valid free wills and the choices the individual faces after leaving the epic cosmos. The novel is not about incarnatio, it is only about inventio and elocutio (81), the skills involved in unfolding and charting the ephemeral and accidental private world of opportunities without conclusion, of journeys without destiny. It is against this background that Bakhtin’s utter dissatisfaction with Shpet’s denigration of the novel becomes clear.115 Bakhtin, too, begins from the premise of negativity: the novel does not have a canon of its own, it is possessed of no constant features that would generate the stability and cohesion marking most other genres. He reinterprets this negativity, however, as strength: the novel knows no ossification, its energy of self-fashioning and reinvention is unlimited, its versatility accommodates and processes vast masses of previously submerged and neglected discourses. In brief, the novel is anything but a merely “rhetorical form” in the pejorative sense Shpet gives this term in “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” in his notes on the novel, and in Vnutrenniaia forma slova. For Shpet, the novel signals impasse; it holds no prospect: “When a genuine flourishing of art occurs, the novel has no future” (84). Unlike poetry, for Shpet (let us recall the formative impact of the Russian Silver Age on his understanding of literature as serious, solemnly elevated, almost elitist business), the novel is a genre for the masses, corresponding to their “average moral aspirations” (88). Bakhtin, in contrast, extolled the democratic charge of the novel and dreamed of a literature colonized by the novelistic.

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A Backward Journey to Aesthetics: Shpet’s Position in the Context of the 1920s The comparison between Bakhtin’s and Shpet’s interpretations of the novel takes us to the heart of the question of Shpet’s position vis-à-vis the different modalities of reflecting on literature in Russia during the 1920s, a time when impulses derived from the works of Russian theorists signaled innovation across the Continent and led the way in establishing literary theory as a specific and autonomous field (and mode) of enquiry. The parallel with Bakhtin suggests that, despite a number of seminal advances, Shpet’s intervention in the realm of literary theory was bound to be perceived by many of his contemporaries as somewhat jaded and perhaps belated. His neo-Humboldtianism, in contrast to the radicalism of the Russian Formalists, earned him the reputation of a thinker who made a virtue of arriving on the intellectual scene late rather than never. Vinogradov reports that the young supporters of Formalism at the State Institute of Art History in Leningrad hoisted a banner with the words “Luchshe Shpet, chem nikogda” (literally, “Better Shpet than never”) to signal their sarcasm and distance from Shpet.116 The irony was not lost on those who knew that Shpet was a follower of German thought; the banner punned on Shpet’s surname and its German homophone spät (late) in the German saying “Besser spät als nie” (“Better late than never”). This was even incorporated into the “Anthem of the Formalists”: Years and water flow by, But we stand firm as a wall, After all better Shpet than never, And better never than Nazarenko.117

If a recent attribution is to be trusted, Demian Bedny savaged Shpet with a version of the same pun: I’ll sigh to myself for a certain GAKhN, where some suspicious Shpet zu spät [too late] was exposed as an alcoholic and a clown.118

This sense of belatedness could be accounted for in terms of Shpet’s philosophical baggage and the specific constellation of theoretical paradigms in Soviet literary studies in the 1920s. Steeped in phenomenology and in a version of

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hermeneutics and philosophy of language that increasingly built on the work of nineteenth-century thinkers, Humboldt and Lazarus foremost among them, Shpet’s views on literature (and also theater) moved in the orbit of aesthetics, refusing to embrace the agenda of a Formalist approach interested in literariness as an intrinsic feature of the verbal work of art. Soviet literary studies in the 1920s were dominated by sociological, Formalist, and psychoanalytic approaches, with some vestiges of a more traditional historical poetics and morphology of literature. Shpet’s work did not belong to any of these paradigms; it was clearly dictated by philosophical concerns and, if anything, called for a return to aesthetics as the proper home of literary studies. Thus Shpet, along with his colleagues and disciples at GAKhN, appeared to swim against the current, denying literary theory the right to exist outside the realm of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Shpet might even be seen as seeking to abort the imminent launch of modern literary theory as an autonomous discipline, attempting to steer it back into the fold of aesthetics and a neo-Humboldtian philosophy of language. These aspirations were seen by many of his contemporaries as regressive, preserving as they did a tradition of well-tempered philosophizing about literature and the arts that was in the process of being supplanted by the radicalism of Formalism (and, to different effect, of Marxism). In the end, Shpet’s role was to encourage a move away from Formalism and address the central question of form from a phenomenological and hermeneutical perspective that enabled a return to the question of content and the significance of the text for the reader. At the same time, we need to be aware of the fact that Shpet’s proposed deradicalization (or deformalization) of literary theory and its attendant reincorporation into the realm of aesthetics and the philosophy of art evolved only gradually in the course of the 1920s. In “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” where this trend is already strong and results in an unmistakable polemic with the Formalists, Shpet still foreshadows some important developments in Structuralist literary theory and semiotics. It is only with Vnutrenniaia forma slova that these innovations finally appear to be abandoned and Shpet reverts to an understanding of literature that harks back to aesthetics and a philosophy of language and art shaped increasingly by nineteenth-century concerns (despite his effort to update these with the help of Marty and others). Bakhtin emerges once again as a relevant point of reference at this juncture. In the early 1920s, Shpet’s preference for discussing the verbal work of art in the framework of aesthetics parallels Bakhtin’s interest in categories such as form,

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author, hero, and dialogue from the point of view of aesthetics, rather than from a perspective grounded specifically in literary theory. In the latter half of the 1920s, however, Shpet continues to discuss literature in a fashion informed by, and committed to, aesthetics and a neo-Humboldtian philosophy of language, whereas Bakhtin’s theoretical discourse gradually breaks away from aesthetics and evolves toward a philosophy of culture. It was from this vantage point in the 1930s that Bakhtin addressed various aspects of genre theory and historical poetics, two areas that remained alien to Shpet, as his notes on the novel reveal. Throughout the 1930s, Bakhtin writes as a philosopher of culture rather than as a thinker drawing his agenda from aesthetics. His entire conceptual apparatus during that time stands under the auspicious sign of grand narratives about the inner dynamics of cultural evolution, of which the novel proves a confident and forceful agent (and epitome). Ultimately, however, Shpet and Bakhtin do share significant common ground through their dissent from literary theory as an autonomous, selfsufficient field—and mode—of enquiry: Shpet performed—and encouraged in others—a return to aesthetics; Bakhtin, on the other hand, set out on a journey forward that would bypass literary theory and take him to the ill-defined but enormously exciting realm of cultural theory and the philosophy of cultural forms. Shpet’s reflections on literature thus come into view as a complex amalgam of innovation and regression, a stirring mixture that embodies the turns of intellectual history at its most attractive and challenging. To sum up, while remaining critical of the Formalists, he presaged important tenets of semiotics and Structuralism. At the same time, his embeddedness in aesthetics and philosophy of art, as well as his distinct distrust of historical poetics,119 meant that his work was in the end deeply skeptical of the self-assertion of modern literary theory in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

3 T O W A R D A P H I L O S O P H Y O F C U LT U R E Bak h t i n beyon d Li t era ry The o ry

Far from the limelight of the Soviet cultural institutions, Mikhail Bakhtin (1885–1975) spent the 1930s working on genre theory as a vehicle for his philosophy of culture. The entire decade was marked by uncertainty for Bakhtin: for part of it, he was a political exile in Kazakhstan; he spent the remainder of the 1930s as an unrehabilitated convict who was not allowed to work or reside in either Moscow or Saint Petersburg (but would make several semi-legal trips to the capital, trying to pursue his scholarly interests). It was during the 1930s that Bakhtin arrived at a new way of capturing the relevance of literature, different from the regimes of relevance that sustained either the Formalists’ or Shpet’s work.

Bakhtin’s Intellectual Trajector y Crucial for understanding this new regime is Bakhtin’s transition in the 1930s from ethics and aesthetics to philosophy of culture, and his wry and difficult—decentered—humanism, which I analyze in the first section of this chapter. I then proceed to offer a case study of Bakhtin’s positioning in relation to the 1930s Soviet debates on the classic and the canon; this prepares the ground for returning to the question of Bakhtin’s impact and later appropriations of his work, especially through the lens of postmodernism and post-Structuralism. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to grasp the specific regime

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of relevance that sustained the significance of literature in Bakhtin’s writings of the 1930s. Genre in Bakhtin’s Early Career

To understand Bakhtin’s consequential transition from ethics and aesthetics to philosophy of culture, we need to register the shifting importance of genre in his writings. The corpus of Bakhtin’s texts on the novel from the 1930s and the early 1940s poses two distinct challenges. The first one is textological. With the exception of Rabelais and His World (an important source for understanding Bakhtin’s theory of genre and the novel, whose genesis has by now been well explored), the other relevant materials have a textological history that is difficult to disentangle.1 At the time of publication they were carved out from a vast mass of unfinished book manuscripts, drafts, papers, and notes, and later edited—often with the active involvement of Sergei Bocharov and Vadim Kozhinov (Bakhtin’s younger friends and later executors of his estate)—to form the texts that are currently known (with their titles on some occasions given posthumously by the editors) as “Discourse in the Novel” (written largely in 1934–36); “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (part of a larger text written in 1937–39, but with the “Concluding Remarks” and the passage immediately preceding them added only in 1973); “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (1940); “Epic and Novel” (1941); and “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” (written around 1936–37, with further preparatory material worked upon during 1938–39).2 The second challenge is interpretative: how to make sense of these texts, taking into account both their immediate Soviet context and addressees and their relevance for cultural and literary theory today. Charting Bakhtin’s evolution as a thinker and the place of genre in his theoretical concerns, which he sought to formulate in dialogue with his contemporaries, could help accomplish this interpretative task. I thus begin this section by tracing the changing significance of genre in Bakhtin’s writings and by outlining the dynamic relationship between epic and novel in his texts of the 1930s: from their juxtaposition in the essays on the novel to their intended synthesis in Rabelais and His World. I then sketch Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and the valorization of the novelistic by exploring Bakhtin’s more profound transition from aesthetics and ethics to philosophy of culture, reflected in his move during the 1930s from polyphony to heteroglossia. Finally, in the third section, I attempt a concise characteriza-

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tion of Bakhtin’s style of theorizing and a brief examination of his legacy in literary and cultural theory. During the first decade after his debut article, published in 1919, genre was a category lacking in theoretical relevance for Bakhtin; it was supplanted in his early writings by a broader notion of form. Bakhtin’s central text on aesthetics, “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art” (Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 257–325),3 introduces a sharp dualism into his thinking about form, which cannot be found in the more integrated and ethical approach to form in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” This dualism is predicated on the differentiation between aesthetic activity as such and the work of art. Aesthetic activity (and aesthetic contemplation) are always “directed toward a work” (267). The work of art, then, is only an external materialization of the intentionality of aesthetic activity (and contemplation). Process and result are thus divorced from one another, and the work of art is thought implicitly inferior to the activity that generates it.4 The division is reinforced by the use of two different terms, “architectonics” and “composition,” the first denoting the structure of the content of aesthetic activity per se, whereas the second serves to address the structure of the work of art as the actualization of that activity (267). Hence Bakhtin’s discontent with “material aesthetics”: “There is in the works of material aesthetics an inescapable and constant confusion of architectonic and compositional forms, so that the former are never clarified in principle or defined with precision, and are undervalued” (268). The outcome of this division is surprising for those wont to see in Bakhtin the great theoretician of genre and the novel: genre is reduced to an external compositional form (269). Unlike architectonic forms, which are “forms of the inner and bodily value of aesthetic man,” compositional forms have an “implemental” character and are “subject to a purely technical evaluation: to what extent have they adequately fulfilled their architectonic task[?]” (270). Drama, for example, is a compositional form, while the “architectonic forms of consummation” are the tragic and the comic (269). The novel does not enjoy higher position either: “The novel is a purely compositional form of the organization of verbal masses; through it, the architectonic form of the artistic consummation of a historical or social event is realized in the aesthetic object. That architectonic form is a variety of the form of epic consummation” (269; translation modified; emphasis in the original). There is a dramatic devaluation of genre in this passage, and, consequently, a refusal to draw a clear line of demarcation between the novel and the epic.

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Like Lukács, who in his Theory of the Novel considers the novel a distinct but nonetheless weak link in the great chain of the epic tradition, the early Bakhtin seeks to accommodate the novelistic within the epic. Following his dismissal of genre as a secondary compositional category, he goes even further than Lukács in this direction, demonstrating a complete lack of interest in the generic specifics of the novel. A clear consequence of this lack of interest in genre is that throughout Bakhtin’s early intellectual career, the epic and the novel, rather than being contrasted, are reconciled as narrative forms of the epic tradition. This subsumption of the novel under the umbrella notion of the epic can be argued to have been the result—at least in part—of Bakhtin’s appropriation of the work of Friedrich Schlegel. Although the impact of the German Romantics remained strong in Bakhtin’s later work, not least in the essays on the novel of the 1930s and the early 1940s, the overall tenor and substance of the discussion changed, especially as Lukács and Mikhail Lifshits gradually emerged as the most significant players on the Moscow scene of literary theory, contributing to a realization of the key importance of genre in debates on culture and ideology in the mid-1930s. It was in the 1930s that genre gained true significance for Bakhtin; in a sense, his intellectual maturity is signaled by this transition from his early writings, in which genre is relegated to insignificance, to his work of the 1930s that puts genre center stage. Even before the famous 1930s Moscow discussion on the novel, Lukács had insisted that epic and novel be viewed in opposition and dialectical sublation. The novel cancels the epic in the age of capitalism and becomes the representative genre of what Lukács calls the epoch of “absolute sinfulness” in his Theory of the Novel, borrowing from Fichte; with the destruction of the capitalist mode of production and the transition to communism, however, the epic overthrows the novel and is fully restored in its rights. It is against this understanding of the two forms that Bakhtin—who was following Lukács’s articles in Literaturnyi kritik (Literary Critic) and his paper at the Moscow discussion on the novel— sought to emancipate himself as a theorist of the novel in the 1930s.5 While in his essays Bakhtin succeeded in overturning the balance of epic and novel in favor of the novel, he nonetheless remained caught in Lukács’s (Hegelian) framework of opposition and mediation between these two genres. Lukács’s envisaged outcome was reconciliation and an ultimate victory for the epic, into which the modern novel would eventually flow. However, Bakhtin’s essays on the novel and Rabelais and His World, both written largely during the

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1930s (with work on the latter continuing into the mid-1960s), articulate two recognizably dissimilar positions: the essays insist on the incompatibility of epic and novel, valorizing the novelistic at the expense of the epic, whereas Rabelais and His World (as we shall see in the next section) charts a gradual rapprochement and synthesis of the two genres. In carnival, the epic reverberates in humanity’s boundless memory “of cosmic perturbations in the distant past,” while the novelistic lives in the grotesque fluctuation and removal of distance and in the irreverent and joyful celebration of resilience through laughter.6 The Valorization of the Novel: From Aesthetics and Ethics to Philosophy of Culture

The new centrality of genre and the novel in the 1930s was a sign of a more profound and considerable shift in Bakhtin’s theoretical agenda. The Moscow discussion on the novel was undoubtedly an important catalyst, but the change reflected Bakhtin’s own evolution as a thinker and his transition from aesthetics and ethics to philosophy of culture, for which genre theory served as a powerful vehicle. A renewed comparison with a less prominent interlocutor among Bakhtin’s contemporaries—Gustav Shpet—offers insight into the dynamics of this evolution. Bakhtin and Shpet shared something fundamental: they were both exceptions on the Russian intellectual scene, in that in their mature writings they were neither religious nor Marxists thinkers. At the same time, Shpet’s extensive notes on the novel from 1924 bring into sharp relief the differences between his and Bakhtin’s approaches, which I analyzed in the chapter on Gustav Shpet. Shpet’s work on the novel called for a return to aesthetics as the proper home of literary studies. This preference for discussing the verbal work of art, including the novel, in the framework of aesthetics actually parallels, as we have seen, Bakhtin’s early interest in categories such as form, author, hero, and dialogue (and his early indifference to genre) from the point of view of aesthetics, rather than from a perspective grounded specifically in literary theory. Aesthetics was in fact the starting point for all major nonMarxist discourses on literature in Europe and Russia around World War I. An agenda derived from aesthetics shaped not only Bakhtin’s (his exploration of “aesthetic activity”) and Shpet’s initial reflections on literature but also those of the Formalists—recall the fundamental importance the early Shklovsky assigned to artistic perception and the aesthetic experience facili-

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tated by the procedure of estrangement. In a sense, aesthetics was the only show in town on the eve of World War I, and it was vis-à-vis, and away from, the initial impulse of aesthetics that both Bakhtin and the Formalists sought to formulate their respective approaches to literature. The material difference here consists in the fact that the Formalists and Bakhtin—in very different ways—left behind that early position grounded in aesthetics, whereas Shpet did not significantly move away from it. In the latter half of the 1920s Shpet continues to discuss literature in a fashion informed by, and committed to, aesthetics and a neo-Humboldtian philosophy of language, whereas Bakhtin’s theoretical discourse, let me repeat this central point, gradually breaks away from aesthetics and evolves toward philosophy of culture. Bakhtin’s preoccupation with genre during the 1930s came as a result of this profound interest in the philosophy and history of cultural forms. It was this innovative shift toward philosophy of culture that enabled Bakhtin to erect his own theoretical edifice during the 1930s, synthesizing different intellectual traditions and reworking and creatively expanding concepts stemming from a range of different disciplines. This shift from aesthetics (and ethics) to a philosophy of culture—and the corresponding abandonment (not unlike that by the Russian Formalists) of interest in the individual writer and moral evaluation—is evident in Bakhtin’s move from polyphony to heteroglossia as underlying features of the novel. Back in 1929, in the first version of his book on Dostoevsky, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Work), “polyphony” was a term Bakhtin used almost exclusively to capture the personal innovation introduced by a particularly talented author rather than the product of a set of social and cultural conditions. There is, however, a hint in the book that polyphony ought to be explained as more than the gift of an extraordinary writer. This line of reasoning was adopted by Bakhtin from Otto Kaus’s book Dostojewski und sein Schicksal (Dostoevsky and His Fate; 1923), which attempted an explanation of Dostoevsky that drew on the divide between community and society (pioneered by Ferdinand Tönnies and well established by then in German sociology) and the transition from the former to the latter. In Bakhtin’s words, paraphrasing Kaus: “Those worlds, those plains—social, cultural, and ideological—which collide in Dostoevsky’s work were each self-sufficient, organically sealed and stable; each made sense internally as an isolated unit. . . . Capitalism destroyed the isolation of these worlds, broke down the seclusion and the inner ideological self-sufficiency of these social spheres” (Bakhtin, Sobranie, 2: 26).7

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Kaus, and after him Bakhtin, equates crisis with modernity and conceives of capitalism as a critical state of society marked by the healthy yet unsettling process of a mutual opening up of various fields of life, which brings along a multitude of previously concealed horizons and voices. Bakhtin was particularly eager to stress the propitiousness of the Russian circumstances: “The polyphonic novel could indeed have been realized only in the capitalist era. The most favorable soil for it was moreover precisely in Russia, where capitalism set in almost catastrophically, and where it came upon an untouched multitude of diverse worlds and social groups, whose individual isolation had not been weakened by the gradual encroachment of capitalism in the West. . . . In this way the objective preconditions were created for the multileveledness and multivoicedness of the polyphonic novel” (27). Despite these attempts to argue the case sociologically, Bakhtin’s earlier work still regards polyphony almost exclusively as an artistic phenomenon that foregrounds the singular achievement of Dostoevsky as an innovative writer. There is no necessary connection at this stage between polyphony and the genre of the novel. The novel as genre is not intrinsically polyphonic; Bakhtin merely asserted that Dostoevsky’s novel was compellingly innovative, in the sense of being, like no other novel before it, polyphonic. The unprecedented nature of Dostoevsky’s achievement, placing him above and beyond tradition, was something of a commonplace in European Dostoevsky criticism; suffice it to point to the Dostoevsky interpretations of Moeller van den Bruck or Lukács. For Lukács of the Theory of the Novel, in particular, Dostoevsky was the last novelist and the first herald of the “new-old” epic form. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin’s radical praise of the novelty of Dostoevsky was doing little more than to reaffirm—this time in radically positive terms—Leo Tolstoy’s assertion that the Russians could not write novels in the sense in which this genre was understood in Europe. In the 1930s, however, the notion of polyphony was gradually ousted by that of heteroglossia. Bakhtin understands heteroglossia as a phenomenon independent of the author’s individual artistic attainment. It is rather a state of affairs in which language is no longer used holistically but as a range of partial sociolects. Whereas polyphony encapsulates a mixture of aesthetic but also moral overtones—listening to the other, not placing oneself above him or her—heteroglossia disowns this potential rigor of the moral expectation. Instead, it promotes a more neutral view of language and the novel, one that makes no moral demands. In promoting the term “heteroglossia” and analyzing the wor(l)d of the peasant

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who speaks different sociolects in different circumstances, Bakhtin behaves as a sociologist who wishes to offer an accurate description of the language situation—and not as a humanist determined to retrieve voices that may otherwise be hushed and lost in the cacophony of modernization. It was only now, in the 1930s, that Bakhtin produced a necessary link between heteroglossia and the novel: the novel is considered the preeminent, if not the sole, embodiment of heteroglossia, the cultural form that is best suited to capture and accommodate the often divergent languages and voices at work in society.

Bakhtin’s Style of Theorizing and His Legacy Preoccupied foremost with philosophy of culture, Bakhtin’s proper realm as a thinker is the in-between territory that cannot be confined to any one particular discipline, a territory he inhabits with nonnegotiable sovereignty. In this space between disciplines, he crafted metaphors of his own that enabled him to move freely between different levels of argumentation and address issues located above and beyond particular fields of knowledge. Often elusively, but always extremely stimulatingly, Bakhtin lifts the categories he employs above the conceptual constraints of their home disciplines and instills new life into them by obliterating their previous conceptual identity. One brief example, the way in which he formulates the idea of dialogue, should do. One can discern in Bakhtin’s use of “dialogue” a clear linguistic substratum, which can probably be attributed to Lev Iakubinskii and a host of other early Soviet linguists, and yet Bakhtin’s specific interpretation of this category is so much wider, applicable to entire narratives and whole domains of culture, that focusing exclusively on its linguistic origins, even when these are attestable, would not explain its power and fascination in Bakhtin’s prose. A closer look at Jan Mukařovský’s important essay “Dialogue and Monologue,” written in 1940, could illustrate this.8 Terminologically, Mukařovský’s text is much more disciplined and rigorous, and yet in scope and inventiveness it lags behind Bakhtin’s treatment of dialogue. Mukařovský (who knew and was highly appreciative of some of the writings of Valentin Voloshinov, one of the members of the Bakhtin Circle) works within a narrowly linguistic juxtaposition of dialogue and monologue; Bakhtin transcends this limitation, he refreshes our understanding of dialogue by inviting us to hear dialogue in a single uttered word, or the dialogue embodied in voices that convey conflicting outlooks and perspectives on the world, or indeed dialogue as the foundation stone for an ambitious, wide-ranging typology of cultural forms (which he contrasts as monological vs.

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dialogical and centripetal vs. centrifugal). This transformation that subjects the term to inner growth (sometimes at the expense of exactitude), a transformation whereby the term expands its scope of relevance to the point of turning into a broader metaphor, is the most important feature informing Bakhtin’s prose, the hallmark of his writings, especially during the 1930s. It is this transformative energy that sets him apart from his likely, or even demonstrable, antecedents hailing from various specializations, be they linguistic, sociological, theological, or arthistorical for that matter. It is not difficult, for example, to demonstrate how several of Bakhtin’s concepts—architectonics, space, gothic realism—were derived, at least to a significant degree, from the German art-historical tradition.9 This, however, tells us very little about the significant transformation of these concepts when thrown into the melting pot of Bakhtin’s argumentation. Bakhtin’s originality as thinker is actually the originality of a great synthesizer who took at liberty from various specialized discourses—linguistics, art history, theology—and then reshaped, extended, and augmented the scope of the respective concepts. The question invites itself: what was the ground that enabled him to do so, especially in the 1930s, the time when he produced his landmark essays on the novel? As I have already suggested, he appears to have done so by accomplishing a transition, indeed, an evolution, from ethics and aesthetics in his early writings to philosophy of culture in his mature works, bypassing literary theory as such. Rather than being about literature per se, his signature book of the 1930s, Rabelais and His World, is a powerful exploration of cultural forms that incorporate literature, but go far beyond it, grounded as they are in ritual, orality, and radical transgression of officially sanctioned norms of behavior. In his essays on the novel, and especially in Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin ascribes to literature a regime of relevance that draws on the dispersion of the written word within a broader cultural mass. He reinscribes literature into culture in a dramatic and novel way, not in the nineteenth-century fashion of discussing literature as the vehicle of ideas or overtly political and social concerns, but rather by establishing its profound enmeshment with myth, ritual, and the environment (the resilience of the human species in the face of overwhelming cosmic forces is a recurring motif in Rabelais and His World). Language— and this is vital to comprehend—is not dismissed as unimportant; far from it. Bakhtin does share a continuous preoccupation with language with the Russian Formalists. But for him language is no longer significant as an embodiment of literariness, nor (as in pre-Formalist literary studies) as conveyor of ideas, emotions, and images. Language, for Bakhtin, is an indispensable descrip-

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tor of genre (we can only understand how the novel works as a genre when we grasp its unique, “heteroglot,” in Bakhtin’s parlance, use of language that differentiates it from other genres)—which then becomes descriptor of entire domains of culture (e.g., the official culture of the Church in contrast to the popular culture of the street, each of which is informed by a fundamentally different use of language). So, like the Formalists, Bakhtin never turns his back on language; unlike them, he embraces language as a marker of entities larger than literature per se; his language-centered theory of culture thus restores, in a much subtler and mediated way, the bond between language and culture that the literary theory of the Formalists had attempted to sever. The place of Bakhtin’s writings of the 1930s on the larger scene of cultural theory becomes particularly visible if one traces the posthumous appropriation of his work. Its early discovery in the West, particularly in the anglophone world, was accompanied by the seemingly scandalous labeling of Bakhtin as a Formalist and Structuralist. This went on for so long (a good twenty-five years)10 and involved so many mainstream intellectual contexts (the American, partly the German, and also the French, where the appropriation of Bakhtin flowed imperceptibly into the mold of a post-Structuralist and psychoanalytic Bakhtin, mainly in the work of Kristeva)11 that it seems utterly improbable that these two designations (“Formalist” and “Structuralist”) were just resilient misnomers. Needless to say, there is a most regrettable degree of simplification involved in calling Bakhtin a Formalist or a Structuralist; it might even appear to be plain wrong to employ these appellations with reference to him. And yet there is, after all, a grain of truth in all this. In the history of ideas, there are sometimes undercurrent affinities at work that do not very readily manifest themselves on the surface. Of course, Bakhtin was neither a Formalist nor a Structuralist, in the sense that he did not partake of these specific practices of interpreting literature.12 But he partook of something much more important: the general episteme, the regime of enquiry that abstracted from the subject and the traditional notion of individual agency. This is what he had in common with the Formalists and the Structuralists; he didn’t use their instruments, their tools of analysis, but he shared some of their basic epistemological premises, while admittedly opposing others. Before we seek to differentiate him from both Formalism and Structuralism, precisely on the level of basic epistemological premises, let us dwell a little bit longer on the fundamental proximity between Bakhtin and these two influential streams. Bakhtin’s entire intellectual evolution can be described as a struggle against

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psychologism and an ever more powerful negation of subjectivity in its classical identitarian version. He admitted to Vadim Kozhinov that Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler played a vital role in his reeducation into a thinker who mistrusted psychologism.13 Beginning with a celebration of Dostoevsky as a unique, inimitable writer of singular achievement, Bakhtin ended up in the 1930s (in his essays on the novel) and in 1963 (in the reworked version of his study of Dostoevsky) focusing on the impersonal memory of genre, leaving little room for creativity as such and examining instead the inherent laws of poetics (note the change in the title of the 1963 book: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics).14 Bakhtin’s entire work and intellectual agenda, indeed the most important questions he sought to answer, were shaped in a battle against traditionally conceived, stable subjectivity: from the question of the body (which Rabelais and His World maintains we gradually cease to possess and be in control of) to the question of language (which, as the essays on the novel would have it, reaches us through established generic patterns and is never quite our own—since it has always already been in someone else’s mouth). The fortunes of the novel embody this rejection of classical subjectivity in full measure: the individual writer is virtually irrelevant, he or she is no more than an instrument through which the genre materializes itself, no more than a mouthpiece that enunciates the calls of generic memory. Bakhtin, in other words, despite his apparent attraction to canonical figures such as Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Rabelais, would ideally have liked to be able to write a history of literature without names. (The formula “history without names” derived from the work of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and had drawn approval from the Russian Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum and also from Pavel Medvedev, who, together with Matvei Kagan, was the most important transmitter of art-historical and art-theoretical knowledge in the Bakhtin Circle.)15 On the other hand, it seems important to probe further into the features that differentiate Bakhtin from Russian Formalism and from Structuralism. Bakhtin’s fundamental disagreement with the former is over the Formalists’ lack of interest in meaning. But Bakhtin does not construe meaning as a stable category that inheres in the text and is then mobilized from time to time to serve an ideological agenda. His idea of meaning is inspiringly monumental: it is cold and distant in its celebration of “great time” as its true home; at the same time it is reassuring and inviting, in that it addresses the uncertainties of that which lies ahead with composure and a triumphant declaration of openness and acceptance of a “future without me.”16 Regardless of this withdrawal of the

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individual, meaning, in a quasi-Nietzschean move, would inevitably experience the festival of its own “return.” Unlike Structuralism, Bakhtin is interested in the inner dynamics of meaning revealed in the transitions between different discursive genres and types. The change is sometimes context-dependent; sometimes it is linked to the flow of time and is measured on the scale of centuries and entire epochs; yet most frequently this inner dynamics is generated by the alternation of pre-set discursive possibilities: monologue and dialogue, grotesque and classical, official and popular—as was also the view of Bakhtin’s predecessors in the arthistorical tradition: Wölfflin, who constructed the opposition between classical (Renaissance) and baroque, or Max Dvořak and Wilhelm Worringer, with their juxtaposition of naturalist and abstract art. Bakhtin’s history of discursive genres in his essays on the novel of the 1930s operates on such a vast scale that sometimes the historical dimension in it gets entirely dissolved, and what the reader ends up with is a typology rather than a diachronic account. The conflicts implicit in these typologies are often of epic proportions; Bakhtin enacts in his works a discursive typomachia (between monologue and dialogue, grotesque and classical, official and popular, to recall once again the outposts that delineate his discursive universe) of an intensity and scope rarely seen before him. His narrative is grand, not just in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense, but also in the more immediate sense of breathtaking solemnity and wide-open vistas. If Bakhtin’s labeling as Formalist and Structuralist teaches us something about the ways in which his thought was integrated and his reputation made outside the Soviet Union during the 1960s and the 1970s, we also need to ask how Bakhtin’s work was able to negotiate the transition to postmodernism and post-Structuralism that began to be acutely felt already in the 1970s and occupied center stage until about the close of the twentieth century. For all his virtues, he would not have been able to stay afloat in the market of ideas if he was perceived solely as a traditional grand-narrative type of thinker whose work was shaped and had peaked during the 1930s. Bakhtin’s intellectual brand, what he did better than most, was the gradual forging of a theoretical platform informed by what I wish to call humanism without subjectivity (or at least without subjectivity understood in the classical identitarian sense). In the mature and late writings, we find an odd, decentered Bakhtinian humanism, seeking and celebrating alterity rather than otherness, and revolving not around the individual but around the generic abilities of the human species to resist and endure in the face of natural cataclysms or

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an ideological monopoly on truth. Bakhtin is probably the single most gifted and persuasive exponent in the twentieth century of this particular strain of humanism without belief in the individual human being at its core, a distant, cosmic love for humanity as survivor and producer of abiding and recurring meanings that celebrate their eventual homecoming in the bosom of “great time.” This new brand of decentered humanism without subjectivity seems to have been Bakhtin’s greatest breakthrough as a thinker during the 1930s and the source of his longevity on the intellectual scene, where his texts continue to teach proximity without empathy, optimism without promise or closure.

In Search of the Classic I want now to shift the focus onto Bakhtin’s cultural theory in its relation to contemporary discourses of the classic and the canon. This section begins by posing the question how cultures produce traditions, because the production of tradition is a form of validating the significance of literature. I try to address this question by discussing the place which Bakhtin’s theory of the novel occupied in this process in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. I do so against the background of important German polemics on community, language and the classic. Just as with my discussion of Shklovsky, Simmel, and Ernst Jünger (and the shorter references to Humboldt and Husserl in the chapter on Shpet), I turn here to an instructive parallel between Bakhtin and a particular branch of the German sociological and philosophical tradition. The analysis of some essential and, so far, unexplored aspects of the German scene of hermeneutic and sociological enquiry would assist me in locating the intellectual bedrock, putting it in perspective, and weighing the wider significance of Bakhtin’s theory of culture, the novel, and the classic in the 1920s–1930s. It seems to me that we have been lacking the perspective of estrangement when looking at these debates and have been entangled—perhaps exclusively—in the fabric of Russian intellectual life, without endeavoring to cast our interpretive net further afield. It is therefore with developments outside Russia that I must begin, returning in the second half to the Russian theoretical landscape to look at it through the prism of Bakhtin’s attempts to offer his own version of the classic by suggesting a synthesis between the fluidity of the novelistic and the tradition-bound stability of the epic in his book Rabelais and His World. Thus, in the first part of this section I briefly survey some significant issues and positions in the German

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hermeneutic and sociological research in the 1920s–1960s, as well as the interactions between the two disciplines exemplified in the work of, and the biographical connections between, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Freyer; I then proceed to analyze Gadamer’s theory of tradition and the classic in connection with Hans Freyer’s take on community, society, and language. Finally, I situate Bakhtin’s work on the noncanonical nature of the novel, as well as his engagement with Rabelais, in the rich and controversial intellectual context of his own time, thus emphasizing the significance of his theory of the novel as a product of, and an oblique intervention in, the struggles over the meaning of the classic in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. I also pose the question of the ambivalent ideological and political implications of Bakhtin’s views of communitarian and individual culture. Freyer and Gadamer: Community, Language, and the Classic

My starting point is the interrelatedness in the twentieth century of three concepts central to the discourse of the humanities in Germany: tradition, community, and the classic. These three concepts loom large in the work of Hans Freyer and Hans-Georg Gadamer, both of them important German theorists of culture and society and contemporaries of Bakhtin. First, a few words are perhaps due by way of briefly arguing the case for considering Freyer’s and Gadamer’s discussions of tradition and the classic as closely connected. To start with, since its early days, German sociology has been imbued with an ambition to “understand” society in a fashion close to hermeneutics and much less interested in describing and establishing the laws of society in a dispassionate inquiry that is methodologically independent of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften). Characteristically, in a study published when Freyer had already gained a dominant position in the German sociological community, Raymond Aron spoke of German sociology’s reliance on the legacy of Dilthey and phenomenology, and of its drive toward “Verstehen.”17 But beyond this underlying proximity in methodology, there is also a clear biographical case for discussing Freyer and Gadamer in the same breath. Gadamer has by now become an inalienable part of the canon of Continental philosophy. In 1997, during Gadamer’s lifetime, Jean Grondin published his first biography; before his death in 2002, Gadamer also saw the publication in German of his collected works. Unlike him, Freyer remains a relatively marginal figure (despite his influence on Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils). The brief

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renaissance of his ideas in the 1990s meant that he had finally emerged from oblivion, but was still waiting to be (re-)admitted to the canon of twentiethcentury European thought. While attempts to cast the shadow of silent accommodation to—if not outright collaboration with—Nazism over Gadamer seem not to have yielded palpable results and left Gadamer’s reputation more or less intact,18 Freyer had clearly discredited himself in the 1930s as one of the promoters and ideologues of the conservative revolution—particularly through his 1931 manifesto Revolution von rechts (Revolution from the Right)—and as the director of the Deutsches Wissenschaftliches Institut (DWI; German Scientific Institute) in Budapest (1941–45); founded by the Nazis, its work was marked by an uneasy mixture of propaganda and research. Freyer also became the first (and last) incumbent of a visiting professorship in German cultural history at the University of Budapest (1938–45); both this post and the directorship of the DWI were established by the German Foreign Office.19 Freyer never joined the National Socialist Party, but in the 1930s he was pro-active in the Gleichschaltung of German sociology; at the same time, he rose to become the most distinguished representative of the Leipzig Sociological School. As early as 1925, he was appointed to the chair of sociology in Leipzig (the first chair in Germany where the discipline of sociology was not subsumed under other academic subjects, but was asserted as an independent field of enquiry). After 1945, despite the fact that he was banned from teaching only during 1947–53, rather than for the rest of his life (as was the case with Heidegger or Carl Schmitt), Freyer’s influence was less direct and resembled the politics of impact “in the wings.” Habermas listed him, along with Heidegger and Schmitt, as one of the three thinkers with the greatest influence on the intellectual formation of his own generation at the end of the 1950s.20 Gadamer and Freyer were colleagues at Leipzig from 1938 through to 1947; in 1943, Gadamer was deputized in Freyer’s absence as the convener of a colloquium on “Außenpolitik und Staatskunde” (Foreign Policy and Statecraft);21 the two planned to hold the colloquium again in 1945 as a joint event, but the summer semester for which it was scheduled never took place because of the war.22 When Leipzig University reopened in February 1946, Gadamer, as the new rector, did everything he could to protect Freyer from the impending denazification.23 More important, Gadamer acknowledged in a 1982 interview that he had read the first edition of Freyer’s important Theorie des objektiven Geistes. Eine Einleitung in die Kulturphilosophie (Theory of Objective Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture [1923]) with great interest.24 As a

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matter of fact, it is possible to argue that Gadamer’s understanding of tradition and the fusion of horizons was stimulated and even shaped to some noticeable extent by Freyer’s understanding of tradition. Drawing on Dilthey (together with Hegel and Simmel, a major inspiration for Freyer’s sociology and philosophy), Freyer stipulated a “circular course of understanding” that rests on a triad of concepts: life, expression, and understanding. Life is meant to be an active force here, and Freyer speaks accordingly of the “rolling stream of life” (Freyer, Theory, 81) that encounters various forms of objectification on its way. It is in this encounter that understanding takes place as a dynamic, life-enhancing process. The philosophy-of-life (Lebensphilosophie) overtones are unmistakable here; they reveal the very origins of modern hermeneutics, whose idea of understanding as an active process based in the present would not have been possible without the shaping impact of Lebensphilosophie (itself an important ingredient of Bakhtin’s own intellectual formation). Tradition is thus presented by Freyer as an encounter between “the understanding life” (Theory, 127) and the objective forms of culture. Speaking on behalf of life, whose primacy over form is declared a necessary condition of tradition, Freyer constructs the following explanation (marked by somewhat essayistic language that pays tribute to the conventions of a philosophical quasi-dialogue). On encountering a form that has already been established for a while, “the understanding life says: This form is now empty; and it must be empty so that I can live with it; but at one time it was filled and basically still is; or: I have shifted the meaning of this form, but it was at one time direct; and like a delightful memory, the form still today bears in itself its own entire depth” (Theory, 127–28). He goes on in terms later echoed in Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons: “Understanding thus continuously maintains a kind of hovering between two lines of meaningful content, one meant for the moment, and the other what was actually intended. An underground combination of lines is drawn between both contents” (Theory, 128). In Gadamer’s words from Truth and Method, “In a tradition [im Walten der Tradition] this process of fusion [of horizons] is continually going on, for there old and new are always combining into something of living value, without either being explicitly foregrounded from the other.”25 I wish now to take the argument a step further and claim that not just the concept of tradition, but also the entire notion of the classic in Gadamer was propelled by concerns central to Freyer’s sociology. Gadamer’s definition of the classical speaks the language of philosophical paradox with an almost pious veneration: “the classical preserves itself precisely because it is significant in

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itself and interprets itself [by itself]. . . . What we call ‘classical’ does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation it overcomes this distance by itself. The classical, then, is certainly ‘timeless’, but this timelessness is a mode of historical being.” Gadamer’s attempt to reconcile timelessness and historicity as equally essential modes of the classic is grounded in his metaphysical trust in the existence of immanent truth, which always is, but which only the flow of time can reveal. Although he insists that the classic is a historical category, the logic of this insistence leads Gadamer to the opposite conclusion: “the classical is a truly historical category, precisely because it is more than a concept of a period or of a historical style, and yet it nevertheless does not want to be the concept of supra-historical value. It does not refer to a quality that has to be ascribed to certain historical phenomena but to a notable mode of being historical: the historical process of preservation [Bewahrung] that, through constantly proving itself [Bewährung], allows something true [ein Wahres] to come into being” (287).26 The classic, Gadamer writes later, is that which “resists historical critique.” This would sound like a pretty banal argument were it not for the following controversial extension: “because its [the classic’s] historical dominion, the binding power of its validity—forever handed down and for ever preserving itself—precedes all historical reflection and holds out in it” (287). Gadamer’s vocabulary, sprinkled with Hegelianisms and Heideggerianisms, and yet recognizably his own—evidences the turn in argumentation: from a historical category, the “classical” is being smoothly and imperceptibly turned into a notion that is posited prior to historical reflection and independently of it, as “classic.” Ultimately, for Gadamer “the classical is fundamentally something quite different from a descriptive concept used by an objectivizing historical consciousness; it is a historical reality, to which historical consciousness [itself] belongs and is subordinate” (287–88). Not confined to classical antiquity, the classical for Gadamer outgrows its status as the stylistic marker of a defined period and assumes universal validity; in Gadamer’s interpretation, it evolves semantically into “classic.” For Gadamer, the omnipotence of historical consciousness must here recede before the assumption that the classical (in its capacity as “classic”) is “immediately strong”: “The word ‘classical’ enunciates precisely this—that the duration of the immediate power of a work [of art] to speak is fundamentally unlimited” (290). It is on the basis of this intensive sublation of the historical in the suprahistorical that Gadamer interprets the normative value of the classical as “a model, which, as something past, is unattainable and yet present [gegenwärtig]” (289).

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Gadamer’s ideas reflect the acuteness of the principal problem of hermeneutics: how to think the historical as something specific, unique, singular, and at the same time as something that partakes of the structure of the present and emits signals toward and for the present. Gadamer is at pains to persuade us that all this becomes possible thanks to tradition, that understanding is located in tradition and that a dialogical universalization of historical experience is only thinkable in the bedrock of tradition. The difficulty stems, however, from the fact that tradition itself—as the act of historically meaningful transmission of (in this case aesthetic) models—is not questioned by Gadamer; he takes it as an absolute entity. The classic is called upon to exemplify the unconditional nature of tradition. It has to illustrate the smoothly working mechanisms of tradition that render the transmission of messages from the past to the present an unfailing process. In this sense, one could say that the classic designates a boundary: with it, all roaming efforts of the semantic transmission come to an end—and the secure career of the transmitted meaning begins, thus confirming the power and beauty of tradition. It is this liminality of the classic that makes it accessible—for Gadamer—solely in the terms of a paradox. Gadamer does not attend to the question why some works of the past receive the special status of classics; he does not question this status but simply solidifies it by declaring it an objectively valid fact. Gadamer’s argument is deeply fearful of any mediation: the classic flies on the wings of tradition as a surprisingly pure substance, as if sparing the reader the profane noises of reception that inevitably accompany the (re)distribution of cultural capital in society. What is more, in the conditions of modernity, the classic—unquestionable, unifying, and somehow organic—appears to be reproducing the features of community, the ideal audience and guardian of tradition. First formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies in his 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the opposition between community and society became a central topic in the German sociological debate in the Weimar Republic; in 1924, Helmuth Plessner, in his Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (The Limits of Community), was already voicing criticism of the idea of community, emphasizing its limited compatibility with modernity.27 It is in this context that Hans Freyer becomes particularly important for understanding Gadamer’s take on the classic. In his main work from the period before World War II, Sociology as a Science of Reality (1930), Freyer argues for an understanding of community as a body that transcends the same (apparent) tension between temporality and suprahistoricity, which Gadamer’s theory of the classic also registers. (It is essential to note here

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that Gadamer’s interest in the problem of the classic goes back to the 1930s, the time when Freyer was developing his ideas on community, progress, and technology. In 1940, Gadamer reviewed Hans Rose’s then influential book Klassik als künstlerische Denkform des Abendlandes [1937]; in Truth and Method, there are no references to Freyer, but in “Hermeneutics and Historicism” [1965] and “Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics” [1968] Gadamer mentions Freyer as an important continuer of Dilthey’s work.)28 According to Freyer, the most significant distinctive feature of the community is that, unlike society, it is based on spatial rather than temporal relations.29 Whereas society is made up of different generations, whose representatives may have never met in person, or indeed of different individuals who are contemporaries but do not know each other, in the community, social intercourse is by definition of a different nature altogether: “There is no community at a distance, through relations of mediation” (Freyer, Soziologie, 241).30 Community is the product of contacts in what Freyer terms the “space of [shared] fate” (Schicksalsraum). The notion of fate no doubt implies certain temporal aspects, but it precludes the idea of history. The community lives in its shared space as a body, which, “even though it is constantly renewed through the change of generations, remains one and the same in this change” (243). Like the classical (turned classic) in Gadamer, “the community stands within history, its shores are laved or burnt by history, but community itself has no history; it only has duration” (244). As Hegel puts it (both Gadamer and Freyer were moving as thinkers within his orbit), community is a prehistoric phenomenon. Yet for Freyer, in its immortality, the community is also an organism that—just as nature—is not just prehistoric, but actually “outside history” (243) and, unlike society, “essentially timeless” (239), an important difference. Like the classic, it withstands the turbulence of history and abides in its constantly renewed immutability, as if maintaining a position outside history. For us, it is even more significant that Freyer also throws out a bridge toward the specific cultural-linguistic aspects that later are to become so vital for Gadamer. The structural law of community life reflects the structural law of language. The community is founded and acts on the same principles that also govern language. In Freyer’s words, it is “as if the community is language through and through” (246). Here Freyer (like Gadamer after him) turns to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Romantic doctrine of language as an organism. Being an organism, language is whole and indivisible. In its social makeup, such is also the community—and this is why language remains integral and indivisible

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only in its usage by the community. To the extent to which they remain members of the (organic and indivisible) community, men and women use language holistically: “it is impossible on principle for language to live in man partially or to be used in a piecemeal fashion” (246). It is only with the advance of social differentiation and the arrival of the relations of domination (Herrschaft), which for Freyer, and also for Hegel and Tönnies, mark the transition from community to society, that heteroglossia (Verschiedensprachigkeit) makes its appearance, disrupting the harmony of community life. With heteroglossia, language begins to be employed partially in a whole gamut of new sociolects, which create different and competing cultural worlds, in which the validity of tradition gradually trails away, and the organically produced canon of the community disintegrates. Freyer’s arguments help us to understand that Gadamer’s theory of the classic is actually oriented toward the opposition between society and community, which has been so vital with regard to—indeed constitutive of—modern German social science. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, then, in turn needs our hermeneutic efforts. It needs to be grasped and interpreted as a specific response to modernity. With Gadamer, the classic is summoned to erase the trauma of social differentiation and to fill the space that gapes and grows in the process of modernization. He does so by presenting the classic as an instrument transmitting the validity of meaning from the organic community, in which—as Freyer puts it—“the closed, compelling horizon reigns” (242) into the open, socially diverse life of society, where tradition has to “fuse” the heterogeneity of horizons, and with this also the heterogeneity of the social expectations in relation to art. The classic, if you will, should be the folklore sui generis of modernity, of the age of script and refined means of communication. It is important to see the German polemics on community, language, and the classic in the 1930s precisely as an intervention by the German humanities in the wider discussions on modernity ensuing after 1933. Politically, the veneration of the classic and community life was sending a twofold message: on the one hand, the insistence on the classic was meant to evoke a feeling of permanence that had to assuage fears of instability and potential disorder; on the other hand, the discourse on the classic was closely interwoven with post-Romantic, often völkisch, nationalism: the (neo)classical was promoted, in literature, music, and the visual arts, as the ever-lasting product and embodiment of Germanness, of which community life was just another manifestation. The defense of the community and the classic was thus a strategy

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designed to claim (and win) the moral high ground in these debates by those approaching the new social realities under the Nazi regime from a position best described as not unsympathetic yet still emphatically conservative. The moral overtones of this stance survived into the 1950s, when Freyer, calling for a subtler conservatism, wrote that technological and economic progress should not be blindly opposed, but should rather be infused with the abiding meaningfulness of the basic forms of social life, on which progress as such thrives. These forms, then, should not be thought of in merely negative terms, as “breaks” that hold back the forward movement, but rather as positive powers that endow the whole process with qualities that cannot be organically grown within the “secondary system” that progress in itself is: “vitality, human sense, human fullness and fruitfulness.” 31 Bakhtin: The Aesthetics and Sociology of the Classic in the 1930s

As we have seen, Hans Freyer uses two terms that were bound to become central, only slightly later, to Bakhtin’s theory of culture and the novel: “heteroglossia” and “horizon.” This terminological recurrence leads me to a hypothesis that at least to some extent explains the significance of Bakhtin’s work on the novel as a complex response to modernity and a promotion of tradition, in which—significantly—the importance of community life looms large, just as in Freyer’s work. What matters in my view is the fact that the question of heteroglossia and of the indispensable sociological underpinnings of a theory of the novel became a variation on the question of tradition and the classic in 1930s Russia. With the Russian hermeneutic scene being relatively unremarkable at the time (Shpet was a notable exception in the era of the revolution and the civil war, but his major work Hermeneutics and Its Problems, which he completed in 1918, remained unpublished in Bakhtin’s lifetime), 32 there was no domestic body of specifically hermeneutic work that Bakhtin could turn to when elaborating his own theory. The impulse came from Shklovsky’s theory of prose. Strongly indebted to Shklovsky’s discovery of the self-mocking nature of the novelistic genre, which never allows the novel to create its own ossified canon, Bakhtin now supplemented the Formalists with his important discovery of the fractured linguistic pluralism of the novel, embodied in the principle of heteroglossia. As a theorist, then, in the 1930s he was facing the most challenging of tasks: how to convert the non-canonical, self-mocking,

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heteroglot genre of the novel—apparently bad material for a classic—into a building block of tradition and an instrument of a wider theory not just of the novelistic but of culture in general, which would remain based on his reading of a deceptively narrow body of “great books” by “great authors”: Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais. In the late 1930s, in what was to become Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin was able to turn the novel into a building block of the classic by reconfiguring the novelistic in a way that opens it up for the influx of epic elements. Bakhtin’s strategy was to imagine a marriage between the novel and the epic, resulting in a single, synthetic genre that preserved the features of the novelistic while countering its transitoriness and fluidity so inherent in the novel and yet so much at variance with the very notion of the classic. The epic substratum in the novelistic was meant to serve as a guarantee of the permanence and stability required in any version of the classic, and to extend and preserve the features of community life in the modern age, in which social division and hierarchy were becoming a compelling reality. Lukács, one of Bakhtin’s great predecessors in the field, had argued in his early work, The Theory of the Novel, that the novelistic is a form of the partial, whereas the epic deals with the whole and is capable of capturing and reproducing totality. As we have seen, Bakhtin himself upheld this framework of opposition between epic and novel in his essays on the novel in the 1930s. But is it possible to harness the two opposites in a mediation, whereby the part would give us access to the whole, while the whole would foreground and honor its parts without being reduced to them? Is there, in other words, a possible synthesis between the heteroglot being of the novel and the tradition-friendly mono-horizon (to speak in Freyer’s terms) of the epic, a form that could guarantee the survival of communitarian tradition in the age of its disruption by the forces of modernity? I wish to suggest that in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin offers precisely such a synthesis between the epic and the novel, two genres irreconcilably separated in his essays of the 1930s: the epic makes its return in Rabelais simultaneously with its expulsion and castigation in Bakhtin’s essay “Epic and Novel.” (This contradiction mirrors his conflicting understanding of collective versus individual identity during the 1930s: in Rabelais, the emphasis is on the collective; in the essay on the bildungsroman, the accent is unmistakably on the powers of the individual.) Yet before I move to a closer analysis of Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World from the perspective of this desired synthesis of epic and novel,

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let me first briefly revisit Bakhtin’s own criteria of what constitutes an epic, formulated in his 1930s essays on the novel. Four features of the epic, despite some inevitable overlaps ensuing from Bakhtin’s rhetoric of repetitiveness and modulation, can be garnered with certainty from the “Epic and Novel” essay:33 1. The subject of the epic is the heroic national past; epic time (the national past) is severed from anything after it, particularly from the time in which the “singer and his listeners” are active.34 Thus, the past cannot be approached with criticism or doubt. The epic hero is an epitome of elevation and distance, and an object of veneration. 2. The source of the epic is the “national tradition” rather than the personal experience of the self. The epic relies on an exclusively “impersonal and sacrosanct tradition.” 3. The epic subsists on a type of memory that is markedly different from the de-heroizing personal memory of genres such as the autobiography or the memoir, or from novelistic “memory,” which would normally comprise the duration of a single human life: “there are no fathers or generations” (24) in novelistic memory, or if there are, they are rivals rather than harmonious kin tied together by a totemic veneration of their predecessors. 4. The fact that the epic is based on past events that are well known to the audience means that it is impossible for the listener/reader to become genuinely interested in the plot of the epic. The epic’s audience values repetition and familiarity over surprise and novelty. How does Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World relate to these criteria? I argue that his interpretation of carnival in Rabelais acts in a twofold manner: while strengthening the presumed (and at times even overtly voiced) correspondence between carnival and the novel as promoters of (personal) freedom, born in the experience of cultural interaction, it also erodes the features of the novelistic and restores the epic as an essential cultural form that regulates and nurtures the life of the people (narod) on communitarian principles. The idea of carnival in Bakhtin’s Rabelais reshapes the relations of epic and novel from mutual animosity and exclusion into serene complementarity. To support this claim, I shall reexamine Bakhtin’s criteria of the epic in their confrontation with the idea of carnival in a four-step analysis. But let me first briefly dwell on the points of convergence between carnival and the genre of the novel. Like the novel, carnival is expanded in Bakhtin’s Rabelais to shed its identity as a particular cultural form and become an epitome of a wider range of prac-

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tices, of communitarian culture as such. It is declared to be the point at which all impulses of popular energy flow together, much like the novel which accommodates the roaming power of the word: “This process of bringing together under the rubric of ‘carnival’ heterogeneous local phenomena and of unifying them in a single concept corresponded to a process taking place in life itself; the various forms of folk celebration, as they were dying or degenerating, transmitted some of their traits to carnival: rituals, paraphernalia, images, masques. . . . carnival became the reservoir into which the forms of folk celebration, which had ceased to exist on their own, emptied” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 218).35 Moreover, carnival is endowed with the same colonizing power as the novel. Not unlike the novel, which tends to novelize all other genres (precisely because it is thought of as something more than genre), carnival does not get on well with other forms of popular culture: “when carnival flourished . . . and became the centre of all popular forms of amusement, it weakened all the other feasts to some extent by depriving them of almost every free and utopian folk element. All other feasts fade when placed alongside carnival” (220). One may thus conclude that the novel and carnival function in the same way in Bakhtin’s theoretical discourse. They absorb previous historical experience and sublate genres and cultural forms that cannot obtain, or are doomed to lose, independence. Not only do both the novel and carnival retain the features of past forms on a higher level; they also assume the power of colonizing previous cultural forms (genres) by stamping on them their own—much more flexible—identity. Having drawn attention to this fundamental point of convergence between carnival and the novel, we can now proceed to examine the aspects of their divergence in Bakhtin’s Rabelais. To do so, we need to revisit Bakhtin’s criteria of “epicness” in their relation to the concept of carnival articulated in the book on Rabelais. The first criterion of epicness, as we have seen, addresses the status of the hero as an epitome of distance and an object of veneration. In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin asserts that both Homer and Rabelais build their worlds upon “the immanent unity of folkloric time,” which, moreover, is “not yet defined against the backdrop of another and fallen time.”36 Extending the idea of a common ground embodied in the folkloric chronotope of Homer and Rabelais, Bakhtin labels Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel as “fundamentally folkloric kings and giants—bogatyri.” He clearly regards them as a sublimated version of the great heroes of the Homeric epic, about which Hegel says in his lectures on aesthetics that they were selected as heroes

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“not because of any sense of superiority, but because of their absolute freedom of will and the creativity they demonstrate in establishing their kingdoms” (241; emphasis added). Bakhtin therefore abandons the principle of superiority and the ensuing necessity for the hero to be venerated by the listener/reader; instead, he asserts “the great man” in Rabelais to be “profoundly democratic,” “an ordinary man raised to a higher power.” Rabelais, in other words, supplies an everyday copy of the epic hero. The novelistic (the idea of the “profoundly democratic” nature of the hero, of his heroism being clad in everyday dress) and the epic (the retention of the idea of a “higher power” that confirms the hero in his status of exceptionality) seem thus to be joining forces to produce an image of the Rabelaisian characters as neither exclusively novelistic nor exclusively epic: they are both at the same time and at all times, the desired synthesis of two principles (the novelistic and the epic), which Bakhtin himself sees as mutually opposed beyond reconciliation in “Epic and Novel.” The second criterion brings to the fore the fact that the epic depends on a “national tradition” that is always “impersonal and sacrosanct.” But, in an important sense, so does carnival, where the forms of experience are utterly impersonal, although simultaneously far from sacrosanct. Bakhtin’s vision of carnival in Rabelais, then, spells out the contours of this very same unity of epic and novel, which remains unfeasible in his essays on the novel. The substratum of this new form, which synthesizes the impersonal (as in epic lore) and the irreverent (as in the novel), is found by Bakhtin in the “collective body,” be it that of the community (people, narod) or of mankind. In his early treatise “Author and Hero,” Bakhtin had analyzed the individual human body, the body of a certain “I”; there, he had sought to outline the boundaries of this individual body. But in the 1930s Bakhtin adopted a different idea of the human body. He arrived at it not without the impact of contemporary physiology and biology, notably Ukhtomskii’s lectures37 and the work of Ivan Kanaev.38 In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin is already busy analyzing the collective body, whose identity is shaped not by drawing a boundary between the self and the other, but in an experience of transgressive togetherness. This collective body denies value to the individual appropriation of the world. Its overwhelming collectivity rests on its “nonclassical” constitution; it is grotesque in the sense of not knowing beginning or end, exterior and interior, depths and shallows. All this makes the grotesque body insusceptible to the grand, the historically intransient, and the monotonously “serious.” Its aversion to piety and the acts of collective veneration reproduced in the bosom of the “sacrosanct” communitarian

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tradition is paradoxically wedded to an organic distrust of individual forms of experiencing the world. Rabelais and His World arguably projects Bakhtin as a thinker of a typically post-Romantic cast, who hovers between subdued communitarian nostalgia and the recognition of the impossibility of restoring community life—just as Freyer realizes that the world of Gemeinschaft, a world without hierarchy and coercion, a world where language still enjoys a holistic being, is forever gone and should not be bewailed. Thus, in Bakhtin’s Rabelais, the question of individual freedom and of communitarian tradition appears to occupy central stage. Bakhtin’s answer, as I shall argue at more length later on, remains ambivalent. The third characteristic of the epic, not unlike the one discussed above, emphasizes the close connection between the epic and “collective memory.” This “collective memory” is capable of working across generations; it is not confined to a single human life and, unlike the “personal” memory of the novel, captures in its folds the unadulteratedly heroic aspects of the characters’ careers. One would expect Rabelais’s book to be treated by Bakhtin as a model for the “de-heroizing” memory of the novel that opposes the collective culture of remembrance. However, we are confronted in Bakhtin’s interpretation with what he terms the memory of the “body of the human species,” the proto-image of which ought to be sought in Bergson’s Matter and Memory. The body of humankind, a Hegelian extension of the communal body of the people, is shown by Bakhtin to grow in strength by suppressing and expelling through laughter its “obscure memory of cosmic perturbations in the distant past” (Rabelais, 335). The capacity of boundless memory is a distinctive attribute of the “body of the species”; this memory processes the menacing events of the deepest past into a joyful celebration of resilience and longevity, without any reference whatsoever to individual existence. Bakhtin’s notion of the body in Rabelais is poised between the process of materialization (objectification) in self-sufficient acts of abundantly physical character and the condition of an abstract identity revelatory of powers of a higher order: limitless memory and “courage” in the face of nature and death, epic immortality, and endless regeneration. The concept of the body proves, then, to be endowed with two different meanings by Bakhtin: the first one represents its verifiable physicality; the other points toward a state of collectivity where the bodily eventually comes to represent the spiritual in the guise of an all-encompassing memory and inextinguishable valor. Once again, Bakhtin seeks to transcend the tension between communal and individual bodily existence, this time by sublating

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these two conditions in the abstractness of an all-human mode of being (“the body of the human species”). Finally, the fourth criterion of epicness discards the possibility that the epic plot may arouse interest on its own. Based on repetition and formulaic accounts of the past, the epic remains in the grip of the familiar and the predictable. It lacks the open vistas of the novelistic where, Bakhtin maintains (following Friedrich Schlegel and Lukács), everything is in the process of becoming. Once again, Rabelais’s novel can be argued to generate a picture of carnival that, on Bakhtin’s reading, presents a rehabilitated version of the epic—in a perhaps not immediately recognizable but nevertheless legible form—and thus preserves some of the features of the latter, including the preference for a plot that seeks support in the repetitive and the familiar. The actions performed in the carnival procession are not those of an individual will or destiny, but rather those of a ritualized collective experience; that is to say, our interest in the practices of carnival as described by Bakhtin is not an interest in a novelistic plot or novelness (what one may have expected from a novel), but rather an interest in what appears to be reconciling flamboyant statements of extraordinariness with a prevalent framework of ritual repetitiveness. The excesses of carnival make it unapproachable from a spectatorial stance, because, like the other festive practices analyzed by Bakhtin, carnival is said to obliterate the boundary between viewer and participant. Referring to the wedding feast as a carnivalesque event, Bakhtin asserts that “during that period there are no footlights, no separation of participants and spectators. Everybody participates” (Rabelais, 265).39 Hence it proves impossible to generate and sustain an interest in the “plot” and the narrative novelty of carnival, for this would have amounted to the adoption of a point of view that invites appreciation based on the position of exteriority championed in Bakhtin’s early “Author and Hero” essay, but vigorously denied in Rabelais. Bakhtin’s transformation of novelistic attitudes into epic reactions to the world in Rabelais, with its fading opposition between the two, manifests itself in his theorization of laughter, a particular function of the human body that is also a vital aspect of culture. Bakhtin inherited two European traditions of theorizing laughter: the neo-Kantian and that of vitalism and philosophy-oflife. The views of Bergson were of special importance to him.40 For Bergson, laughter is the “corrective” of automatism and mechanization; it helps society to get rid of rigidity “in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability.”41 Moreover, implicitly evoking Hobbes’s

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understanding of laughter as a means of gaining an advantage over one’s opponent (rival) in a polemic, Bergson arrives at a conclusion that is not far from Hobbes’s: the laugher’s function is to “intimidate by humiliating” (188). Bakhtin is indebted to Bergson for the notion of laughter as a “social gesture” (73) that ultimately originates in group attitudes and reactions. However spontaneous laughter might appear to be, Bergson stresses that it “always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary” (64). Bakhtin’s notion of laughter radicalizes this idea: for him, laughter originates in the opposition of groups representing popular culture in its clash with official ideology; but laughter soon sheds this identity and becomes communitarian and collective, to the point of transcending all group divisions. In Rabelais, laughter tends to be thought of more as an emblem of the united body of the people and a cohesive bond between the various layers of society than as a dividing practice. From a group phenomenon called on to rectify the faults of other groups, laughter is transformed into a collective power that emanates from the whole of the people’s body and spreads throughout the universe. Instead of being drawn upon as a mechanism of constructing group/class differences, which would constitute the pith of a novelistic narrative, laughter in Rabelais is redefined as an epic device that eradicates individual or group dissimilarities, and becomes once again emblematic of a long forgotten social cohesion. Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin, effacing the difference between epic and novel, reproaches Victor Hugo for “never understanding the epic quality [epichnost'] of Rabelaisian laughter” (Rabelais, 128). It has become clear by now that in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, carnival is interpreted as a blend between the large-scale and “naïve” qualities of the epic, on the one hand, and the elusive, fluctuating, self-ironic, and contradictory nature of the novelistic, on the other. During the 1930s, the epic does not disappear from Bakhtin’s thought: it is sublimated in carnival, where it is mixed with and fertilized by the force vitale of the novelistic. Like the epic, carnival is about the maintaining of traditional practices, but in an open and charitably “insecure” way. Thus, Rabelais and His World seems to be the point where, after reconciling and synthesizing culture and life in the acts of the human body, after reworking and redrawing the boundaries of cultural taboo, and after defending a symbiosis between the epic and the novelistic, Bakhtin offers his way of squaring the circle of fragmentation and wholeness—and thus also his own version of the classic. It was only with his dissertation on Rabelais that he

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found the necessary set of generic features that—as in T. S. Eliot’s account of the classic—would allow him to reorder the entire preceding series, not just of literature but of culture as a whole, and to sponsor a new sense of tradition based on the supple and irreverent attainments of folk (community) culture. It was not by chance that it was after (and, in a sense, owing to) his work on Rabelais that Bakhtin was able to inscribe Dostoevsky—whom he had still regarded as a solitary genius back in 1929—within a deeper, if somewhat peculiar, global tradition of carnivalesque literature, thus finally reimagining him as a world classic rather than an idiosyncratic Russian master. Finally, I should like to reopen the vexed question of the political implications of Bakhtin’s pronouncements on the epic and the novelistic, on communitarian and individual culture, and on their desired synthesis. For decades now, scholars in Russia and the West have been embroiled in severe polemics about Bakhtin’s work in the 1930s—was he a Stalinist or an anti-Stalinist, for or surreptitiously against the Soviet regime? I am afraid there is no simple answer to this question. Bakhtin was no wiser than his time, no matter how much we would like the opposite to be true; his interest in Rabelais, for example, could be shown to have been the result of a changing perspective on the classic in Soviet society, resulting from a swift ideological transition to the platform of the Popular Front after 1935 and involving greater attention to Western classics of, at least apparently, more populist flavor. In this context, Bakhtin’s work sends an ambiguous message, simultaneously of utopia and nostalgia. The literary canon he constructed was certainly double-faced. Bakhtin embraced and wholeheartedly asserted the genre of the novel as a vehicle of modernity that recognizes no sacrosanct dogma or tradition and sees current Soviet reality as but a link in a chain of historical developments that cannot be arrested or exhausted, not even by the revolution. On the other hand, his veneration of the epic in Rabelais and His World was a manifest acceptance, indeed a nostalgic approval, of practices characteristic of community life that were now called upon to instill a sense of tradition and to mitigate the effects of the brutal modernization raging in the USSR in the 1930s (most dramatically exemplified by the enforced collectivization of agriculture, whose tragic outcomes—mass starvation and famine—Bakhtin no doubt witnessed during his exile in Kostanay in northern Kazakhstan). But Bakhtin’s embrace of the power of communitarian culture was also dangerously consonant with the Soviet line of enforced social homogenization. The notion of the classic elaborated in Rabelais and His World appears, then, to have been very much part and parcel of the emerging official

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endorsement of the great “epic novel,” a hybrid genre that Soviet aesthetics sought to revive and promote—notably as an extension of the safely classical legacy of Lev Tolstoy—to a significant ingredient of its new literary canon in the 1930s. The gradual rapprochement between the novel and the epic, indeed the inevitable sublation of the novel in a renewed epic, was the central argument of Lukács and Mikhail Lifshits—the two most vocal opponents of vulgar sociologism in the 1930s—at the important Moscow discussion about the novel at the end of 1934 and the beginning of 1935, which Bakhtin, as I mentioned before, followed with considerable interest.42 Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World may someday be read with Sholokhov’s epic novels And Quiet Flows the Don (1928–40) and Virgin Soil Upturned (1932–60), two of the indisputable classics of the Soviet era, in mind, revealing the roots of Bakhtin’s theory of culture in the contemporary politics and aesthetics of canon-building in the Soviet Union. The rapprochement of epic and novelistic, the case for which we find tacitly yet vigorously argued in Rabelais and His World, should not, of course, be explained just with reference to Soviet culture; in the wider European context, James Joyce’s Ulysses—which was heatedly discussed in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and drew sympathetic pronouncements by Bakhtin—was a particularly significant embodiment of this trend,43 as was Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. It thus becomes increasingly clear that it would be impossible to study Bakhtin’s writings of the 1930s—his most seminal period as a thinker—without taking into account the larger framework of consequential battles over the meaning (and the whole process of production) of tradition and the classic in Soviet culture, by and toward which his work as a theorist of culture was implicitly or explicitly directed. Bakhtin’s own positioning within the concomitant Soviet conversations on the canon facilitated a new way of thinking about the relevance of literature. This new thinking was impossible without his powerful celebration of ambiguity; it was equally unfeasible without his embrace of cultural memory as the true place in which literature’s significance takes shape.

Bakhtin and Postmodernism Bakhtin’s theoretical writings were subjected to a range of uses, whose compatibility with the historical texture and tenor of his ideas remains uncertain; while some have claimed him for the postmodernist and post-Structuralist

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canon, others have dwelled on his work’s intrinsic resistance to such incorporation. Bakhtin’s flight away from aesthetics—but also away from literary theory in the way the Formalists understood it—meant that his theory of the novel could never simply fit into inherited modes of reflection upon literature and its relevance; equally, it could not be safely boxed into later intellectual currents (including postmodernism and post-Structuralism). What concerns me here, therefore, is to understand how Bakhtin eschewed existing notions of the relevance of literature and succeeded in constructing his own version of its significance. The serious appropriation of Bakhtin’s work in the West commenced in the 1960s precisely with interpretations feeding into the early phase of post-Structuralism. From the very beginning, Bakhtin was enlisted as a thinker whose ideas could contribute to the postmodern and postStructuralist concerns with meaning, subjectivity, and the canon. Thus in many ways the study of Bakhtin in the West was initiated as a study of the potential compatibility of his work with the rising agenda of postmodernism and post-Structuralism. It was only later, in the latter half of the 1980s, that a historical approach to Bakhtin began to emerge, which questioned his status as predecessor of a number of modern trends in literary and cultural theory and frustrated the hope that his work could be seamlessly accommodated under the overarching concepts of post-Structuralist discourse. In what follows I want to chart brief ly the principal lines of engagement with Bakhtin’s thought in the contexts of post-Structuralism and deconstruction. In the first two subsections attention is drawn to two thinkers, whose texts were formative in the debate over how to “use” Bakhtin. Julia Kristeva and Paul de Man are taken here as the representatives of an affirmative-transformative and a skeptical approach respectively. In the remaining part, a number of key areas of the postmodernist and post-Structuralist appropriation of Bakhtin are explored. The conclusion returns to the issue of historical meaning versus contemporary significance in Bakhtin’s work. Kristeva and Bakhtin

Julia Kristeva is undoubtedly not only the person responsible for reclaiming Bakhtin for the Western intellectual scene, but also the author of the most serious early texts renegotiating the foundations of Bakhtin’s theory and their potential capacity to stimulate post-Structuralist thought. Kristeva’s first text

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on Bakhtin, “Le mot, le dialogue et le roman” (Word, Dialogue, and Novel), written in 1966 and first published the following year in Critique, reshapes his notion of dialogicity into the less personalistic concept of intertextuality. Intertextuality is designed to replace the amorphous, and apparently too humanistic, idea of polyphony, which still retains the horizon of intersubjectivity. The literary text now emerges as a mosaic of quotations that reflect the interaction of depersonalized texts and languages rather than of subjects. Kristeva regards the Socratic dialogue, which Bakhtin takes to be an important prototype of the novel, as an anonymous construct that testifies to the negation of personality in the act of dialogue. Not surprisingly, her interest is also drawn by carnival, which she considers a phenomenon that cannot be interpreted with the categories of substance, causality, and identity in mind. Carnival is anti-teleological; instead of being driven by an ultimate goal and seeking to flesh out an inherent essence, it liquidates the subject and reveals the unconscious elemental forces of sex and death. Thus Bakhtin is read by Kristeva as a thinker who, by introducing the principles of dialogism and Menippean ambivalence, embodies the process of abandoning the categories of “identity, substance, causality, and definition” in favor of “analogy, relation, opposition.”44 Kristeva’s later analysis of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in her essay “The Ruin of a Poetics” (1970; English translation, 1973) traces possible parallels (and differences) between Bakhtin and Freud, thus emphasizing depersonalization in Bakhtin’s theory of the novel even further. Polyphony, Kristeva argues here, is not the result of a harmonious blend of different voices, but rather the consequence of the language user becoming “his own otherness,” and thereby “multiple and elusive, polyphonic.”45 Polyphony, thus divested of its connotations of intersubjectivity, is understood as an open and undecided intertextual space, in which “the ‘character’ is nothing more than a discursive point of view of the ‘I’ who writes through another ‘I.’”46 That Kristeva read Bakhtin in a way strengthening her own case for the importance of psychoanalysis in the rise of (post-)Structuralist thought can be gathered from her retrospective comments on the two texts discussed above. In an interview granted in 1995 to the Vitebsk-Moscow journal of Bakhtin studies, Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, which ceased publication in 2018, she stated that the distance between Bakhtin and psychoanalysis is, after all, too considerable to be bridged by any impartial interpretation. “From the very beginning,” Kristeva writes, “I introduced a deliberate ‘working’ distortion to

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my perception of Bakhtin. It seems to me that Bakhtin’s ‘Other’ is after all the ‘Other’ of Hegelian consciousness, and certainly not the bifurcated ‘Other’ of psychoanalysis. I, for one, wanted to perceive it not as an ‘intersubjective Other’, but rather as a dimension disclosing another reality within the reality of consciousness. In other words, the ‘Hegelian’ Bakhtin was as if twisted by me and turned into a ‘Freudian’ Bakhtin.”47 Paul de Man and Bakhtin

On reading Kristeva’s interpretations of Bakhtin’s work, one may argue that her texts (often working through seminal violation of Bakhtin’s own framework) foreshadowed a whole range of postmodern theoretical anxieties that were to be spelled out in the 1970s and 1980s. But Kristeva remained largely uninterested in weighing those aspects of Bakhtin’s oeuvre that could be demonstrated to work against aligning him with exponents of postmodern and post-Structuralist thought. Writing more than ten years after her second article on Bakhtin, Paul de Man, in a text originally published in 1983 in Poetics Today, took a close look at Bakhtin’s theory of genre, only to establish that his notion of language and discourse can be “monologically aberrant,” thus undermining his “dialogical ideology.” Unlike Kristeva, de Man was also skeptical about the potential of Bakhtin’s hermeneutic approach—which de Man somewhat incongruously applies with reference to the individual—to truly appreciate otherness. De Man’s reading of Bakhtin is edifyingly critical at the price of detaching itself from the premises of Bakhtin’s own thinking.48 De Man’s questioning of Bakhtin starts with a critique of Bakhtin’s rigid opposition between the tropological polysemy of poetry and the dialogism of prose (an opposition that, variously framed and labeled, has often been attacked, particularly by those who—not with de Man’s meta-arguments—believe Bakhtin’s dialogism to be fully applicable to poetry as well). Bakhtin thinks the trope as “intentional structure directed toward an object,” de Man argues (“Dialogue and Dialogism,” 112);49 thus, tropes are endowed with the status of pure episteme rather than a fact of language. The intentionality and the divorce of tropes from language exclude them from both poetic and prosaic discourse and locate them in the field of epistemology. Unlike tropes, which are in the grip of an object-directed discourse, dialogism in de Man’s interpretation of Bakhtin is seen as social-oriented. Drawing predominantly on Bakhtin’s study of Dostoevsky, he concedes that

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“Bakhtin at times conveys the impression that one can accede from dialogism as a metalinguistic (i.e., formal) structure to dialogism as a recognition of exotopy” in a social and cultural sense (109). Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky book, in this respect, appears to de Man more seminal than “Discourse in the Novel,” whose societal models may well imply class structures and class relations. Thus, dialogism in the Dostoevsky book may be taken to suggest that the binary opposition between fiction and fact fades away and no longer applies. Whether this transition from the textual embodiment of dialogism to the recognition of the other in a situation of real dialogue does indeed take place in Bakhtin is a question de Man leaves open, although his tone betrays skepticism. What matters is that regardless of whether genuine dialogue is attained, Bakhtin nevertheless presents dialogism as a social-oriented discourse. But if this is true, the opposition between trope and dialogism (poetry and novel) should be taken to stand for the deeper opposition between object and society, which, de Man warns, is redolent of reifying theoretical practices (112). Even more disturbingly, de Man believes—in a move informed by a somewhat one-sided interpretation of hermeneutics—that on certain occasions in Bakhtin’s texts, dialogism is reduced to a hermeneutic system of question and answer, in which “understanding” the primary meaning cancels all attempts at a genuine acceptance of otherness. The allegedly normative discourse of hermeneutic appropriation of meaning is bound to frustrate the discourse of difference grounded in otherness. 50 Thus Bakhtin’s project is ambivalent and unable to subscribe fully to the deconstructive strategies of transcending binary oppositions and resisting a reductionist approach to alterity. Meaning and Canonicity

With Kristeva and de Man, we can foreground two different approaches to Bakhtin: claiming him unreservedly for a postmodern and post-Structuralist theoretical agenda through “modifying” his thought to fit in with the patterns of indetermination, alterity, semantic suspension, and decentering of the self (Kristeva); and subjecting his postulates to a patient scrutiny revealing his, in de Man’s view, strongly limited compatibility with the philosophical tenets underlying postmodernism and deconstruction. Bakhtin’s historical distance from postmodernism comes to the fore in an unmistakable fashion when the question of the meaning of cultural forms is posed, which, as we have seen,

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was his major preoccupation in his mature writings. Janus-faced, Bakhtin’s theory of culture gestures both toward admiration for popular (communitarian) culture—protean, in flux, often nonhierarchical—and the various forms of “life ideology” (zhiznennaia ideologiia), and the approbation of a presumed canon of great art (important, as we saw early on in this chapter, as depersonalized canon rather than the attainment of individual writers). He retains his fidelity to those works of literature that stand the test of “great time” and participate in the “great experience” of humankind. Bakhtin’s dualism of “great” and “small” time, of “great” and “small” experience, so clearly and passionately stated in his texts of the 1960s and 1970s, has its roots in the blend of three philosophical traditions. First, there is the neo-Kantian split between fact and value, along with an appreciation of the potential openendedness of being arising from the tension between that which is available, and that which is posited; this potential open-endedness is championed in the articles of Bakhtin’s close friend Matvei Kagan (one of the GAKhN associates working with Shpet and his colleagues on aesthetics and philosophy of art).51 Second, there is the Hegelian idea of totality, of culture as a depersonalized, world-historical unity, which provides the ground for each meaning to touch on (and be touched by) other meanings, thus entering into a potentially unlimited dialogue with them. Third, there is the serious domestic tradition of Russian eschatologism, which supports the hope that every meaning can enjoy a resurrection and that every word is hospitably awaited by “great time” at the Second Coming, where a new and “great experience” will do justice to that which has been forgotten while “small time” lasted. This powerful utopia is one of the main sources of the ongoing magic and attraction of Bakhtin’s texts. On the surface, it suggests that everything can be salvaged in “great time”; in reality, however, Bakhtin never considers works other than those already belonging to a presumed canon of great literature (e.g., Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais). Yet the mechanisms of this radically depersonalized and desubjectivized utopian salvation—with even canonized writers (Dostoevsky and Rabelais being strong cases in point) recognized solely for their roles as enunciators of the impersonal memory of genre—cast Bakhtin in a different light: not as an inveterate promoter of “great literature” in its conservative stability, but as a thinker who tries to comprehend how tradition produces its own authors—rather than being produced by them. In a sense, Bakhtin anticipates the later withdrawal of the rights of the author by Roland Barthes. In order to be admitted to the bosom of “great time,” meaning has to be unsta-

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ble and—to a considerable degree—depersonalized, Bakhtin clearly insists. Salvation cannot be hoped for before meaning sheds its stable identity and its status of being borne by an author who exercises control over it. The author’s withdrawal, beginning with Russian Formalism and confirmed—from a different perspective—in Bakhtin’s philosophy of culture, is an idea central to Bakhtin’s ability to survive the challenges of post-Structuralism and even prove—for Kristeva, among many others—compatible with it. Yet entering the dialogue of “great time” is an act preceded not just by the relinquishing of authorial claims, but also, crucially, by the handing over of meaning—in all its changeability—into the care of Time. It is in this potentially never-ending dialogue that a first or last meaning can no longer exist; what emerges along this chain is an unceasing rejuvenation through change, a salvation through inclusion into new contexts. Bakhtin, then, allows his fans to eat their cake without having to mourn its disappearance: the shaken stability of meaning and the humble withdrawal of the author are in fact only means of purchasing admission to the “homecoming festival” that cultural artefacts may celebrate in “great time.” Laughter, Body, and Participation

Carnival and participatory culture have traditionally been an important focus of postmodernist appropriations of Bakhtin; on the other hand, these appropriations have faced the challenge of substantiated attempts to reassess Bakhtin’s ideas of popular culture and carnival from the perspective of leftist cultural criticism or through attentive historical comparison.52 It has been brilliantly argued by David Carroll, in an article drawing potential parallels between Bakhtin and Lyotard, that in Bakhtin’s Rabelais, laughter is an “affirmation of unresolved and unresolvable contradictions,” an opening up to “difference, heterogeneity, and alterity” (Carroll, “Narrative, Heterogeneity,” 88).53 Laughter indicates sociability, community, and a “nondetermined relation to others” (87). Thus carnival, resting as it does on the support of laughter and the nonclassical body, is the “fluctuating form of freedom itself, the acting out or performance of nonrestraint, flexibility, multiplicity, otherness” (90). To the (Marxist) objection that carnival is no more than a safety valve provided by the ruling class in order for energies jeopardizing the status quo to be diverted away from a more significant (political) action, Carroll responds by asserting the nature of carnival as an alternative form of social reality that is unrealizable except in play. Participatory performance,

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play, and cultural alterity emerge as inextricably interwoven in an exemplary postmodernist reading of Rabelais. Yet this would remain a one-sided reading of Bakhtin, and Carroll himself foregrounds the perils of such an interpretation. The danger stems from the fact that Bakhtin’s vision of carnival affirms a notion of alterity materialized in a collectivist action that, in its corporeal intensity, appears to be expressive of a pre- or postlinguistic notion of otherness. In addition, in Bakhtin’s optimistic version of carnival, negativity and death are negated and established as no more than sublatable moments in the immortality of the people; but the refusal to recognize pain, negativity, and death as irreducible elements of the human condition amounts to refusing to fully recognize alterity, in whose engendering they are bound to partake. On Bakhtin’s interpretation, the laughter of the people dispels fears vis-à-vis death and cosmic upheavals; the material foundation of this affirmative attitude is located in the “body of the species,” a Hegelian construct that is placed above the death-and-life dilemma. Immortal and thus impregnable to the forces of historic change, all this body knows are the powerful swings of sublation between stirb und werde that underwrite Bakhtin’s grand narrative of unfailing rejuvenation.54 Thus, as we have seen, the participatory nature of carnival in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World cannot be unequivocally regarded as an indication of a culture built upon contingency and rejection of grand narratives. Admittedly, there is also an ideologically disturbing layer in Bakhtin’s celebration of collective bodily endurance. It may not be amounting to negativity in the post-Structuralist sense of the word, but it does give rise to his quaint, cold, decentered humanism, in which humankind outweighs and outlives individual human beings. In Rabelais and His World, the liberal regime of dialogue with, and appreciation of, another human being is ousted by illiberal fascination with the powers of collectivity. Over the past few decades, appropriators and interpreters of Bakhtin have been more willing to inscribe him in current debates than to contextualize his thought in its historical ambience. Although seminal and stimulating, attempts to claim Bakhtin for a postmodernist and post-Structuralist theoretical agenda have evolved on the far side of analyzing his work on its own historically posited terms. While firmly integrated in the repertoire of postmodernist and postStructuralist thought, Bakhtin’s notions of alterity, of participatory culture, and of negotiated (weakened) authorial control over meaning emerge from an intellectual context that renders them hardly compatible with the critique of grand narratives. Bakhtin’s multiple appropriations from postmodernist

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and post-Structuralist perspectives are testimony to the agility with which his work moves between different regimes of relevance toward its own terrain: that of philosophy of culture. It thus carves out a different regime of relevance, in which literature is neither autonomous from, nor attached to, society and politics, neither like all other arts nor unlike them, but is instead positioned at the crossroads of multiple modalities of expression and ambivalent discursive energies—word, laughter, bodily involvement, engaged in praise and parody— and is, as a result of this, validated “across deep time” (to borrow Wai Chee Dimock’s phrase)55 as the product of the longue durée memory of genres and discourses. Literature for Bakhtin is a laboratory of becoming, in which larger discursive principles (monologue and dialogue; heteroglot and homoglot; centrifugal and centripetal) are shown at work as its true shaping forces. Language is just as important in Bakhtin’s understanding of literature and genre—not because its use can be demonstrated to differ from the uses of ordinary language (in a way the Russian Formalists would deem constitutive of literature), but precisely because language in literature (especially the novel) intensifies the status of ordinary language as always already stratified, always already deployed in a naturally available (but not naturally produced) heteroglot mode that defies normative homogenization. Bakhtin thus succeeds in establishing a new zone of consideration for literature, in which the antagonistic view of its autonomy and specificity versus its dependence on the forces of society and politics is gradually mitigated and dissolved through reconceiving literature as an intermodal strand in the cultural memory of an ever-resilient, holistically imagined humanity.

4 THE BOUNDARIES OF MODERNITY Sem antic Paleon t ology an d It s S ub t e r r a ne a n I m p a c t

Some of the features of Bakhtin’s methodology and style of theorizing discussed in the previous chapter—especially his predilection for a history of literature and culture “without names,” his preoccupation with genre and memory of genre, as well as his reevaluation of the significance of folklore and communitarian culture and their place on the discursive map of modernity—were shared by other methodological formations in the 1930s, most notably by the adherents of “semantic paleontology.” Itself a relatively small group of academics, brought together by admiration for Nikolai Marr’s “new doctrine of language” and his methodology of cultural analysis, this formation in turn had a considerable impact, as we shall see in the last section of this chapter, on Bakhtin and some of his contemporaries. When it comes to the specific ways in which they understood the relevance of literature, the practitioners of semantic paleontology worked within a framework that, in retrospect, must be recognized as akin to Bakhtin’s wider philosophy of culture; they also positioned themselves proactively vis-à-vis Russian Formalism, seeking to radicalize some of its impulses, while rejecting others. The presence of semantic paleontology in literary studies and its importance for the methodological debates of the 1930s have never before been examined systematically. I thus begin by outlining the foundations of semantic paleontology and its interventions in the study of literature during the 1930s; as a next step, the analysis focuses on the principal meth-

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odological distinctions that semantic paleontology sought to draw in order to assert its own identity vis-à-vis other trends. Attention then turns to the central question: what was the place of semantic paleontology in the 1930s polemics on how and where one should draw the boundaries of modernity, and how did this shape the way its practitioners assigned significance to literature? In the final sections I weigh the impact of semantic paleontology on cultural and literary theory. As will become evident, this impact did not follow the channels of official recognition, yet it persisted into the early 1980s, at times paradoxically reinforced by the critique that semantic paleontology triggered.

Foundations and Early Work: The Manifesto Volume on Tristan and Isolde After decades of neglect, semantic paleontology is now finally enjoying a moment of renewed interest in the West, which goes hand in hand with fresh explorations in the field of historical poetics.1 The exponents of semantic paleontology came of age as scholars and thinkers in the course of the 1920s and produced their most significant work in the 1930s; by that time Nikolai Marr had reached the apogee of his public influence (in 1930, he was accorded the honor of addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and soon afterward joined the Party as its only member among the academicians elected to the Academy of Sciences before 1917).2 Unlike “bourgeois,” purely “formal” linguistics (the vast body of primarily historical and comparative research that Marr brushed aside as sterile “IndoEuropeanistics”), the “new doctrine of language,” as Marr’s own teaching came to be termed, prioritized the exploration of the origins of language (“glottogenesis”) and its socioeconomically conditioned evolution, mirrored in the transformations of core semantic elements at various historical stages. The new theory proclaimed that the study of language should be conducted not “abstractly,” but in close connection with the study of material culture. Archeology and ethnography became indispensable allies of linguistics, furnishing evidence of the social and economic functions of language and the changes it underwent as societies moved through successive stages of evolution based on different modes of production. In the lucid summarizing words of a contemporary folklorist (and a somewhat skeptical commentator), Marr’s method was grounded in (a) paleontology; (b) stadialism (stadial'nost', i.e., belief in stage-like transforma-

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tion); and (c) semantics, “stage-like transformation being the principle of his theory, paleontology—its tool, semantics—its material.”3 “Semantic paleontology” was an expression authorized by Marr himself; he used it in his 1931 article “On Semantic Paleontology in the Languages of the Non-Japhetic Systems,” a text that reads as a compendium of his views on language. In a nutshell, semantic paleontology was considered a method that enables scholars to make their way into the depths of glottogenesis; crucial here was the need specifically to study semantics, and precisely in a paleontological fashion, so that meanings that had crystallized at earlier stages (“deposits,” in Marr’s parlance) could be uncovered: “Semantics has allowed us, step by step, through the paleontology of speech, to get to the process of organization of the linguistic material, to penetrate it.”4 Informing this paleontological quest was an assumption of homogeneity. Not only do languages evolve inexorably from multitude and diversity toward unity (eventually flowing into a single world language), but glottogenesis right from the start highlights underlying typological similarities between the languages of communities at the same stage of socioeconomic development. Instead of thinking in terms of language families based on race and ethnicity (in the words of one of Marr’s followers, “from the point of view [of the new doctrine of language], ethnos is the outcome rather than the starting point of historical development”),5 Marr sought to abolish this vital mainstay of “traditional” (Indo-European) linguistics by denying the existence of a proto-language. The unity Marr stipulated sprang not from belonging to a common family of languages (although initially he had used the term “Japhetic” as a designation for one such language group), but rather from being located at the same stage of socioeconomic evolution (“Japhetic” thus gradually became a label for a particularly important foundation stage, which all languages went through). Since for Marr language and thought were inseparable, the commonality between languages was in the final analysis based on the commonality of ideas, attitudes, and sentiments accessible to humanity, and in need of being articulated, at various points of its socioeconomic progression. Semantic paleontology was at pains to furnish proof of this commonality by identifying the building blocks that supposedly constructed the semantic universe of humanity. These building blocks, regardless of potentially endless transformations and combinations, presented a finite number according to Marr. Initially, he believed there to be twelve such elements, later reducing that number to nine, then seven, and ending up with four (the notorious sal, ber, yon, rosh, replaced on occasion—not without pressure from some of Marr’s

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skeptical associates—by the more sensible sequence A, B, C, D).6 Confronted with the question of how exactly he had arrived at this number, Marr would typically provide metaphysical explanations: the four elements reflected the four corners or directions of the world; or “certain things need no proof; they can be demonstrated.”7 Nor was Marr any wiser when attempting to explain why—if language morphology was indeed conditioned by the socioeconomic stage and mode of production, with the expectation that all languages used by communities occupying that particular stage would display the same type of morphology—“the feudal [era] of the West spoke an inflective language, that of the East, however, an agglutinative one?”8 Marr himself almost never applied his doctrine to the study of modern literature.9 A rare exception is his speech at the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Maxim Gorky’s literary career in the autumn of 1932 (Gorky’s first short story, “Makar Chudra,” had been published in the newspaper Kavkaz in 1892). Along with a number of platitudes, Marr offered here a stage-like account of the evolution of literary genres, referring to poetry as an earlier mode of writing and insisting on prose being the product of a later stage, when the “technique of thinking in images is supplanted, actually improved when it comes to precision, by the technique of thinking through concepts.”10 Earlier attempts to advance the “new doctrine” in the area of literary studies had been associated above all with classics and folklore and were initiated in the mid1920s, with Boris Bogaevskii, a historian of the ancient world, organizing a circle at his home with the participation of several orientalists and historians, united by the ambition to study Homer in the light of Marr’s theory.11 Despite Bogaevskii’s determination to found a “truly historical, i.e., materialist poetics,”12 grounded in Marr’s teaching and applicable to any work of literature, including Goethe’s Faust, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Pushkin’s poems, it was only in 1932 that a collaborative study, edited by Marr and discussing the multiple transformations of the motif of Tristan and Isolde from prehistoric times to feudalism,13 consolidated the new methodology. Significantly, the volume’s title invoked an earlier article by Marr but deliberately reversed the perspective to emphasize the paleontological descent: thus Marr’s “Ishtar’: From the Matriarchal Goddess of Afroeurasia to the Love Heroine of Feudal Europe”14 became Tristan and Isolde: From the Love Heroine of Feudal Europe to the Matriarchal Goddess of Afroeurasia.15 The volume on Tristan and Isolde effectively played the role of a collective manifesto for the scholars who were intent on studying literature by employing

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the method of semantic paleontology. The book attracted participation from twelve scholars and incorporated essays researched and written in 1929–31. It enjoyed a thorough and benevolent review in the West16 and even made its way into Stalin’s personal library.17 Two of these scholars, Ol'ga Freidenberg (1890–1955) and Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii (1880–1937),18 embraced semantic paleontology in a way that sought to assess its philosophical foundations and to inscribe it in the wider landscape of Soviet literary and cultural theory—in the sincere belief that this would bring a breakthrough in Western cultural theory too.

Methodological Distinctions: Against Russian Formalism and Vulgar Sociologism As a method of literary studies, semantic paleontology saw its principal opponent in Russian Formalism. Although at a public discussion on the Formal Method held in Leningrad, having seen the sleight of hand applied against the Formalists by the chair of the meeting, Ol'ga Freidenberg publicly voted in their favor,19 no other school of literary theory is attacked in her and Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii’s writings with such consistency and intensity. This might come as a surprise, given that, by the early 1930s, Russian Formalism had already been practically defunct for a couple of years, and on the wane for much longer. Freidenberg did not simply criticize the Formalists for neglecting content or for their lack of interest in the ideas literature embodies or promotes. In Poetika siuzheta i zhanra (1936; Poetics of Plot and Genre), Freidenberg’s only book published in her lifetime, she launched a thinly veiled assault on Shklovsky for his attempt to devise a “theory of prose” (Freidenberg refers to Shklovsky solely by evoking the title of his eponymous book, without even putting it in quotation marks), and on Tynianov, whose doctrine of “literary evolution” is evoked in Freidenberg’s remark that the Formalists had turned poetics into an application of “Darwin to literature.”20 Elsewhere, Freidenberg polemicizes against Boris Eikhenbaum (without naming him explicitly), questioning the principles behind his 1924 book on Lermontov21 (a polemic against the same book, openly naming Eikhenbaum, can also be found in Frank-Kamenetskii).22 Freidenberg’s chief objection, however, was more radical and far-reaching than these instances would suggest: she was deeply unhappy, not so much with Formalism’s neglect of particular ideas articulated in works of literature, but— more consequentially—with Formalism’s lack of interest in uncovering the laws

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of thinking that had informed the creativity of humankind since its very first steps. Freidenberg believed that Formalism’s attention to form made for a static approach to literature. Unlike the Formalists, the paleontologists, she insists, conceive of literature not as a “ready” and always already given phenomenon, but as the specific product of a multistage transformation, at the heart of which there lies a change in outlook conditioned by the economic base.23 Admittedly, Formalism and semantic paleontology agreed on individual authors and their “inventions” having limited significance in the grand scenarios of literary and cultural evolution. To this extent, just like Marxism, Formalism, and psychoanalysis (not to mention Bakhtin), semantic paleontology partook of the larger paradigm of a literary history “without names” (to evoke Heinrich Wölfflin’s art-historical demand once again) that dominated the Soviet 1920s and 1930s. Yet Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii were arguably the most radical exponents of this trend. Not only was literary history to be “without names”; it also had to be more than historical, because the historical method itself would not do in describing the mechanisms of cultural change. Unlike the Formalists, who assumed literariness to be an ever-present feature, and thus limited the applicability of the historical method solely to studying the processes whereby nonliterary material enters the established literary system (or, conversely, parts of that system exit it or settle on its margins), the semantic paleontologists went much further in insisting that literariness itself should be subjected to fundamental scrutiny that goes far deeper than merely tracing its diachronic undulations. In order to signal their radical departure, the semantic paleontologists proclaimed that the historical approach should be reserved for phenomena within and of the literary system, whereas literariness—the fundamental quality that makes literature what it is—should be studied genetically. In Freidenberg’s words, “to the ready-made, finalized literary phenomenon one had to react by posing the question of the origins of literature itself.”24 The genetic approach, unlike the historical, questioned the very core of literature by enquiring into what was there before literature, and asking how literature came to be. The answers of the semantic paleontologists differed in detail but not in substance. Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii believed that the growth of culture could be traced with reference to three key stages: myth, folklore, and then literature, each corresponding to qualitatively different socioeconomic formations and modes of production. Early on in the protracted prehistory of humanity, in “pre-class” society (Freidenberg cautiously toes the official line that increasingly insisted on Communism being the pinnacle of

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history and the only embodiment of “classless” society, with the formation preceding the slave-holding society being referred to as “pre-class” rather than “classless”), myth was the only ideological superstructure, the only available conveyor of a wider world picture.25 Later on, with the transition to class society, but at a stage that was still marked by a relatively primitive development of the forces of production, folklore emerged as a typical by-product of this transition: it still preserved the cosmological elements of myth, but these were now often transformed into narratives about the (mis)fortune of individuals. Folklore was thus the ideological superstructure of the stage of transition from pre-class to class society, while literature was expressly seen as a (relatively late) “product of class society.”26 In Frank-Kamenetskii’s scheme, this general sequence is retained but somewhat qualified by the introduction of matriarchy, patriarchy, and feudalism as the principal early stages of social evolution. On Frank-Kamenetskii’s reading, matriarchy was the age of myth, patriarchy saw the first noticeable rise in social stratification and, with it, the rise of the mixed form of the epic, which combined the cosmological and the privately human, followed by feudalism, in the course of which the deities of the previous stages were gradually supplanted by “real personae,” giving rise to “quasi-everyday” plots (“quasi,” because under the surface these plots often remained bound to myth and its large-scale vision of the natural cycle).27 Two features differentiated this model from the orthodox and no doubt rather primitive sociological account of the succession of various base-conditioned modes of creativity. To start with, the model advanced by Freidenberg and FrankKamenetskii allowed for some complexity embedded in continuity: myth did not vanish with the arrival of folklore, nor did folklore disappear with the advent of literature. It is this coexistence of superstructural layers drawn from different socioeconomic stages that Freidenberg seeks to emphasize in her definition of folklore: “I mean by folklore the pre-class ‘production of ideas,’ [still] functioning in the system of class Weltanschauung.”28 Literature—“before coming into its own”–had been evolving in close contact with folklore, Freidenberg insisted. According to her account, all through to the nineteenth century literature borrowed its plots either directly from folklore (by processing popular legends, as did Boccaccio, Calderón, and Shakespeare)29 or from other literary works; only following the nineteenth-century revolution in the organization of production and the corresponding revolution of consciousness did writers break with tradition, beginning to draw their plots from the newspapers, from “daily occurrences,” or from their own power of imagination and invention.30

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That Freidenberg focused on the nineteenth century as “the last frontier of the ready-made plot and the beginning of the freely invented one”31 was not entirely surprising. Nineteenth-century Western European literature, particularly the French novel (especially Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola), was accorded paramount attention by Soviet sociological criticism during the 1930s; out of these debates, the Soviet version of “critical realism” was to crystallize during that decade. Yet Freidenberg employed the nineteenth-century simply to mark the chronological endpoint of what she thought had been a considerably longer process. Much more important than the endpoint was the extensive transformation leading up to it. The semantic paleontologists’ true interest and curiosity were claimed by the remote realm of prehistory, antiquity, and feudalism in which, according to them, myth and folklore were the principal discursive formations, and where literature, understood in the modern (pre-Structuralist, shaped mainly by Romantic aesthetic ideology) sense of the autonomy of the author and the supremacy of the new and original, did not exist. The second feature that set apart semantic paleontology from Soviet vulgar sociologism—despite the shared belief that literature is a superstructural phenomenon conditioned historically by the base—was Marr’s, Freidenberg’s, and Frank-Kamenetskii’s insistence that the dependence of literature on the mode of production and the wider forms of sociality can only be established by tracing the historical transformations of thinking mirrored in the origins of language and linguistic change. In other words, no theory of cultural evolution was possible without embedding its hypotheses in, and corroborating them through, the study of glottogenesis and the evolution of language. To do this, the findings of semantic paleontology had to be supplemented by what Frank-Kamenetskii called “paleontological morphology,” that is, the study of how plot emerged, assisted by changes in morphology and the formation of primeval semantic “bundles.” Frank-Kamenetskii, along with Marr, believed that once these bundles, or clusters, were established (each reflecting a potentially very wide circle of interconnected meanings, such as “love,” “death,” and “resurrection”; or “sky,” “water,” “light,” “fire,” “vegetation,” “winter,” and “ice”), plot only began to develop after the verb had severed itself from the noun, assisted by the already formed pronouns. As humankind’s active impact on nature grew with the help of new techniques and tools of labor, gradually the conflict between the “subject and object of action” came to the fore, which issued in a distinction between the passive and the active voices of the verb. Before this distinction was available, creativity lived on “the borderline between

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semantic identity and plot construction,” where the function of the protagonist was expressed not through action but through his changing conditions (as in the “alternation of life and death in the myth of the dying and rising god”).32 Finally, while at the very early stages there was most likely no grammatical differentiation between first, second, and third person (grammatically, they were all expressed through the third-person pronoun, believed to have originated in the name of the totem; Frank-Kamenetskii thought he had found the “paleontological source” of the trinitarian nature of God in this grammatical identity between first, second, and third person),33 with the gradual advance of grammatical differentiation the nucleus of everyday plot began to emerge. Thus, the staple motif of adultery, where three distinct protagonists are needed to enact the plot scheme, serves Frank-Kamenetskii as narrative evidence of a more advanced stage of grammatical differentiation within language.

Drawing the Boundaries of Modernity: From Image-Based to Conceptual Cognition All of this rested, of course, on an unshaken belief in the evolution of the mind from a primitive, pre-logical state to a rational, logical modus operandi. Harking back to work on myth and language by Ludwig Noiré and Lucien LévyBruhl (and, closer to home, by Aleksandr Potebnia), Frank-Kamenetskii, who had also seriously engaged with the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer,34 asserted the central role of metaphor as a cognitive category that was genetically linked to mythological images. For Frank-Kamenetskii, both are tools of “knowing the concrete through the concrete,” in contradistinction to theoretical cognition that relies on formal-logical abstraction, thus “artificially severing the link between the general and the singular.”35 Even though myth was considered an earlier stage of cultural evolution, prior to “poetry” (“poetry” was often used by the semantic paleontologists as a generic term for “literature”), poetic metaphor developed in close contact with, and out of, myth. This “genetic link to myth,” was, however, not supposed to “discredit poetic metaphor, just as the undeniable connection of astronomy with astrology or of chemistry with alchemy cannot cast a shadow on these areas of knowledge.”36 There was no value judgment involved in describing the transition from one stage of cultural evolution to the next; rather, the mechanism of transition revealed a recurring pattern, whereby what had functioned as content at an earlier stage would become form at the next one. Frank-Kamenetskii repeatedly uses this formulation with

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reference to myth and literature.37 A good example of how this rule is applied in practice is furnished in his long (and at the time of his death unfinished) work “On the Genesis of the Legend of Romeo and Juliet”: In myth, we find an image-borne perception of nature in terms borrowed from [the realm of] social relations. Poetry, orientated [as it is] toward depicting the life of society, uses the phenomena of nature for an image-borne representation of man in [the framework of] human relationships. And if in myth the separation of the lovers (gods) is a metaphor of winter as nature’s death, whereas marriage is a metaphor of vegetation and fecundity, [then] in poetry we find the reverse correlation: here winter serves as a metaphor of separation and death, and vegetation . . . as an emblem of marriage, love, or woman as the embodiment of love magic.38

Thus what used to be content at the mythological stage (nature’s cycle of seasons) becomes form at the stage of literature: nature and the change of seasons now function as a metaphor of human relations. No doubt under pressure from the prevalent Marxist paradigm of Soviet literary studies in the 1930s, this transition is seen, both by Frank-Kamenetskii and Freidenberg, as containing the early germs of realism, testifying to the emerging ability of literature to portray and analyze human relations.39 Realism processed the lingering deposits of myth through various acts of “rationalization,”40 which enhanced the plausibility of the inherited plots. Thus, for example, instead of dying and rising again and again as part of the mythical cycle, with the transition to realism, the protagonists had to limit their deaths to a single event, saturating the plot with a string of deceptive demises. Although metaphor was credited by the semantic paleontologists with performing the role of a bridge between image-based and conceptual cognition, thus holding these two aspects of culture in equilibrium, and although the semantic paleontologists tried very hard not to introduce value judgments concerning the different forms of cognition, the theory of stadialism embraced by them led them in the end to assert rationality as an indispensable and nonnegotiable feature of modernity. All this points to a contradiction at the heart of semantic paleontology, never quite resolved, between, on the one hand, continuity (e.g., the passion for identifying recurring semantic bundles and motifs that survive socioeconomic change) and, on the other, leap, rupture, and discontinuity (e.g., Freidenberg’s thinking of literature as a qualitatively new superstructure that at some point is bound to sever the umbilical cord that

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attaches it to folklore). In contravention to her belief in enduring “semantic deposits,” but in accord with her relentless stadialism, folklore, despite being praised for its mediating role between myth and literature, was eventually castigated by Freidenberg as a relict of the past that had to be eradicated, along with any survivals of religion. In her paper at the public discussion on folklore in Leningrad in June 1931, she was at her most militant, demanding that folklore be actively destroyed—a rather uncomfortable statement, both in tone and in substance, from an otherwise sophisticated thinker.41 Thus although semantic paleontology had made a persistent effort to establish primordial semantic bundles and trace their transformations at successive stages of history, it maintained—especially in the case of Freidenberg—a less than flexible distinction between modernity and premodernity, the former sustaining and nurturing rationality and conceptual thinking, and the latter—despite its huge power of generating archetypal images and motifs—perpetuating a mode of thinking grounded in a picture of the world often stigmatized as “diffuse,” undifferentiated, and therefore deprived of potency and real social impact. In the end, the boundaries of modernity were drawn somewhat rigidly by Freidenberg (less so by Frank-Kamenetskii). Even some of the Marxist sympathizers with semantic paleontology felt that this rigid dichotomy should be revised, not necessarily in order to do justice to premodern thinking but to chart the persistence of “irrationalism” in human history. Ieremeia Ioffe, the principal exponent of a new, more radical—in some aspects, cruder, in others, perhaps more imaginative—sociological aesthetics in the 1930s (like the semantic paleontologists, Ioffe lived and worked in Leningrad), endeavored to revisit Marr’s stage theory in the light of what he judged to be a much more fundamental (and thus conceptually more effective) opposition: that between socioeconomic formations based on exploitation and those that precluded it. Here the nineteenth century ceased to be the crucial demarcation line that separated industrial capitalism (Freidenberg’s synonym for modernity) from an allegedly amorphous, primitive, and pre-logical culture. In his 1937 book Sinteticheskoe izuchenie iskusstva i zvukovoe kino (The Synthetic Study of Art and Sound Cinema), Ioffe argued that the bourgeoisie, hard as it tried and despite its bold revolutionary acts, was never able to cut off its links to the preceding socioeconomic formation (feudalism), for the bourgeoisie remained after all a class committed to exploitation. This fundamental affinity with feudalism was reawakened once capitalism moved away from its early, revolutionary period and entered the crisis-ridden imperialist stage.

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“The curve of capitalist thinking goes back to its origins” (Ioffe, Sinteticheskoe izuchenie, 16);42 in other words, the humanist thought of early capitalism, which had liberated humanity from the “irrational fetters of cosmogony, from kin and guild constraints” (18), was later supplanted by a Positivist (in essence, secondarily cosmological) picture of the world, in which humans were once again reduced to cogs in the larger wheel of the universe (and the markets). While praising Marr and his associates for detecting a repertoire of recurring “semantic bundles” (using the same term—puchok—which is also employed by the semantic paleontologists), Ioffe accounts for this recurrence differently, locating the reason for it in the “immobile forms” of bourgeois thinking—forms that go back to feudalism, then disappear in the “cultural underground” during the “progressive” phase of capitalism, only to resurface in the age of its “dissolution” (20). These “immobile forms” are ultimately conditioned by the fact that feudalism and capitalism present a continuum, sharing as they do the nature of formations based on exploitation. Ioffe further charges the semantic paleontologists with failing to recognize that the recurrence of these “semantic bundles” is not a matter of plain variation: rather, at each stage of development we have to deal with rather complex transformations, “a split and fight of the elements of one and the same semantic bundle, their distribution onto incommensurable series” (46). This incommensurability reflects the contradictory nature of class-based thinking. Contrary to Freidenberg, Ioffe believes that irrationality and pre-logical thinking do not disappear with the arrival of advanced capitalism; they survive the industrial revolution, because irrationality is the very nature of any thinking grounded in exploitation. (Ioffe’s critique of irrationality, which extends to encompass the “fascist worldview” [408], is no doubt part and parcel of a larger leftist trend of the later 1930s seeking to detect the intellectual genealogy of Nazism in what Lukács termed the process of the “destruction of reason.”) Ioffe thus concludes that “the resilience of the semantic series, the resilience of irrational semantic bundles, the[ir] stability flow from the conservative nature of the forms of consciousness of class society” (46), which do not easily alter their substantially contradictory character, even in periods marked by seemingly radical technological progress.

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The Impact of Semantic Paleontology in the 1930s and Beyond Ioffe’s serious—critical but not unsympathetic—engagement with semantic paleontology remained, on the whole, an isolated occurrence. This was indicative of the new method failing to gain official approval as a leading paradigm of literary studies in the 1930s. At least on the surface, it didn’t seem to attract sufficient attention and to make the public impact its founders would have hoped for. In one of several books to appear in the 1930s, solidifying the Marr cult and canonizing his “new doctrine of language,” Sergei Bykovskii devoted an entire chapter to exploring “the significance of Marr’s scientific theory for the fields of science immediately related to linguistics.”43 Focusing on archaeology, ethnography, and anthropology, he remained completely silent on issues of literary history and theory. Not even in folkloristics did semantic paleontology enjoy overwhelming success. Freidenberg’s hostility to folklore as a relic—a logical conclusion of her more uncompromising application of the theory of stadialism—flew in the face of efforts to revive and manipulate folklore for political purposes that were increasingly prominent (and tactically much smarter than her forthrightness) during the 1930s.44 If anything, semantic paleontology inhibited this process, and this is why even with regard to the study of folklore the method failed to gain the wide currency one might have been led to expect at the time.45 Freidenberg herself had doubts about the immediate relevance of semantic paleontology for literary studies, notwithstanding her praise for its sweeping methodological ambition: “Marr’s paleontological analysis has emerged as truly revolutionary; [it is] the most characteristic aspect of the entire new teaching on language, with the smallest number of genuine followers and the largest number of opponents.”46 Her own books did not generate much public attention; Poetika siuzheta i zhanra received one negative review (resembling a lampoon more than a scholarly evaluation) and a one-page dismissive and ironic note by a reviewer who had already dedicated a flippant page to her edited volume Antichnye teorii iazyka i stilia (Ancient Theories of Language and Style).47 Only the manifesto volume on Tristan and Isolde sparked a brief but significant newspaper polemic. In Leningrad, Anna Beskina and Lev Tsyrlin, both at the time PhD students at the Institute for the Comparative Study of the Literatures and Languages of the West and East (ILIAZV), and both strongly impressed by a paper Freidenberg had delivered there in 1931,48 appealed to their more senior colleagues, insisting that “literary studies must finally take

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notice of the existence of Japhetidology [Marr and his followers’ theory]; it’s better to do that later than never.”49 With admirable acuteness, Beskina and Tsyrlin identified two important contributions of semantic paleontology to Soviet literary theory and scholarship. To start with, it significantly broadened the horizons of Soviet literary studies by extending the legitimate domain of literary history beyond the “narrow platform of European nineteenth-century literature,” vital though contemporary discussions of the nineteenth century may have been in establishing the concept of “critical realism.” Secondly, unlike traditional historical poetics, semantic paleontology understood images to be predominantly a cognitive category; as such, they were a specific, historically conditioned (and thus constrained and imperfect) “form of expression of conceptual thinking.” To these contributions articulated by Beskina and Tsyrlin, we have to add a third one. Perhaps most important, semantic paleontology—still from recognizably Marxist (if not entirely orthodox) positions— managed to annul the divorce between literary studies and linguistics that had been so characteristic of Marxist literary theory until then. Indeed, one can perceive in the work of Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii an appeal—at the time urgent—to put language back on the agenda of leftist literary studies. In a sense, their work was a mirror image of what Formalism had done: asserting the centrality of language, yet not as the carrier of “literariness” but rather as an embodiment of socioeconomic change that in turn brings along changes in worldview that are to be examined by looking carefully at the multitude of semantic deposits over the longue durée of prehistory and history proper. Language, as we can see, was the main protagonist in Russian literary and cultural theory after World War I, and into the 1930s: differently conceived of in the works of the Formalists, Shpet, and Bakhtin, through the work of the semantic paleontologists it eventually became a central plank of a body of literary and cultural theory more loosely associated with Marxism (para-Marxist, if you will). It was precisely this radical remarriage of linguistics and literature, and the priority accorded to semantics, that proved highly suspect in the eyes of those defending orthodox literary sociology. David Tamarchenko, another contributor to the Leningrad exchanges around the collective volume on Tristan and Isolde, charged the doctrine of stadialism with inattention to the Leninist theory of reflection. By this he meant that semantic paleontology tended to deduce the stadial nature and socioeconomic aspects of plot from the data of semantics, obtained through linguistic analysis. If for the stages of prehistory this seemed

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a permissible operation, it fell short of methodological rigor when it came to understanding the more recent stages of development. Marx, Tamarchenko reminded Freidenberg and Frank-Kamenetskii, had called for the forms of ideological life to be derived from the socioeconomic relations that governed reality; instead, the semantic paleontologists appeared to be doing exactly the opposite: they were distilling the essence of socioeconomic reality from the semantic material of myth, folklore, and literature. The centrality of semantics was thus turning the principle of reflection on its head; Marr’s followers strove to comprehend socioeconomic reality from the superstructural forms it was supposed to have conditioned in the first place.50 Freidenberg was aware of this potential rift with Marxism. In an unpublished (and, judging by the full text, apparently unfinished) paper drafted in 1931 and titled “Do Literary Studies Need Japhetidology?” (thus displaying the synonymic and frequently interchangeable use of terms such as “Japhetidology,” derived from Marr’s linguistic doctrine; “semantic paleontology”; and “genetic method”), she questioned the tactical suitability of the term: “it seems a claim to methodological independence is concealed in it”; “this devastating terminology seems to exist only to enrage the Marxists and to beat the Japhetidologists.”51 While negotiating the boundaries between her own para-Marxist cultural theory and orthodox sociologism, Freidenberg was to face criticism from some of her own pupils, more often than not for methodological reasons. In an article surveying the history of the “genetic method,” written decades after semantic paleontology had left the stage of Soviet literary theory, Sofia Poliakova charged Marr’s followers with reducing cultural history to a “gigantic tautology.” While in hot pursuit of primeval clusters of meaning, Poliakova maintained, Freidenberg produced a semantic universe in which everything resembled and echoed everything else. “We are thus in the kingdom of sameness clad in difference.”52 In 1979–80, Freidenberg once again became the target of criticism, this time by a group of young classicists at Leningrad University who believed her work to be lacking in methodological rigor and philological exactitude. Freidenberg was aligned here with Lotman, Toporov, Averintsev, and Losev, who were bundled together by these budding scholars as the representatives (real or alleged) of a new—Structuralist—orthodoxy in philology, which, because it was perceived by many as a form of opposition to the regime, was felt to be beyond criticism. The students organized small workshops, in which they questioned the methodological untouchability of Structuralism and semiotics; Freidenberg was now

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included in this group and singled out for critical attention, chiefly because she was considered a predecessor sui generis of Structuralism and semiotics by Toporov and to some extent by Lotman, whose notion of “explosion” (vzryv) as a mechanism of cultural and historical change undoubtedly drew on her idea of the fitful birth of qualitatively new cultural formations.53 The discussions organized by the students (except for the one on Averintsev, which had not been recorded) were later published in the samizdat journal Metrodor.54 However contested and feeble in its public impact on the methodology of literary studies, semantic paleontology had a remarkable and consequential underground influence. Viktor Zhirmunskii’s work in the 1930s (and for years to come) rested on the premises of Marr’s comparative stadialism; in Zhirmunskii’s words, “we can and must compare analogous literary phenomena that emerge at the same stages of the social-historical process, regardless of any immediate influence among them.”55 Similarly, Zhirmunskii lent his unequivocal approval to “paleontological analysis” as a tool for charting the transformations of community culture.56 At roughly the same time, traces of comparative stadialism can also be found in Zhirmunskii’s Herder monograph, written in the 1930s but first published only in 1959. In a notable passage, Zhirmunskii considers the universality of folklore in a stadial and developmental frame: “Thus behind the national specificity of folk poetry, its universal features are revealed to Herder as a particular stage in the development of poetic thought, equally mandatory, from an historical point of view, for the ‘classic’ and the modern European peoples, as well as for the primitive ones that have not been touched by the influence of European civilization.”57 But Zhirmunskii (himself a para-Formalist in his younger years) was neither the only avid reader of the semantic paleontologists nor the only theorist of literature and culture to incorporate vestiges of their methodology into his work. Mikhail Bakhtin’s rediscovery of Rabelais, folklore, and popular culture was no doubt stimulated by Freidenberg’s work.58 Although he refers to Freidenberg only once in Rabelais and His World, he had read Poetics of Plot and Genre for the first time toward the end of 1936, leaving behind revealing marginal notes. Freidenberg’s understanding of parody as a converted form of deification and veneration, her sensitivity for the coexistence of the serious and the comic, and her belief that the Greek novel was itself a variant of the epic were shared by Bakhtin in his insistence that the prehistory of the novel as genre be examined anew. It is this attention to antiquity and the premodern discursive forms of the novelistic that sets Bakhtin apart from Lukács, the other major theorist

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of the novel in the 1930s, who elected to focus solely on its history since the eighteenth century. Moreover, Bakhtin’s entire Rabelais project, as well as his writings on the theory of the novel, were shot through by the same mistrust of ready, fixed, and petrified cultural forms that we have located in Freidenberg’s statement: “To the ready-made, finalized literary phenomenon, one had to react by posing the question of the origins of literature itself.” As we have seen, despite his attention to great canonical writers (Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais), Bakhtin remained—not only in the 1930s but into the 1960s, when his Rabelais and His World and the revised Dostoevsky monograph were published—an ardent believer in a history of literature without names, in which—just as in Freidenberg’s and Frank-Kamenetskii’s work—genre and its memory, deposited in anonymous plots and ambivalent semantic clusters, played a much more significant role than any one individual writer. Bakhtin refers approvingly to Marr and Meshchaninov in his writings on the prehistory of the novelistic genre (including a lengthier discussion of their works in “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”); he preserved his respectful attitude to Marr’s work into the 1950s (as a lecture he gave in 1958 at Saransk demonstrates), long after Marr’s dethronement by Stalin in 1950.59 Thus, one may conclude, the true impact of semantic paleontology on literary studies during the 1930s (and beyond) was much more substantial than the lack of formal public backing would suggest. It asserted itself as a specific para-Marxist discourse, seeking to differentiate itself both from Formalism and vulgar sociologism, and was later mobilized, at least in part, as a predecessor sui generis of Soviet Structuralism and semiotics. The scope of this impact was largely determined by the significance semantic paleontology held in the crucial debates on the boundaries of modernity that were raging during the Soviet 1930s. The uneasy balance between championing the uniqueness of Soviet classless society, on the one hand, and essaying to bestow on it a venerable line of descent, on the other, was central to the work of the semantic paleontologists. Never quite resolved, the tension between continuity and rupture, between smooth evolution and revolutionary explosion was reflective of the wider process of drawing and redrawing the boundaries of modernity, of pondering the implications of the incorporation or rejection of premodern cultural forms in the face of the new agenda of socialism in one country. The discussions of how cultural forms evolve and what the mechanisms are of the transformations they undergo; on the status and relevance of semantic clusters that had survived multiple transitions from myth to folklore to literature; on the radical historic-

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ity of literariness and the need to consider it from a genetic perspective—all these disputes were formulating and deliberating one substantive issue: how should culture, and literature as part of it, relate to the challenges flowing from the accelerated accession to modernity during that decade. The political and intellectual stakes of articulating answers to this question were high, and so, often, was the degree of sophistication discernable in these answers. Semantic paleontology asserted a regime of relevance in which literature—reminiscent of the scenario advanced by Bakhtin—was validated through its place in a long, stage-wise evolution of cultural forms. The elaboration of this particular regime of relevance allowed the semantic paleontologists (and their most gifted critiques and followers) to sharpen their own methodological profile, equidistant from both Russian Formalism and vulgar sociologism, and explore a range of theoretical alternatives within and beyond Marxism.

5 INTERWAR EXILES Regi mes of Relevan c e in Ém igr é Cri t i c i s m an d T he o ry

The previous chapters have explored different ideas about the relevance of literature, discussing a range of theoretical positions during the interwar decades. In this chapter I want to return to the importance of exile for how we ref lect on literature and its significance in a multilingual and multicultural environment, renewing questions of its relevance and its canon in the diaspora (and thus also, from a different angle, the question of the classic posed in the chapter on Bakhtin). The discussion here goes beyond what has been established in the preceding chapters, not least because it considers literary theory not per se, but in its interactions with another distinct discourse, that of literary criticism, which had its own dynamic and its own conventions. The symbiosis of literary theory and criticism was a palpable feature of literary life in the diaspora, encouraged, in no small measure, by the social and professional makeup of the new intelligentsia. What follows is an examination of the ways in which émigré literary criticism between the world wars essayed to extend an inherited regime of relevance that conceived of literature as speaking directly to the traditional collective concerns of its creators and readers—in contrast to a radically different perspective that sought to endorse a regime of relevance in which literature would be denationalized in order to address the private concerns of the exile. The importance of transnational mobility, exile, and estrangement for thinking theoretically about literature is a theme I

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have already established in the Introduction to this book; I will revisit this theme once again in the Epilogue.

Setting the Agenda Writing the history of Russian émigré literary criticism and theory between World Wars I and II presents a set of challenges. We still know relatively little about the ways in which émigré writing began, over time, to interact with the various host cultures, and what implications this interaction had for how émigré literature and criticism related to cultural and political processes in Soviet Russia. Earlier historians of Russian émigré culture, notably Marc Raeff, believed that “Russian literature in emigration remained as isolated from Western literatures as it had been in prerevolutionary Russia, perhaps even more so.”1 More recent research, foremost by Leonid Livak and Maria Rubins, has persuasively demonstrated the intensive appropriation of French culture and, more widely, of the European modernist novel by the Paris émigrés, as well as their participation in French cultural life, not least as regular reviewers and critics writing for French periodicals (Yuliya Sazonova, Gleb Struve, Vladimir Veidle).2 The rich stock of émigré memoirs gives a sense of this integrationist drive. In Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory, Vasily Yanovsky relates an episode in which he and his fellow émigré writer Iurii Fel'zen had gone to the offices of a Paris publishing house to enquire of Gabriel Marcel about the fate of their manuscripts; there, they bumped into Vladimir Nabokov (Sirin), who was leaving, having tried to interest Marcel in publishing his novel Despair in French.3 Generational change was an important factor in this reorientation of the creative energy of émigré literature; even more significant, however, appears to have been the multicultural dynamism of metropolitan European cities, such as Berlin (which had hosted the first outburst of Russian émigré creativity in the late 1910s and the early 1920s, when Russian writers and artists became an integral part of the European avant-garde) and Paris (where Russian writers of both the younger and the older generations became involved in a Franco-Russian literary dialogue, particularly from the mid1920s on).4 With this new approach to émigré writing in mind, I focus in this chapter—among other key issues—on how a freshly formed European modernist canon (above all Proust’s writing) contributed to attempts by a younger generation of émigré writers and critics in Paris to rearrange the Russian literary canon of the nineteenth century.

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A second difficulty stems from the fact that we still know very little about what specific impact émigré literature and criticism actually had in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union. This is a vastly underresearched area, and here I can only state, with some urgency, the need to explore it. The dynamics of this impact differed. It was stronger during the more relaxed regime of loyalty of the early 1920s, when travel was easier and the difference between living abroad and being an émigré was still not set in stone.5 As early as April 1921, the AllRussian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) decreed that twenty copies of all the leading émigré newspapers should be subscribed to, so as to be available to Party policy makers and administrators in Soviet Russia; an estimated 160 to 200 copies of the journal Volia Rossii (which was not unsympathetic to developments in Soviet Russia) were bought by the Soviet authorities.6 Control over the importation of émigré literature did not commence until 1923.7 Especially during this initial period (until 1923), competition with the émigré literary press was taken very seriously, as the case of establishing Krasnaia nov' in 1921 as the first Soviet “thick” literary journal—a tacit response to the foundation of Sovremennye zapiski in Paris in 1920—demonstrates.8 The impact of émigré culture was still perceptible in the mid-to-late 1920s, when surveys of Russian émigré literature kept appearing in some of the major Moscow periodicals, although reviews of individual works of émigré literature and criticism were less common.9 Through the prism of Soviet literary criticism of the 1920s, émigré writing was increasingly interpreted as flight from Symbolism, toward a healthy adoption of realism. The “high standard” of this resilient émigré realism was set by Ivan Bunin (who was to become the first writer writing in Russian to win the Nobel Prize for literature). In the eyes of his Soviet critics, notably Dmitrii Gorbov, a prominent member of the Pereval (“Pass”) group of postrevolutionary writers, Bunin was both an example of commitment to realism and proof of the terminal decline of bourgeois writing. Measured by Bunin’s standard, the younger generation of émigré writers were often accused of succumbing to less desirable versions of realism—excessive attention to the everyday aspects of life (bytovizm)—or to old-style “symbolist abstraction.”10 Attention to émigré writing and the polemics in émigré criticism faded away after the 1920s (although major émigré newspapers, such as Pavel Milyukov’s Poslednye novosti, continued to claim the attention of the Soviet political elite),11 not to reappear again in full measure until the late 1960s. Significantly, by 1930, references to émigré criticism had begun to function as little more than a weapon in settling domestic scores; in the journal Na literaturnom postu (On the Literary Guard),

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for example, Demian Bedny (Efim Pridvorov) distorted arguments drawn from émigré literary criticism to denounce the prose writers close to Pereval.12 A third difficulty flows from another knowledge deficit: we need a more accurate picture of how literary criticism worked in the émigré environment: who wrote it, what were its institutions, mechanisms, and status? An insight— perhaps somewhat biased but nevertheless welcome—is afforded in a series of articles by the prominent Prague-based émigré literary critic Alfred Bem published in April–May 1931 in the Berlin Russian-language newspaper Rul'. Bem draws attention to the following features of émigré criticism: * It was concentrated in the newspapers rather than the journals; the book review acquired “permanent residence” in the newspaper, as did the literary feuilleton (no doubt a somewhat partisan diagnosis by Bem, himself a prominent newspaper critic; as we shall see, journals played an indispensable role in the major debates of émigré criticism). * Literary criticism in emigration was no longer in the hands of professional critics: except for Iulii Aikhenval'd (Berlin; Aikhenval'd had passed away in 1928), Petr Pil'skii (Riga), and Mark Slonim and Bem himself (both in Prague), most of the prominent literary critics were actually writers, predominantly poets (such as the two antagonists and most significant critics on the Paris scene, Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgii Adamovich, along with many others). * Émigré literary journals relied on a thin editorial core sharing the same political views; the writers and critics were peripheral to it, with no expectation of loyalty to the journal’s political agenda (we will see later that Mikhail Osorgin contradicted Bem’s judgment on this point). This meant that the literary sections of the journals lacked “proper guidance”; literary critics were left to their own devices, feeling free to express their own taste and views but deprived of the homogeneity that would constitute a “literary trend.”13 Bem’s diagnosis of the adverse conditions in which émigré literary criticism operated emphasized the often ephemeral status of publications in the periodicals. As a matter of fact, only three interwar émigrés managed to publish books of critical essays and reviews written in emigration (not counting the genre of the critical monograph: e.g., Vladimir Veidle’s short book on Khodasevich [Paris, 1928], Konstantin Mochul'skii’s book on Gogol [Paris, 1934], or Kirill Zaitsev’s monograph on Bunin [Berlin, 1934]).14 Bem himself was hoping to collect his “Letters on Literature” in a book but inclement economic conditions stood in the way. This may, at least in part, explain the desire of émigré critics to anchor their own efforts in the work of their predecessors, spinning out a

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longer tradition and constructing a superior canon of Russian literary criticism. In a unique collection published in Russian in Shanghai (1941), suitably titled Masterpieces of Russian Literary Criticism, the editor Kirill Zaitsev justified his decision to include solely essays written in the nineteenth century by the need to foreground that which had stood the test of time and steer clear of partisan, and thus also short-lived, criticism. To ensure his volume’s longevity, Zaitsev selected pieces written not by “professional critics”—whose bias and subjectivity would generally rule out judgments of lasting value—but by intellectuals who were also writers, philosophers, or historians; the anthology thus republished essays by Pushkin, Belinsky, Gogol, Zhukovsky, Turgenev, Girgor'ev, Khomyakov, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Leont'ev, Klyuchevsky, Rozanov, and Vladimir Solovyov.15 A fourth difficulty has to do with the fact that émigré literary criticism and literary theory, while of necessity linked, did not display the same dynamics and followed dissimilar trajectories. While literary criticism felt increasingly committed to, but also constrained by, the need to engage with events in the Soviet Union and take a clear stance, theory was freer from this expectation, and thus also enjoying more flexibility in articulating its own agenda. Exile, rather than acting as an impeding factor, was right at the heart of developments in literary theory during the interwar period; it was part and parcel of a renewed cultural cosmopolitanism that transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia. As we have seen in the Introduction, for a number of years the activities of the Russian Formalists were taking place in a climate of enhanced mobility and exchange of ideas between the metropolitan and émigré streams of Russian culture. The most gifted ambassadors of the Formalists abroad were Viktor Shklovsky, during the time he spent as an émigré in Berlin, and Roman Jakobson while in Czechoslovakia (where he arrived as a Soviet citizen, but decided eventually not to return to Moscow).16 Jakobson is a particularly important example; his subsequent cooperation with Piotr Bogatyrev17 and with the Vienna-based émigré scholar Nikolai Trubetzkoy, as well as his connections with Yuri Tynianov (who stayed in Russia but was involved in the work of his Prague colleagues),18 were crucial in attempts to revive Opoiaz (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in the Soviet Union. These attempts, while unsuccessful, yielded an important document in the history of literary theory, a brief set of theses titled “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language,” written in Prague jointly by Jakobson and Tynianov and signaling the urgent need to revise the supremacy of “pure synchronism” and promote an analysis of

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the “correlation between the literary series and other historical series.”19 Thus, the work of Russian Formalism in its concluding stages, and later the formation and flourishing of the Prague Linguistic Circle, became possible through intellectual exchanges that benefited from the crossing of national boundaries, often under the duress of exile.20 The work of Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Shklovsky, and Bogatyrev came to embody the potential of what Edward Said was later to term “travelling theory”: “The point of theory is . . . to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile.”21 In Prague, in particular, one could observe in a nutshell the stupendous diversity of methodological approaches marking émigré literary scholarship between the world wars. Along with Jakobson’s post-Formalism and Bogatyrev’s early functionalist Structuralism (developed, recent Russian research would claim, independently of Malinovsky’s),22 we can also see the unfolding of fruitful historico-philological research (centered around the 1925–33 Dostoevsky Seminar founded by Alfred Bem)23 and psychoanalytic literary scholarship, the main exponent of which was Nikolai Osipov (1877–1934), who had made Freud’s acquaintance in Vienna in 1910 and had propagated his ideas in Russia, before emigrating in 1919 and arriving in Czechoslovakia in 1921.24 To this one should add the Prague wing of Eurasianism, led by Piotr Savitsky, who had set himself the task of establishing “Eurasian literary studies” in which Russian literary history, both before and after 1917, was to be reexamined from the point of view of its potential to assert Russia’s special geopolitical and cultural status. Savitsky eventually acknowledged his failure in this task, but he did succeed in persuading a number of followers in Prague (Konstantin Chkheidze, Leontii Kopetskii, G. I. Rubanov) to embrace Eurasianism as an interpretative prism through which to comment on the Soviet literary scene of the 1920s–30s.25 Importantly, Prague was the place where some of these currents intersected, most noticeably in Jakobson’s attempt to lend legitimacy to Eurasian linguistics (encouraged in part by Savitsky), in Savitsky’s efforts to found a linguistic geography with Structuralist ambitions, and in Bogatyrev’s (later abandoned) idea of a specifically Eurasian Russian folkloristics.26 This peaceful coexistence of approaches practiced in Prague should not, however, obscure the larger dissimilarities in the inner dynamics of émigré theory and criticism. Jakobson, who participated in both discourses, was rather exceptional in a landscape where these two discursive formations remained estranged in their cohabitation. To illustrate this point, let me deal briefly with the divergent positions of Jakobson and Vladislav Khodasevich, undoubtedly

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two of the most distinguished émigré commentators on literature, and draw attention to the prevalent hostility among émigré literary critics toward Russian Formalism. Jakobson’s large-scale project of literary theory, in which notions such as the differentiation and competition between literature and the series of everyday life (byt), the fundamental distinction between metaphor and metonymy, and the systemic nature of the evolution of literature and its generic repertoire played a central role, can be seen at work in his émigré texts that merge literary criticism and theory, notably in his “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” written in May–June 1930 and published in 1931, and in “Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak” (trans. in 1969 as ”The Prose of the Poet Pasternak”), written in a Bulgarian Black Sea resort in 1935 and published the same year in Slavische Rundschau.27 While elaborating on his theoretical principles embraced and developed in the late 1910s and during the 1920s, these texts are also a remarkable testimony to Jakobson’s prowess as a literary critic. They are marked by sustained loyalty to Futurism and especially to Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky; the poetry of the latter, in particular, functions as an implicit model to which Jakobson remains beholden in these and several other articles of the 1920s and 1930s. By contrast, Khodasevich who (unlike Jakobson) had not directly participated in the debates on theory immediately before and after 1917 and had been writing exclusively within the discursive space of literary criticism, failed to recognize Mayakovsky’s gift and stature. Characteristically, he also sought to reject the innovative theoretical charge of Russian Formalism (and was equally dismissive of psychoanalytic literary studies).28 There is, of course, more to all this than Khodasevich’s personal dislike of Mayakovsky’s poetry or his disagreement with Formalism. Not just Khodasevich but almost the whole of émigré literary criticism remained remarkably conservative in its reaction to Russian Formalism, Georgii Adamovich being another strong exponent of this attitude. Adamovich shared this stance with Nabokov, notwithstanding the fact that he failed to appreciate the latter’s prose. When it came to their rejection of Russian Formalism, personal taste for literature proved immaterial, as did the critic’s ability or inability to spot individual talent. 29 Among the émigré critics, the activist symbiosis between Formalism and the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) seems to have been appreciated solely by the left-wing of the Eurasians, whose political orientation facilitated a more sympathetic treatment of

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Formalism (I have dwelled on this in some detail in the chapter on Russian Formalism). The trajectories of émigré literary theory and criticism were thus undoubtedly entangled yet far from identical; each had its own dynamics of promoting or rejecting the new methodological principles worked out since the start of World War I. In what follows I concentrate on literary criticism as an inherently polemical discourse, tracing the pivotal points of debate in emigration and examining their significance for articulating a range of conflicting views on how literature could claim relevance in and through its diasporic existence.30

Major Polemics Émigré literary life, not unlike Soviet cultural intercourse, was largely sustained by discussions, some shorter, others more prolonged; some not exceeding the importance of a storm in a teacup, others of a more lasting impact.31 Here I choose to dwell on the most momentous debates in émigré literary criticism: the exchanges on the role of criticism; the polemic on “young literature,” in effect a polemic on the future of émigré writing; and the important ongoing discussions on the canon. Many of these polemics have been seen through the prism of personal rivalry and disagreement, notably between Adamovich and Khodasevich, arguably the two most influential émigré literary critics on the Paris scene.32 While this remains a valid approach, and one that captures in vivid detail the literary life of the emigration, here I seek to understand these debates in a way that is not restricted to the predilections and idiosyncrasies of individuals, but instead reconstructs the larger playing field and the structural positions available within it.33 The Debate on the Role of Literary Criticism

A decade after the 1917 October Revolution, Russian émigré literature was beginning to reflect upon the lost hope of restoring the previous political and cultural conditions; the focus now was on the mission of émigré culture—what was to be achieved, and how, by those considering themselves, in Nina Berberova’s famous words (often wrongly attributed to Zinaida Gippius), ambassadors of, rather than exiles from, Russian literature.34 The 1928 discussion on literary criticism pondered its tasks in the new context. There had been pronouncements on criticism even before that discussion, but these had failed to

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coalesce into a sustained conversation.35 The 1928 discussion was launched with a newspaper contribution by the writer, critic, and bibliophile Mikhail Osorgin. The elephant in the room for a long time had been the question of where the future of Russian literature actually lay: in Paris, Berlin, Prague, and Shanghai, or in the Soviet Union, with critics of different persuasion (such as the leftleaning Mirskii and Slonim or the politically more conservative Adamovich) already proclaiming Moscow Russian literature’s true center. Literary criticism was seen as subordinate to this agenda. Osorgin’s view was not optimistic: he saw émigré criticism as ensnared by political dogma and the interpersonal ties of émigré literati, enjoying little freedom in a business dominated by the orders of established circles of friends or by the tacit prohibition of unprejudiced writing about Soviet literature. For Osorgin, the dense networks of émigré literary intercourse meant that critics were deprived of the opportunity to pass independent judgment; nor were they—pace Bem’s verdict, adduced above—at liberty to speak against the political creed of the periodical for which they wrote. Instead of advancing the cause of literature, criticism had become a “family affair.”36 Osorgin thus denied the very possibility of impartial literary criticism in emigration. Agreeing with Osorgin, Georgii Adamovich (writing in Poslednie Novosti under the pseudonym Sisyphus) and Zinaida Gippius (who preferred the male pseudonym Anton Krainii) believed that the émigré cultural environment placed special restrictions on impartiality and objectivity. In Gippius’s caustic words, instead of offering independent verdicts on the works of their contemporaries, many critics were engaged in heaping praise on their friends, and even neighbors.37 In his next contribution to the discussion, Adamovich (now writing under his real name) formulated a different argument, asking the fundamental question about the role of literary criticism. While tacitly acknowledging the difficulty in sustaining objective judgment in the closely knit émigré literary life, Adamovich highlighted creativity as the central aspect of criticism. To him, the evaluative act was secondary to the ability to construct a world of one’s own in the process of commenting on another author’s work. Critics were writers, Adamovich insisted, and their primary responsibility was to write about what is “most important,” “about life” itself, utilizing the work under review as a pretext and legitimate springboard for an act of co-creativity.38 (Although usually in disagreement with Adamovich, in his contribution to the discussion, Khodasevich welcomed this emphasis on the creative nature of criticism.) It was this line of construing literary criticism as an autonomous act of creativ-

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ity, asserted by critics as different in their aesthetic platforms and approaches as Adamovich and Khodasevich, that elicited a fresh response from Osorgin. The work of the reviewer, Osorgin maintained, should not be despised, necessary as it might be to acknowledge the creative nature of criticism. In terms of significance, evaluation was in his eyes an act on a par with interpretation. The social effect of a literary review, its usefulness for vast numbers of readers, could not be overestimated.39 The seemingly trivial polemic on literary criticism was representative of deeper anxieties about the destiny of émigré culture: how was it to reach its recipients, who was the real addressee of émigré literature at a time when, in the words of the writer Georgii Ivanov, it was increasingly dogged by suspicions of having been left “without a reader”?40 The highlighting of criticism as a co-creative act, whose value was independent of the need to evaluate literature aesthetically, was a symptom of a growing sense of crisis: the metabolism of literary production had been disturbed by the loss of clarity over the target audience of émigré literature and criticism. Repeatedly drawing attention to the painfully closed—and oppressively intimate—mode of literary exchange, and to the relatively small scale of the émigré literary scene (all of which forced critics to abandon impartiality), amounted to articulating a profound sense of isolation and insecurity. The debate over the role of criticism thus mirrored wider debates about the fate of émigré writing at a time when it had become obvious that the Soviet regime was there to stay. The Polemic on “Young Literature”

By the early 1930s, the question of continuity and the need to foster “young literature,” a “replacement” (smena) for the older generation of writers, was prominently on the agenda. “Young” here was not necessarily a designation of age; rather, it referred to all those who had launched their literary careers in emigration rather than in Russia. This new generation, despite some age disparity, was constituted by the shared experience of having to find a different stock of themes without relying as much on reminiscences of the prerevolutionary past. Although some of the differences between “fathers” and “children” had already been clearly stated a decade after the October Revolution, notably in an article by Mikhail Tsetlin, it was only in the early 1930s that the polemic began in earnest.41 In 1932–33, the Paris journal Chisla featured two articles articulating the views of the younger generation: Vladimir Varshavskii’s “On

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the Hero of Young Literature” (1932, no. 6) and Iurii Terapiano’s “The Man of the 1930s” (1933, nos. 7–8). Pessimistic in tone, both articles insisted on the unique experience of a cohort of writers shaped outside Russia and later—in the 1950s—labeled by Varshavskii “the unnoticed generation,” an appellation designed to suggest superfluity, irrelevance, and marginality.42 Terapiano maintained in his contribution that for the new “man of the 1930s” the “line of inner life” had become much more significant and expressive of his true condition, gradually supplanting the “exterior human being,” and entailing sensations of “solitude and void,” characteristic of these younger generations of émigré literati who found themselves in a world that had withdrawn the support of the home tradition without offering them domestication in the new (French) culture.43 This fascination with “inner life” was considered morbid by others. Christian-Socialist in its orientation (with strong statist, almost totalitarian, preferences), the journal Novyi grad championed an activist position that envisaged novel forms of collectivity, declaring war on “self-indulgent” interiority. It was in Novyi grad that Fyodor Stepun, a philosopher and publicist who had earned for himself the controversial reputation of a “pro-Soviet” émigré, chose to contribute to the debate by outlining what he hoped would become the mission of the young émigré literature. Under the suggestive title “Postrevolutionary Consciousness and the Task of Émigré Literature,” Stepun invoked the powerful example of nineteenth-century Polish émigré literature, which served as a morally constructive force, raising national consciousness and keeping alive the ideal of a strong, forward-looking Polish culture. He required nothing less of the young generation of Russian émigré literati. Tracing their faults to Lev Shestov’s ostensibly pernicious influence, Stepun saw in Varshavskii’s and Terapiano’s essays an unacceptable splitting of the human being into a spiritual “thingin-itself” and a range of less important “derivative reflections” of that essence (Stepun, “Porevoliutsionnoe,” 23).44 Far from being emphasized, cultivated (let alone nursed) as part of the human condition, loneliness—the reality of which was material and undeniable, plaguing the lives of thousands of émigrés—had to be fought. Going into the recesses of one’s inner self was no exit strategy: émigré isolation required a move forward—not into the “crowd” (itself a form of solitude) but into the “common cause” of the emigration. “We are not afraid to say,” Stepun concluded, “that the young émigré writer can find himself and his own path of creativity only in such a heroic mood” (24; emphasis in the original). Not only did Stepun’s call for heroism presuppose homogeneity and

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a conserved notion of cultural identity; worse than that, it identified forces that were allegedly out to destroy “the Russianness of the young writers that the émigré cause needed” (ibid.). Stepun was perturbed by the fact that the names of James Joyce, André Gide, and particularly Marcel Proust occurred more often in the conversations of the younger Russian émigrés than the “greatest Russian names.” (From the vantage point of the younger émigré generation, Gide had indeed been declared by Vladimir Varshavskii to be “closer and more comprehensible than any of the contemporary Russian writers.”)45 In Stepun’s eyes, those of the young generation who tried to write à la Proust (pod Prusta) had adopted a streak of “analytical psychologism alien to Russian art.” The “non-Russianness” of this “young literature” was evident in the abandonment of the “spiritual leadership” that Russian literature had traditionally exercised over both the writer and the reader. Paris literary criticism, Stepun charged, was “sustained by taste, not by faith” (25). Throughout 1936, representatives of Russian “young literature” responded, sometimes even without directly mentioning Stepun, to these accusations of passivity and lack of moral certitude.46 The concluding leg of the polemic began with an article by Gaito Gazdanov, “On the Young Émigré Literature” (Gazdanov, “O molodoi”).47 Gazdanov wrote with some authority, having made a successful debut with his acclaimed novel An Evening with Claire (written in 1929 and first published as a book the following year). His account of the achievements of the young generation was rather somber; in his view, since 1920, Russian émigré literature had produced but one great writer, Nabokov. The rest of the “production” of the young émigré writers he disparagingly called “literature,” in the same sense in which one talks about “the literature on internal combustion engines” (404). Yet this diagnosis didn’t mean that Stepun was right: for Gazdanov, Stepun’s criticism was operating with “by now completely archaic concepts dating back to the start of the century” (405). The real reason for the problems faced by “young literature,” Gazdanov thought, was the “minuscule size of the readership,” a result of the pressures on former members of the Russian intelligentsia to assume social roles and positions in exile that lowered their cultural standards. (As Gazdanov noted, former lawyers, physicians, engineers, and journalists were becoming manual workers and taxi drivers in droves—a transition he was well placed to comment on, for he was earning his living at the time precisely as a Paris taxi driver.) But even that was only part of the truth about the unenviable state of “young literature.” The deeper explanation for its plight lay in the destruction of “harmonious schemes” and “outlooks”

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through the “horrible events” of the revolution and the civil war. Deprived of their mainstays, the young Russian writers in Paris had lost access to “inner moral knowledge” (406), an all-important precondition for creating genuine works of art. Although Gazdanov considered Stepun’s call for “heroism” oldfashioned and wanting in the new environment, he, too, remained trapped in the opposition between Russian and non-Russian (European) literature: the lack of “inner moral knowledge” did “not mean that writers [should] cease writing; but the most important thing we demand from literature, not in the European but in the Russian understanding of it, is removed from it and makes it uninteresting and pale” (407). Gazdanov thus warned against expectations that émigré writers would be able to create literature comparable to the “writings of Blok, Belyi, and Gorky.” In the next issue of Sovremennye zapiski, Mark Aldanov intervened with an article titled “On the Situation of Émigré Literature.” Like Stepun, Aldanov cited the constructive example of Polish émigré literature; but he judged the situation of the Russian literati abroad to be radically different and saw the reasons for the difficulties they experienced exclusively in the poverty of the emigration. Even more than Gazdanov, Aldanov believed that poverty had deprived the émigré writers, particularly the younger generation, of a cultured audience and had also forced them to take jobs that over time proved incompatible with the demands of a literary career. The sales of prose and poetry, often not exceeding three hundred copies, would not support a thriving émigré literature. Powerful patronage was entertained by Aldanov as a solution, but then quickly declared “unrealistic” and abandoned (Aldanov, “O polozhenii,” 409).48 Referring to another text by Stepun (without mentioning him by name), Aldanov averred that Stepun had exaggerated the role of interpersonal communication as a precondition for the well-being of émigré literature. Stepun had lamented the disconnect between individual writers, claiming that literature does not arise simply from a number of writers finding themselves in the same place at the same time. Echoing the discussion on the tasks of literary criticism, where the size and cohesion of the émigré community were considered a major impediment to objectivity, Aldanov maintained that autonomy and isolation were not absolute evils: after all, he argued, Dostoevsky had never met Tolstoy (406). The same issue of Sovremennye zapiski carried an essay by Varshavskii, suggestively titled “On the Prose of the ‘Younger’ Émigré Writers.’” (Note the deliberate ambiguity of the title: the Russian mladshikh means both “younger” but also “junior,” also in a qualitative and hierarchical sense.) Varshavskii was

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writing as a representative of this younger literature, feeling it could no longer follow the aesthetic and social tenets of the older generation of established émigré writers who saw the preservation and amplification of the idealized image of pre-1917 Russia as their principal mission. With explicit reference now to Nabokov’s 1935 novel Invitation to a Beheading, Varshavskii once again asserted that modern man was split into an exterior layer of objectifications and an “authentic and genuine being that cannot be defined by any ‘passport’ designations” (Varshavskii, “O proze,” 413).49 Observing Paris life, the young émigré writers were surrounded by people who “lived only in the socialized segment of their ‘I’” (ibid.), the exterior realm of normality, success, and well-being with which the young émigrés could not—and positively refused to—identify. At the same time Varshavskii realized the risk attached to this solipsistic trend: forgetting that the celebration of the self ought to be wedded—if only as an ideal—to a celebration of the “personality of the other, of each person, of all people,” as in “the great past of Russian literature” (414). Gazdanov’s position, which was soon taken to be representative of the anxieties of the younger generation, was severely criticized by both Adamovich and Osorgin who considered pessimism a “legitimate”—though ultimately counterproductive—attitude.50 Osorgin’s criticism grew even more unrelenting in an article published following the appearance of Varshavskii’s second intervention in the debate. The title, “On the ‘Desolation of the Soul,’” already hinted at Osorgin’s distance from the younger literati’s self-understanding as a generation shaped exclusively by the experience of solitude and deprivation.51 While the financial situation of the émigré literati was indeed precarious, the malaise of isolation seemed unduly overemphasized. Admittedly, the émigrés did not have a home of their own, but from their Paris vantage point they had “the whole world at their disposal,” and it was difficult to accept that these creative resources should yield nothing but an “inner void and the assertion of one’s ‘solitude.’” Attacking the young generation’s infatuation with Proust, Osorgin went so far as to call the state of inner desolation a “private matter”: after all, other (read: the better) prose writers of the younger generation displayed an affinity with “the world struggle for genuine humanism” in their works. In brief, Osorgin called on the exponents of existential angst to “stop wallowing in self-pity.” Vladislav Khodasevich, who since the mid-1920s had increasingly been expending his energy on literary criticism, and was, at the time of contributing to the debate, the chief literary commentator of the inf luential

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newspaper Vozrozhdenie, spoke last in this discussion. While agreeing with Aldanov that adverse economic conditions were a major impediment, causing as they did a chronic decline in the number of educated readers, he took issue with Aldanov’s oversimplistic contrast between the situation in the Soviet Union and in emigration (Soviet literature enjoyed a wide audience and state protection but no freedom, whereas the émigré writers had freedom but no readership and no economic security). In the émigré environment, Khodasevich—against Aldanov’s optimism—detected another type of coercion. Safe from political social orders, émigré literature was exposed to, and often also driven by, aesthetic and intellectual orders: one demanded of émigré writers that their “works be ideologically and artistically simple and outdated” (Khodasevich, “Pered kontsom,” 181). 52 In his brilliant essay, Khodasevich diagnosed Russian émigré literature as suffering from submission to the imperatives of what, in today’s terms, one might term the nostalgia industry, an ideological and aesthetic enterprise catering, according to him, to the existing mass audience of philistine, lowbrow, moderately educated expatriates, whose thirst for the old and familiar made them uncomfortable with the very freshness and unfamiliarity of the themes, devices, and even the “previously unknown names” of the younger literati (ibid.). Although enjoying freedom from censorship and political sanctions in the émigré environment, a book that was beyond the comprehension of this readership would not be printed or sold, Khodasevich warned; its author would suffer the “silent, decorous” sanction “called hunger.” In Russia, literature had been naturally stratified, with different genres and writers reaching different social layers and classes; in emigration, however, it had become “‘classless’ in the most bitter-ironic sense”: it reached only “individuals dotted across the vast space of our dispersion.” Thus the freedom of émigré literature that Aldanov had so ardently praised was merely “freedom to cry in the desert” (182–83). Disputes over the Canon

The polemics over “young literature” betrayed a very clear sense of generational change and shifting notions of literary value. The new cohort of writers, whose formative years were spent largely outside Russia, had unorthodox answers to the question about the social mission of literature and its loyalty to tradition. An ongoing polemic reexamining the central axis of the Russian poetry canon of the nineteenth century and juxtaposing Pushkin and Lermontov was a sa-

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lient feature of this rethinking of literary reputations that accompanied the rise of the new generation on the Paris literary scene. The location—Paris—is significant here, for the emerging Lermontov cult was indeed confined to Montparnasse and was part and parcel of what was quickly becoming known as the “Paris note” in émigré poetry.53 It was not by accident that Paris was the center of this new cult. In the early 1920s, Berlin had offered propitious ground for the collaboration of Russian and German avantgarde artists who were members of the international Constructivist movement, but in the latter half of the decade, following the collapse of book publishing in Germany as a result of hyperinflation, the capital of Russian émigré cultural life shifted to Paris. Many of the younger Russian literati in Paris were actively pursuing their interest in writers and styles that were shaping the modernist literary landscape, foremost Proust and Joyce. For these younger literati, French and, more widely, European literary life was gaining increasing significance; it was often more germane to their own artistic preoccupations than the timehonored, ossified catalogue of Russian masterpieces, with the totemic veneration of Pushkin at its core. While the émigré Pushkiniana was flourishing in quantitative terms, a new sense of priorities was emerging.54 Georgii Adamovich was the patron of this revisionist drive, which in the eyes of the established émigré writers who had launched their careers before 1917 appeared to be little less than unforgivable infidelity to the ideals and the values of the past. Lermontov was the unsung hero of the poets of the “Paris note,” a choice partly conditioned by the desire to counterbalance the religious and moralistic tone at the heart of the literary hierarchy erected and guarded by the older generation. In 1899, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov had delivered a public lecture on Lermontov, posthumously published as an article, in which he acknowledged Lermontov’s genius but implied that this was, rather, a Western genius of utter concentration on one’s own subjectivity, and thus an exception in the history of Russian letters. Even when speaking of something else, Lermontov ultimately spoke of himself; Pushkin, on the other hand, “even when he speaks of himself, seems to be speaking of someone else,”55 demonstrating a gift of openness to the world. As if this would not have sufficed to cast a shadow on Lermontov, Solovyov reproached him for not being strong enough in fighting his “demon of pride” and for failing to embrace “humility” (344). Genius he no doubt was, but he took this extraordinary gift of God as a right and privilege—not as a duty to serve (340). Adamovich and his fellow literati of the younger generation discerned in Solovyov’s verdict the rigor of

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public expectations they no longer felt called upon to meet. To them, literature had ceased to be a moral watchtower and had become a “human document,” a phrase often employed by Adamovich and borrowed by him from Edmond de Goncourt who had used document humain in the mid-1870s to signal naturalism’s loyalty to, and appreciation of, the details of everyday life. On the divisive Lermontov issue, Adamovich and his followers found themselves closer to another established position in Russian literary criticism, that of Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who in his article “M. Iu. Lermontov: A Poet of Superhumanity,” first published in 1909, had declared Lermontov’s daring a virtue rather than a sin. Merezhkovsky coined the polar distinction between Pushkin and Lermontov (he had similarly coined an influential if somewhat crude opposition between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) that was to resurface in the writings of the younger émigrés almost thirty years later: “Pushkin is the diurnal, Lermontov the nocturnal luminary of Russian poetry, the whole of which oscillates between them as between the two poles of contemplation and action” (Pushkin’s poetry positing, for Merezhkovsky, the pole of inaction and contemplation).56 “Why did Lermontov draw closer to us? Why do we all of the sudden want to talk about him?”57 Merezhkovsky asked. A similar sense of Lermontov having drawn closer to their concerns was informing the attempts of the younger generation of Paris émigrés to reorganize the canon of Russian literature: in the opening editorial of Novyi korabl' (New Ship), a journal of the young generation, in which Merezhkovsky and Gippius nonetheless played a dominant part, Pushkin was conspicuously missing from the list of names (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Lermontov among them—but also Vladimir Solovyov) supplying the young literati with a link between the past and the future.58 The leading critic of the “young,” Georgii Adamovich, had begun praising Lermontov even earlier. As part of his “Literary Conversations” in Zveno, he questioned the healthiness of a situation in which “the Pushkin canon of [a] clear, firm, male, ‘sunny’ attitude to life seemed the only one,” rendering Lermontov “provincial, old-fashioned, and ever so slightly ridiculous with his melancholy.”59 Adamovich’s objection was informed not only by Merezhkovsky but also by Vasilii Rozanov’s judgment in his 1898 essay “An Eternally Sad Duel”: “by the structure of his spirit he [Pushkin] is facing the past, not the future”; Pushkin was an autumnal “echo”; “he gave us the ‘resonance’ of universal beauty in its fading accords.” In contrast to Pushkin’s “autumnal feel,” Lermontov introduced to Russian literature the “current of ‘vernal’ prophecy.”60 In a later article, “Pushkin and Lermontov” (1914), Rozanov, not unlike

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Merezhkovsky, constructed an antithesis between Pushkin as a poet of “harmony,” “accord,” and “happiness,” “the head of world-wide safeguarding,” and Lermontov, who was suggested to be an example of motion, dynamism, and of a realization that “the world had ‘sprung and run away,’” not to be captured or conserved in simple and transparent words.61 In a brief article on Lermontov in 1916, Rozanov brings to a head this simmering contrast: “Pushkin was allencompassing, but old—‘former’ . . . Lermontov was totally new, unexpected, ‘unforetold.’”62 Adamovich was thus not entirely original in observing that “in our poetry, Pushkin faces the past, Lermontov looks forward.”63 In a review discussing Boris Pasternak’s narrative poem “Lieutenant Schmidt,” Adamovich formulated his distance from Pushkin, concluding: “It seems the world is indeed more complex and richer than Pushkin imagined it to be.” Adamovich called on the new generations of Russian writers, both in Russia and abroad, to realize that following Pushkin (an act that did not amount to following the “line of greatest resistance”) might well prevent them from learning to speak with voices of their own.64 This perceived relinquishing of Pushkin’s legacy drew a retort from Khodasevich, in which he raised the stakes of the polemic, demonizing Adamovich, in an article suggestively titled “The Demons,” for the alleged lack of patriotism displayed in his questioning of Pushkin’s standing.65 A counterresponse followed swiftly, in which Adamovich emphasized the futility of calls for a return to Pushkin.66 The contrast between Pushkin and Lermontov was further elaborated in Adamovich’s articles “Lermontov” and “Pushkin i Lermontov,” both in 1931.67 Adamovich now maintained that this opposition had also gained relevance in the Soviet Union, where a division seemed to be under way between those orientated toward Pushkin and those drawing their example and inspiration from Lermontov; the Soviet Lermontov vogue even took on proportions that called forth “irritation and puzzlement” among “literature’s guardians” (Adamovich, “Pushkin i Lermontov”).68 Lermontov’s crucial advantage over Pushkin was couched by Adamovich in terms strikingly reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin’s praise of flux and lack of closure. Thus Lermontov’s “idea of man and the world is not finalized, is in progress, and not put in equilibrium and order”; this makes him an “ally and partner rather than a reproachful ideal” (576).69 Formal perfection in Pushkin came at the price of expunging man from poetry. As a poet, Lermontov was no doubt far less perfect than Pushkin, but instead of crafting a “porcelain trifle” (Adamovich was referring to Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”), Lermontov probed

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the deeper layers of the soul, inaccessible to the serene and classically accomplished Pushkin. Adamovich concluded from this juxtaposition that “outward completeness” should not be privileged over “inner riches,” nor should the “object” be allowed to triumph over “spirit” (580). This line was carried forward in Adamovich’s famous “Commentaries,” a rubric reserved for him at Chisla (1930–34), the journal of the younger Paris literati (in which Merezhkovsky’s and Gippius’s influence was still recognizable, despite Chisla’s polemic against Gippius,70 with other writers of the older generation, notably Boris Zaitsev, also valued and published in its pages). The younger writers around Chisla believed literature to be a field of experimentation and, as suggested before, a “human document” rather than an exercise in correctness, regularity, and formal glitter. In the very first issue of Chisla, Adamovich submitted that Pushkin, by the time of his violent death, had already reached the natural end of his career as a poet; no way forward was seen for him (in contrast to Lermontov).71 In his second set of “Commentaries,” Adamovich warned that the recent “collapse of the notion of artistic perfection has most markedly affected our relationship to Pushkin.”72 Without formal perfection, Adamovich implied, there was very little Pushkin could offer a generation of writers who avidly read Proust, Joyce, and Gide, seeking to cultivate and assert their own sensitivities in a Western cultural metropolis. In a review published in the same instalment of Chisla, Adamovich apostrophized the young poets of the emigration: “Gentlemen, sacrifice your classicism and strictness, your purity, your Pushkinism, write—if only a pair of words—in such a manner as if you had known nothing prior to them.”73 “Pushkinism” was Adamovich’s shorthand for a fetish-like veneration and imitation of the poet without heeding the realities of modern life (Khodasevich was also skeptical of “Pushkinism,” but he understood by this merely the fetishization of Pushkin through scholarship, above all in the Soviet Union; his reservations had been anticipated by Boris Eikhenbaum who noted the process of trivializing Pushkin from a “monument” into a “plaster statuette”).74 It was these perceived assaults on Pushkin’s authority by Adamovich that prompted Alfred Bem, in Prague, to defend the cult of the poet. In an article titled “The Pushkin Cult and Those Who Shake the Tripod,” Bem stigmatized Adamovich as “the theoretician of this new anti-Pushkin movement” and Chisla as the periodical that sheltered it (Bem, “Kul't Pushkina i kolebliushchie trenozhnik”).75 It is important to note that the title of Bem’s text played on Khodasevich’s 1921 article, “The Shaken Tripod,” an early admonition of

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the need to keep alive Pushkin’s lessons at a time when history had rendered his epoch remote and seemingly less relevant. Published while Khodasevich was still in Soviet Russia, the article invoked the last verse of Pushkin’s poem “To the Poet,” which declared that the artist’s freedom should rise above the crowds and highlighted their immature and destructive attitude toward their poets. Like Khodasevich, Bem demanded that the new generations of poets heed rather than refuse Pushkin’s biddings and rediscover his oeuvre for their own time: “without a cult of the past, there are no attainments in the future” (“Kul't Pushkina,” 57). Nor was Bem the only ally of Khodasevich in the Pushkin vs. Lermontov debate of the mid-1930s: the subtexts of Nabokov’s novel The Gift (serialized in 1937–38 in Sovremennye zapiski, but not published in full until 1952), at the time all but transparent to the émigré artistic community, played on this topical debate, satirizing Adamovich in the figure of a female literary critic called “Khristofor Mortus,” a composite character whose male pseudonym concealed real-life features of Zinaida Gippius, Merezhkovsky, and Nikolai Otsup, the (co-)editor of Chisla. Adamovich, the circle around Chisla, and their anti-Pushkin line were also the target of Nabokov’s satire in a short story, “Lips to Lips.”76 Bem was concerned that the digression from the norms of clarity and simplicity set by Pushkin was beginning to shape not just Adamovich’s preferences, but rather the outlook and the style of a wider circle of young literati around Chisla, the outlet Adamovich and his associates used for their “erosive work,” which, in the words of Gleb Struve in the Paris newspaper Rossiia i slavianstvo, amounted to an attack on “Russian culture, Russian statehood, Russia’s entire recent history.”77 In response to Letters about Lermontov (1935), a novel by Iurii Fel'zen (a pseudonym of Nikolai Freidenshtein, the first part of which was meant to signal his love for Lermontov),78 Bem wrote a sarcastic and apprehensive review titled “Metropolitan Provincialism,” accusing Fel'zen not only of following Adamovich’s “anti-Pushkin” line, but also of paraphrasing portions of the latter’s “Commentaries” in his novel (Bem, “Stolichnyi provintsializm”).79 As a matter of fact, metropolitanism (stolichnost') was to Fel'zen a feature based not just on space, but just as much on history and the experience of time. Provincialism inhabited the folds of “dim, ordinary, difficult to remember,” and eventless years (59). Fel'zen’s protagonist, on the contrary, prided himself on being metropolitan in the sense of having witnessed historic events that raised him above and beyond provincial mentality. Added to this sensation of having been thrust onto the stage of history is the protagonist’s affinity for

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French literature. The names of at least half a dozen French writers are strewn all over the novel, but it is Proust’s that stands out unmistakably. Proust aids Fel'zen’s protagonist in shedding the “constraining ‘skin of homogeneity’” (30), that is, cultural uniformity grounded in a suffocating and intrusive notion of Russianness. In the eyes of Fel'zen’s protagonist, Proust’s writing rearranges the entire European literary canon: “If there ever was a miracle known to us, this is, of course, Proust, who has already somehow outshone Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” (29). On balance, Tolstoy fares better than Dostoevsky in this account and, together with Lermontov and Proust, is cited as an example of “goodness” and of the all-important ability to write “about man in general” (52). Yet it is Lermontov who appears most often (almost always in Proust’s company) as an emanation of the new ideals of the younger metropolitan intellectual. Fel'zen constructs an image of Lermontov consonant with that of Volodia, his introspective and meditative protagonist, who shies away from the practical aspects of life and prefers instead to ponder the depths of human interiority: “Lermontov was simply a human being, and, immersed in himself, he relentlessly thought about himself and his life” (58). Compared with Lermontov’s predilection for contemplation, Pushkin’s prose strikes Fel'zen’s protagonist as “flat, dim-grey, and lightweight,” lacking in “sincere personal tone” (10, 11). Lermontov and Proust are thus being enthroned as the new icons of a generation that considered literature to be, in Boris Poplavsky’s words, “a private letter sent to an unknown address,” not an instrument of civic and moral edification (Poplavskii, “O misticheskoi,” 309).80 Refusing to be measured by external success, even rhyming success with swindle, and hence calling Pushkin “somewhat deceitful” (309), Poplavsky, just like Fel'zen after him, endorsed Adamovich’s reshuffling of the canon: “How can one speak of the age of Pushkin at all. There is only the time of Lermontov” (310).81 Significant here is the contrast between “age” (epokha), with its implication of grandeur and the intimation of limited duration, and “time” (vremia), devoid of immediate greatness, but suggesting open-endedness and contemporaneity: the time of Lermontov has arrived, and he has become a friend and ally of the younger Paris émigré literati. In claiming to be the exponent of a metropolitan worldview, Fel'zen was asserting a new allocation of cultural capital, and, as we have seen, a new version of the canon. This was seen as a twofold affront by Bem, who, as noted earlier, accused Fel'zen (and by implication Adamovich) of false metropolitanism; Fel'zen’s protagonist, he insisted, resembled a provincial nonentity who had found himself by accident in the capital but had remained impassive and sev-

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ered from the great historical events of his time. He devoured the culture of the capital (Paris) with provincial eagerness and regurgitated it in an equally provincial, unassimilated, and tiresomely “pretentious” manner.82 The simplicity that marked Lermontov’s style was beyond Fel'zen’s reach; ironically, his Letters about Lermontov merely documented an undigested, provincial modernism, and as such could not assert a revision of the canon and of Pushkin’s place in it. The battles over the canon were thus accompanied by a heated discussion about what constituted metropolitanism and provincialism in émigré literature, and how the domain of émigré culture was to be reconstituted and divided, a polemic that lasted throughout the 1930s, reflecting the new artistic sensitivities cultivated in Paris and the distance that was building up between the French capital and other centers of émigré literature.83 The last word in this protracted debate seems to have come from Adamovich, who in 1939, the year of Lermontov’s 125th anniversary, published his strongest statement yet (Adamovich, “Lermontov”).84 Adamovich here returns to his idea of Pushkin and Lermontov as “two poles, two poetic ideals” (841); he makes repeated use of his tried and tested criterion of evaluation: in terms of poetic quality, Pushkin’s verse is no doubt better, but in its “aspirations—if not its accomplishments—Lermontov’s poetry reached farther than Pushkin’s” (843). To the 1930s Paris literati, “Pushkin remained a god, [while] Lermontov became a friend, in the intimacy of whose presence everybody would become purer and freer” (843). Retrospectively surveying the scene of Russian émigré literature in Paris, Georgii Fedotov reiterated this underlying opposition: “Pushkin is too lucid and earthly, too much asserting life and too accomplished in his form. The Parisians, rather, perceive the world as hell and want to demolish any established forms that are turning into fetters. Lermontov is closer to them.”85 Lermontov was thus considered a better embodiment of the new understanding of the relevance of literature in exile, and of the writer’s public role: no longer a “national poet,” but a diasporic voice in a culture subsisting increasingly on adaptation, hybridity, and live interaction with Western literature, art, and philosophy. The canon wars, particularly those at Chisla, were keenly observed in the Soviet Union, where Vladimir Ermilov dedicated a few cynical passages to them in an article welcoming the Party decree to liquidate the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and establish a single Union of Soviet Writers. Ermilov claims in this embarrassing document of vulgar sociologism (using disturbingly coarse language) that the “white-guardist” war over the canon is evidence of the “cannibalism” of the bourgeoisie, which is now prepared to give

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up and destroy what was truly valuable in its own bourgeois and aristocratic past. Writing after the appearance of the first five issues of Chisla, Ermilov concludes that who exactly will win this skirmish is immaterial, since the white guard would most certainly “abandon Lermontov tomorrow,” just as it was now turning against Pushkin. The Soviet working class, by contrast, should ignore these wars and take what is best from each of the two poets and make it work for the proletarian cause.86 The émigré canon wars were thus held at arm’s length, a sign of their potential significance—and that of émigré literary criticism as a whole—just as the battles in Soviet aesthetics and literary history over the legacy of the nineteenth century were coming to a head. The doctrines adopted a couple of years later by the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers were to solidify the return to a regime of relevance in which literature drew its significance from its capacity to engage directly with the political agenda of the day.

EPILOGUE A F as t -Forward t o “World L it e r a t ure ”

I began this book by stating that today the legacy of modern literary theory is not available in a pure and concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, often fittingly elusive. The reason for this is that this inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and must negotiate. The patrimony of literary theory is currently active within a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly treasured autonomy. This regime of relevance has engendered an interpretative framework that has recently grown and gained enormous popularity, not least in the classroom, as “world literature.” I put the words in quotation marks, not least because they usually refer to a particular liberal Anglo-Saxon discourse grounded in assumptions of mobility, transparency, and a recontextualizing (but also decontextualizing) circulation that supports the free consumption and unrestricted comparison of literary artifacts.

Russian Literar y Theor y and “World Literature”: Bakhtin and Shklovsky Whether obliquely or more directly, many of the major trends in Russian literary theory during the interwar decades were relevant to this regime of understanding and valorizing literature in the multiple contexts of its global production and consumption. Bakhtin, for example, begins his book on Rabe-

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lais with a reference precisely to world literature: “Of all great writers of world literature, Rabelais is the least popular, the least understood and appreciated.”1 Paying lip service to the then powerful notion of world literature as a body of canonical writing, Bakhtin ostensibly compares Rabelais to Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, but this understanding of world literature does not really interest him. Instead, Bakhtin takes a different route, reconceptualizing the study of world literature as a study of the processes that shape the novel to become a world genre, a global discursive power. Of course, Bakhtin is indebted here to the Russian Formalists: for him, too, the novel is the underdog of world literature, whose discursive energies are at first feeble and scattered, unnamed for a long time, until they begin to coalesce and rise to prominence.2 Bakhtin’s engagement with world literature is distinctly non-Eurocentric and, as I hinted in the third chapter, non-philological. He works with the novels he lists mostly in translation, as does Shklovsky before him. Bakhtin appears to be relying on a Western-European canon to validate his theses. But, in truth, he is more interested in the literature and culture of premodernity, the time when Europe was not yet a dominant force, long before the continent began to see itself as the center of the world. Bakhtin is thus actually a thinker much more fascinated by the subterranean cultural deposits of folklore, of minor discourses, of ancient genres, of anonymous verbal masses. All this long predates the European culture of the age of modernity (beginning roughly with the Renaissance, but especially since the eighteenth century when the doctrine of cultural Eurocentrism is worked out by the French philosophes, only to witness its first major crisis in the years around World War I), which is the only dominant (Eurocentric) European culture we know. Even Rabelais’s novel interests him above all for its traditional, premodern, folklore-based layers. Bakhtin performs a flight away from Eurocentrism, not by writing on non-European cultures, but by writing on pre-European cultures, on cultures that thrived on the shared property of folklore, rites, rituals, and epic narratives, before Europe even began to emerge as an entity on the cultural and political map of the world: his is an anti-Eurocentric journey not in space, but in time.3 His contemporaries, the semantic paleontologists Nikolai Marr and Ol'ga Freidenberg (whose writings, as we have seen, Bakhtin knew), did something similar in their work on myth and preliterary discourses. All of this casts Bakhtin’s work in a new light and allows us to enlist him as an early predecessor of the non-Eurocentric and translation-friendly thrust of today’s Anglo-Saxon academic programs in world literature. But I would like now to turn my attention to a case study of the diffuse and

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dispersed afterlife of Russian literary theory in the new regime of relevance that sustains the framework of “world literature” today. This case study uncovers Viktor Shklosky’s previously overlooked engagement with the discursive domain we currently tend to refer to as “world literature,” which unfolds in A Sentimental Journey, arguably the richest part of his 1920s memoir trilogy. Shklovsky’s work has already been discussed through the prism of mobility and nomadism;4 what I would like to do here is to begin to shift this discussion toward recognition—still outstanding—of his active involvement in, and reaction to, early Soviet discourses and practices of world literature. The publication history of Viktor Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey in Russia is indicative of the turmoil he captures in his memoir. Written and published in parts between June 1919 and January 1923, this was a book, begun in Russia and completed in emigration, about war, revolution, literary theory, and—crucially, and so far unnoticed—about world literature. In its entirety, it first appeared in January 1923 in Berlin; the many Russian editions since 1923 would omit various portions of the book (deemed to be incompatible with official dogma), right down to 2002, when the text of the Berlin edition was republished in Moscow.5 Thus Sentimental Journey is also about exile and the long journey home, which sometimes comes to an end only posthumously (Shklovsky had passed away in Moscow in December 1984). On first reading, Sentimental Journey is a book about the February and October revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war that engulfed Russia and its empire. It starts with memorable passages about Shklovsky’s life before the revolutions: dullness, dreariness, and constant oppression through the tedious passage of time make up the dominant mood in the opening paragraphs. The beginning is thus mutely suggestive of cataclysm and estrangement waiting to happen in order to mitigate this unbearable sense of flatness. Estrangement is very much Shklovsky’s master technique in Sentimental Journey: he often chronologically reshuffles the episodes he narrates, leaves entire semantic entities dangling without resolution, and resurrects the tradition of wit and paradox in order to present the reader with an exposition of the war and the two revolutions that is not linear and, ultimately, eschews taking sides, working instead across political dividing lines. In an extraordinary passage on the death of his brother, Evgeny, Shklovsky states: “He was killed by the Reds or the Whites. I don’t remember which—I really don’t remember. But his death was unjust” (156). It would be hard to find a better example of political withdrawal in favor of a strong ethical judgment; only Kolya, Gaito Gazdanov’s protagonist from

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An Evening with Claire, rivals this reluctance to commit politically when he says that joining the Whites was mere accident—he might just as easily have joined the Reds. As a member of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Shklovsky rejected the October Revolution, but in his memoir he highlights its attractiveness, its sheer incommensurability, scale, and purifying force. Remarkably, Shklovsky’s memoir weaves into this powerful narrative of revolutions and conflicts a third one: an examination of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism during the war; in the East, in Persia, Shklovsky notes the absence of anti-Semitism as a factor that helps his reconciliation with, and acceptance of, the locals. A Sentimental Journey is thus a book that straddles intense self-reflection and unmitigated self-abandonment to fate: citing Spinoza’s famous example of the “falling stone,” Shklovsky quips that “a falling stone does not need to think” (133). Shklovsky’s memoir is not just about war and revolution, however; it is also about world literature. Shklovsky’s involvement in the emergent Russian debate on world literature was direct and, as often with him, marked by commitment and distance in the same breath. In 1919, he joined “World Literature,” Gorky’s large-scale publishing project, educational and socially ameliorative at its core (the Russian vsemirnaia literatura can be translated as both world literature and universal literature), which aimed at the establishment in postrevolutionary Russia of a new, expanded canon of world literature, including—for the first time—works not just from Western literatures, but also from the literatures of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. These works had to be translated (in some cases retranslated to replace earlier poor translations), equipped with proper introductions and apparatus, and made available in scholarly reliable but cheap editions to those previously disenfranchised: the workers, peasants, and soldiers, in short, the classes of the oppressed. The project was centered in Petrograd, and its infrastructure included a publishing house which, at its zenith, would employ around 350 editors and translators (something difficult to imagine today), and a translators’ studio meant to familiarize younger translators with translation theory, literary theory, and related fields.6 It was to this studio that Shklovsky was recruited by Gorky to give lectures on literary theory. Petrograd was at that time a city ravaged by famine and civil war, in the grip of dire poverty and utter insecurity. In his Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky laconically notes his aunt’s death from starvation; it was in this atmosphere that he threw himself into Gorky’s project. The ambition to promote a non-Eurocentric approach to world literature was particularly

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important: early on, Gorky established an editorial committee on oriental literatures chaired by the academician Sergei Oldenburg, his friend of long standing and dean of Russian Indology; the committee also included the brilliant sinologist Vasilii Alekseev, the renowned Arabist Ignatii Krachkovskii, the already famous archeologist and linguist Nikolai Marr, the journalist and writer Aleksandr Tikhonov, and Gorky himself.7 The paradox at the heart of this project was not, of course, the fact that Gorky set out to redress decades of social injustice; he regarded his project precisely as an instrument of radical social transformation, in which previously disadvantaged layers of society would be offered access to the greatest works of literature. But this radical social transformation, meant to facilitate upward mobility for millions of people, was to be achieved through the most conservative of methods: by invoking a secure (if augmented) canon of, to recall Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture from Culture and Anarchy, “the best that has been thought and said.” Gorky’s radical project was thus tempered by his humanist notion of world literature as a canon of texts and a tool of inculcating the virtues of civility and erudition (or “learnedness,” in the language of that epoch). This understanding of world literature goes back to the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century when Wieland (not by accident the author of the first important German novel of education), some 25 years before Goethe, in a short and elliptic manner talked about world literature as an instrument of self-improvement that teaches us to better communicate with others and supplies knowledge of the world we would otherwise not have access to.8 Some of the best contemporary Russian writers and translators worked for Gorky’s translators’ studio, including Evgeny Zamyatin, Nikolai Gumilev, and Kornei Chukovskii (who had already published translations of Walt Whitman’s poetry); of the Russian Formalists, Boris Eikhenbaum was also invited to contribute. Shklovsky notes in his memoir that the translators’ studio quickly evolved into a “literary studio,” where drafts of literary works were discussed and literary theory and criticism were on the agenda. “I never in my life worked the way I did that year” (186), he writes. Shklovsky taught Don Quixote and Sterne to his young students and wrote the chapters on Cervantes and Sterne that were to be included in his book O teorii prozy (English translation, Theory of Prose) in conversation with them.

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The Portability of Literariness: Shklovsky’s Enduring Relevance It is very important at this juncture to place Shklovsky’s commitment to the idea of world literature in the broader context of our present debates on the subject. To understand “world literature” as a specific construct, we must ask the unavoidable question about the location of “world literature” vis-à-vis language, which has important consequences for how we interpret the dispersed legacy of modern literary theory founded by Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists. This question appears to be banal at first sight; yet, there could not be a more fundamental question when it comes to how we think about literature than the question of language. Here we need to confront the issue of translation and recognize its legitimacy, not just with reference to current debates (between those who champion the beneficial role of translation and those who treasure the idea of untranslatability as a way of opposing politically dubious equivalences),9 but by going to the very origins of modern literary theory and the work Shklovsky himself was doing in 1919–20, some of which he succinctly captures in his Sentimental Journey. My contention here is that we need to begin to understand the current Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature, in which the legitimization of reading and analyzing literature in and through translation plays a pivotal role, as an echo of, and a late intervention in, a debate that begins in the early days of modern literary theory.10 As we have seen in this book, modern literary theory, especially in the version elaborated by Russian Formalism, rests on the assumption that literature is a specific and unique discourse, whose distinctiveness crystalizes around the abstract quality of “literariness.” This way of thinking about literature, which was largely defunct by the 1990s, began with Shklovsky and his fellow Formalists around World War I; in Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky rages against those who think of literature primarily as a conveyor of political ideas and civic values, rather than as a specific, selfsufficient use of language: “How strange to substitute the history of Russian liberalism for the history of Russian literature” (192). But this classic version of literary theory did not disappear without leaving behind a dispersed legacy consisting in rehearsing, in various ways, the question of the centrality—or otherwise—of language in how we understand literature. The current debate on “world literature” is part and parcel of this dispersed legacy of literary theory, reenacting the cardinal debate about whether one should think literature within the horizon of language or beyond that horizon. It is incumbent upon us to

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recognize that the conversations on world literature in the Anglo-American academy are an extension of these earlier debates on language and literariness originating in the classic version of literary theory (not least because, like so many other discourses of liberal persuasion, the discourse on world literature, too, often passes over its own premises in silence, leaving them insufficiently reflected upon, and at times even naturalizing them). As is well known, the Russian Formalists agreed that what lends literature its specificity is literariness. But we tend to forget that they disagreed on what constitutes literariness.11 Roman Jakobson (mentioned once in A Sentimental Journey, but more frequently in Shklovsky’s only slightly later memoirs Zoo, or Letters not about Love and Third Factory) believed that literariness is lodged in the intricate, fine-grained workings of language. To him, only the language of the original matters, because this intricacy cannot be captured in translation. It was not by chance that Jakobson spent his entire career (when it comes to his work as a literary scholar) analyzing texts written in verse, basing these analyses on the language of the original. Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and to some extent also Tynianov, on the other hand, believed that the effects of literariness are also (and, in a sense, primarily) produced on levels above and beyond language. In a striking difference to Jakobson, Shklovsky, in particular, chose to analyze prose rather than poetry, and to do this in translation. This is precisely the work he was doing in the translators’ studio in Petrograd, of which he reminisces in his Sentimental Journey. It was the level of composition, rather than the microlevel of language, that claimed Shklovsky’s attention when trying to explain the effects of literariness. His famous distinction between plot and story, for example, also works with undiminishing validity when we read in translation; we do not need the language of the original to appreciate the transposition of the material and its reorganization through retrospection, retardation, and so on (techniques Shklovsky, sometimes following Sterne,12 himself abundantly employs in A Sentimental Journey). Moreover, Shklovsky and Tynianov proved that even on the level of style, the language of the original is not the only vehicle of literariness. The parodic aspects of Don Quixote, for instance, can be gleaned and grasped also in translation, provided we have some background knowledge of chivalric culture and its conventions. Thus the Russian Formalists’ internal debate on what constitutes literariness—and Shklovsky’s belief in its portability beyond the language of the original—had the unintended consequence of lending ammunition and justification today to those who believe in the legitimacy of reading and analyzing literature in translation.

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Let me repeat: the current discourse of “world literature” is an iteration of the principal question of modern literary theory at the time of its birth: should one think literature within or beyond the horizon of language? This specific iteration recasts this question, while retaining its theoretical momentum. Shklovsky (who was blissfully monolingual and, as we have seen, taught Cervantes and Sterne in translation in the translators’ studio) and Eikhenbaum (who, despite being a reader of English who could—and did—work with texts of fiction in the original, also often highlighted the fact that literariness materializes on the level of composition, rather than solely on the micro-level of language) both faced the foundational conundrum of literary theory: how to account for literariness with reference to both individual languages and language per se; if this response was to be seminal in terms of theory, it had to be a response that addressed both the singularity of language (the language of the original) and its multiplicity (the multiple languages in which a literary text reaches its potential audiences in translation). There could be no legitimate claim to theory unless literariness could be demonstrated to operate across languages, in an act of continuous estrangement from the language of the original. The Anglo-Saxon discourse on world literature, foremost in the work of David Damrosch, has proceeded—so it seems to me—in the steps of Shklovsky by foregrounding the legitimacy of working in translation. Damrosch has implicitly confronted the tension between the singularity and multiplicity of language by concluding that studying a literary work in the languages of its socialization is more important than studying it in the language of its production, not least because this new priority restricts and undermines the monopoly of methodological nationalism in literary studies. (The languages of creation and socialization can, of course, coincide, and the implications flowing from this, especially where this coincidence involves a global language such as English, are something worth thinking about; equally, there are cases in which more than one language can be deployed in producing a work of literature—but never as many as the plethora of languages that provide the infrastructure for its circulation.)13 Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey is thus not just a monument to the February and October revolutions and the ensuing civil war; it is also a monument to one of the most seminal moments in the evolution of literary theory, which still reverberates in our current debates on world literature. The wide-ranging implications of Shklovsky’s highlighting the legitimacy of reading and analyzing literature in translation mitigates, at least to some extent, concerns by some

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of his contemporaries that the Formalists’ concept of literariness was based on the discussion of an overwhelmingly Eurocentric (and thus certainly relatively narrow and insufficiently representative) corpus of texts.14 Yet one should not assume that Shklovsky embraced Gorky’s project unreservedly. In a splendid passage from Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky ironically distances himself from what he clearly perceived as a project on too grand a scale, and one that sought to revolutionize culture through the conservative educational tools of the canon. In the passage Shklovsky refers to both Gorky’s world literature project and the eponymous publishing house: “World Literature.” A Russian writer mustn’t write what he wants to: he must translate the classics, all the classics; everyone must translate and everyone must read. Everyone will read everything and will know everything, absolutely everything. No need for hundreds of publishing houses; one will do— Grzhebin’s. And a catalogue projected to one hundred years, a catalogue one hundred printer’s signatures long; in English, French, Indo-Chinese and Sanskrit. And all the literati and all the writers will fill in the schemes according to rubrics, supervised by none other than S. Oldenburg and Alexandre Benois, and then shelves of books will be born, and everyone will read all the shelves and know everything. No heroism or faith in people is needed here. . . . But for the Russian intelligentsia, Gorky was [a true] Noah. . . . (189; translation modified)

This is Shklovsky at his best: both passionate and restrained, ironically distanced and committed. He clearly objects to Gorky’s project of world literature, as he sees in it a coercive instrument of imposing a nonnegotiable canon (“the classics”); Shklovsky seems even to suggest that Gorky’s project is a form of censorship, and of contempt for the freedom of expression. There is also a dormant nationalism in Shklovsky’s indictment of Gorky’s implied criticism of Russian literature as provincial compared to the canon of world literature. The enumeration of languages into which the overambitious catalogue of the “World Literature” publishing house was to be printed is—without a shadow of a doubt—only half-serious in tone (“Indo-Chinese” is Shklovsky’s mocking evocation of a [nonexisting] single language of the East; “Sanskrit” was by that time largely out of vernacular use). (As a matter of fact, Gorky’s World Literature publishing house published two separate catalogues [both in 1919]: one containing a list [marked as “provisional”] of translations of literary works from Europe and North America, and one of [intended] translations from non-Western litera-

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tures [titled “The Literature of the Orient”]; the first catalogue featured an essay by Gorky and editorial apparatus, both also translated into French, English, and German, whereas the second catalogue had an unsigned brief introduction and editorial apparatus, both available in the catalogue solely in Russian and French.)15 Even before his criticism voiced in the memoir, Shklovsky had already once openly shared with Gorky his discontent with the project’s understanding of world literature, which was in danger of reproducing a mechanical view of it as the sum total of its parts, thus accounting for its variety in merely spatial terms: “Grzhebin’s publishing house, and the House of Scholars, and ‘World Literature’ (real name: ‘the whole of the world’ [literature])—this is also a [case of] spatial perception,” Shklovsky wrote.16 The fascination of Sentimental Journey for today’s reader lies in its idiosyncratic, sometimes even whimsical, portrayal of war and revolution—a memoir that zigzags through five years of history, from Russia to Galicia to northern Iran to Russia, then to Ukraine, back to Russia, back to Ukraine, and then on again to Russia, to Finland and Germany, capturing acts of profound transformation through the ephemera of daily life; a memoir displaying Shklovsky’s blissful disregard for dates (he cannot recall whether he married in 1919 or 1920 [177]), and his playful employment of compositional techniques of estrangement à la Sterne. But Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey is also a valuable piece of engagement with literary theory through fiction: an early—and at the time pioneering—attempt to practice theory without a theoretical meta-language. This daring attempt, which begins with Sentimental Journey, intensifies in the next two memoirs written by Shklovsky (Zoo, or Letters not about Love and Third Factory); it foreshadows post-Structuralism’s endeavor (especially evident in Roland Barthes’s later work) to amalgamate fiction and theory productively in an uncharted journey through the text. Paradoxical, ironic, difficult, at times soberly pessimistic, Shklovsky’s greatest achievement in his Sentimental Journey is the realization that one has to confront and test the language of (Formalist) literary theory against the language of fiction by staging their symbiotic existence within a single work. Through Shklovsky’s early memoirs—including his Sentimental Journey—Russian Formalism comes into its own, realizing that the most significant Other of literary theory is literature itself.17 It is this twofold relevance of Shklovsky’s text—as a quirky document of its time and as an intervention in consequential debates on literary theory and on world literature—that extends its life across time and space. Shklovsky was to continue his engagement with the Soviet discourse of world literature dur-

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ing the 1930s, especially in the several different versions of his Marco Polo,18 a narrative about travel to and from East Asia that, in fact, staged a journey across landmasses which were to become a part of the Asian territories of the Soviet Union. Orientalism, empire, and world literature19 were to meet in this deceptively modest book in a way that was both fascinating and ideologically profoundly ambivalent. Shklovsky was thus directly engaged with the Soviet discourse and practices of world literature; but his single most important contribution, in my view, was to have posed the question about what constitutes literariness—and to have answered it in a way that continues to impact our current polemics around world literature. His insistence that the literary core of literature travels well, his belief, in other words, that literariness is in the end portable, remains an unavoidable argument in these disputes, even when the academic practitioners of “world literature” are not always prepared to acknowledge this. Shklovsky, then, furnishes an ideal example of the diffuse, subterranean afterlife of Russian literary theory in our own century.

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NOTES

PROLOGUE 1. In the United States, the Polish émigré literary scholar Manfred Kridl published a fine English-language summary of the ideas of the Formalists in 1944 (Kridl, “Russian Formalism”), which was the first article in English to deal exclusively with Russian Formalism. In the same year, another émigré intellectual, Otto Maria Carpeaux (born Otto Karpfen in Vienna), who had fled to Brazil in 1939 and was to remain there until his death in 1978, mentioned Shklovsky’s book Theory of Prose in an essay on Dostoevsky in the Diário de Pernambuco (see Gomide, Dostoiévski, 257). Carpeaux was a prolific, encyclopedically knowledgeable literary critic; he frequently drew on the Formalists in his later work (for a biography, see Ventura, De Karpfen). In China, Qian Zhongshu cited Shklovsky as early as 1948, drawing attention to his theory of the canonization of minor genres (cf. Zhang, From Comparison, 129). Articles on Russian Formalism had appeared in Europe (foremost France, Germany, and Poland) during the 1920s– 30s; Dawid Hopensztand, who perished in 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, has emerged as arguably the shrewdest Central-European commentator on Russian Formalism in the interwar decades. 2. See, e.g., David Rodowick’s elegant Elegy for Theory (2014). 3. Cusset, French Theory, 99. 4. See Cole, Birth of Theory. 5. Cole, “Function,” 810. 6. For a terminological distinction between “literary theory” and “theory of literature,” see Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, 11–12. 7. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45. INTRODUCTION 1. Despite the recent trend of bringing together Central and Eastern Europe under the umbrella designation “East-Central Europe,” I prefer to preserve their differences, which in turn accentuate the many important similarities in the emergence of literary theory in these lands. For a powerful restatement of the differences between Central and Eastern Europe, see Neumann, “Europe’s Post–Cold War Memory of Russia.” 2. For studies in English of East and Central European literary theory in compara-

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tive perspective, see Steiner, “Roots”; Bojtár, Slavic Structuralism; Striedter, Literary Structure; Doležel, Occidental Poetics. 3. On the intellectual origins of Structuralism in Eastern and Central Europe and the connections of Trubetzkoy’s, Jakobson’s, and the Prague Circle’s linguistic doctrines with Saussure’s, see Sériot, Structure and the Whole. 4. For a study of Propp’s Russian predecessors, see Jason and Segal, “Precursors”; see also Gilet, Vladimir Propp. 5. On Vodička’s appropriation of Ingarden, see Schmid, “Zum Begriff ”; Fieguth, “Rezeption”; Doležel, “Structuralism of the Prague Circle,” in Selden, ed., From Formalism to Poststructuralism, 54–55. 6. Jauss, “Limits”; Szondi, Einführung; in English, see Szondi, On Textual Understanding. 7. Iser, Act of Reading. 8. For more on this, see Tihanov, Narrativas. 9. Cf. Kókai, Im Nebel, 235–36. 10. The literature on Auerbach and Spitzer has grown substantially over the past twenty years. For a very good overview, esp. with reference to the role of exile in their work, see Apter, Translation Zone, chap. 3; specifically on Auerbach, see, among others, Damrosch, “Auerbach”; Konuk, East West; Bormuth, “Erich Auerbach.” 11. On this nineteenth-century model, see Tihanov, “Cosmopolitanism,” 143–44. 12. Cf. the argument in Konuk, East West. 13. Cf. Ľubomir Ďurovič, “The Beginnings of Structuralism in Slovakia and the Bratislava Linguistic Circle,” in Matejka, ed., Sound, Sign and Meaning, 54. 14. Mauthner, Erinnerungen, 32–33. 15. Quoted in Galan, Historic Structures, xii. 16. Ingarden, Literary Work of Art, lxxii. 17. For a brief account of Shpet’s role, see Fokkema, “Continuity,” 164–65; for a masterful analysis of Shpet’s philosophy of language and his place in the phenomenological debates of the time, see Seifrid, Word Made Self. On the Prague Linguistic Circle and phenomenology, see Sus, “On the Genetic Preconditions,” 30. 18. See, above all, Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language. 19. See Jakobson, O cheshskom stikhe, 19. 20. Jakobson, “O realismu.” 21. See on this Tihanov, “Viktor Shklovsky and Georg Lukács.” 22. Cf. Neubauer, “Bakhtin versus Lukács.” 23. Lifshits, “Iz avtobiografii idei.” 24. Cf. Jakobson, “Společná,” here 110. 25. Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 10. 26. Ibid., 143. 27. On the history and the institutions of literary scholarship in Russia, see Byford, Literary Scholarship. 28. A concise and useful survey of the history of the institutionalization of English as an academic subject (including most of the dates adduced above) can be found in

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Wallace Martin, “Criticism and the Academy,” in Litz et al., eds., Modernism and the New Criticism, chap. 14. 29. In a different context, Cornis-Pope and Neubauer rightly observe that literature was institutionalized earlier in societies with problematic national identities—such as in Eastern and Central Europe (including Germany)—rather than in nations that had “a robust self-image,” such as England and France (cf. Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, Towards, 12). 30. Richards, Practical Criticism, 295. 31. My discussion of Richards draws here on Paul Fry’s excellent analysis in Litz et al., eds., Modernism and the New Criticism, chap. 8, esp. 191–93. 32. For an argument that highlights the novelty of Richards’s approach, see North, Literary Criticism, 22–25. 33. A shrewd description of the way in which the study of folklore and dialectology were imbued with elements of sociological analysis is offered in Ladislav Matejka, “Sociological Concerns in the Moscow Linguistic Circle,” in Pomorska, ed., Language, Poetry and Poetics, 307–12. Matejka singles out the attention to sociological analysis as a major difference between the Moscow wing of Formalism and Opoiaz (of which Jakobson and Bogatyrev wrote as early as 1922 in their article “Slavic Philology in Russia between 1914–1921”; cf. Matejka, “Sociological Concerns,” 311). 34. Jakobson, “Zadachi khudozhestvennoi propagandy,” Iskusstvo, no. 8 (5 September 1919). Jakobson adduces a quotation from Marx to promote novelty and experiment in form: “there comes a moment for all forms when they “are transformed from forms of development of productional forces into their chains” (quoted in Stephen Rudy, “Jakobson-Aljagrov and Futurism,” in Pomorska, ed., Language, Poetry and Poetics, 285). CHAPTER 1 1. See Iser, Fiktive. 2. Walzel, Wechselseitige Erhellung. 3. See Ingarden, Literary Work of Art. 4. See Bruster, “Shakespeare,” 45, for the attribution of the term to Dubrow (there also for Bruster’s claim that “New Formalism” is a “qualification” of New Historicism); indicatively, Bruster defines New Formalism as a “critical genre,” not as a method (ibid., 44). In the 1990s and in his later work, Stephen Cohen called for a “historical formalism” that would “reinvigorate New Historicism” (Cohen, “Introduction,” 14). For some of the methodological difficulties associated with New Formalism, see also Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” 5. On the genealogy and prehistory of Russian Formalism in terms of its disciplinary filiations, see recently Merrill, “Historical Poetics.” 6. See the quotation from Brunetière in Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 51. 7. Brik, “The So-Called Formal Method,” 90; Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, 27. 8. On 23 May 1928, Eikhenbaum wrote in his diary: “acquaintance with Pumpi-

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anskii. . . . He understands us well, but he calls us a religious sect and thinks us close to the Marxists [sblizhaet s marksistami]”; quoted in Ustinov, “Materialy,” 249. 9. See the contributions by Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Iakubinskii, Tynianov, Kazanskii, and Tomashevskii in Lef, no. 1 (1924): 53–148. 10. On this see more in Serguei Oushakine’s extensive introduction to Ushakin, ed. Formal'nyi metod, vol. 1. 11. Some of the most significant attempts at establishing “sociological poetics” as response to Formalism are analyzed by Erlich in his classic Russian Formalism. 12. “Boi marksistov s formalistami,” Krasnaia gazeta (vechernii vypusk), 1927 (8 March): 4. 13. “Raspad formalizma,” Zhizn' iskusstva, 1927 (15 March): 5 14. First published in Ustinov, “Materialy,” 254–60. 15. “Disput o formal'nom metode,” Novyi Lef, no. 3 (April 1927): 20–25; Eikhenbaum’s authorship is indicated in brackets in the journal’s index. 16. A concise description of the debate is given in Any, Boris Eikhenbaum, 96–98. 17. See Chukovskii, Dnevnik: 1901–1929, 398. 18. Ustinov, “Materialy disputa,” 254. 19. See Helmers, ed., Verfremdung in der Literatur. 20. Verfremdung, which is usually left untranslated in English to describe a particular concept credited to Brecht, is used almost universally in German as a translation of the Russian ostranenie, despite the clear awareness, especially among Slavists, of the differences involved. Here I preserve Verfremdung and ostranenie as two separate terms, translating the latter throughout as “estrangement.” On how Brecht’s theory of Verfremdung relates to ostranenie (estrangement), see the comments at the end of this section. In German, the picture is further complicated by the Hegelian-Marxist concept of Entfremdung (alienation), which often proves central in discussions of Verfremdung. 21. See above all Hansen-Löve, Der russische Formalismus. 22. From the literature examining the origins of estrangement and the concepts related to it (Verfremdung, defamiliarization, foregrounding) in aesthetics, philosophy, and the arts, see above all Grimm, “Verfremdung”; from the more recent literature, see, e.g., Günther, “Ostranenie—‘sniatie pokrovov’”; Botz, “‘Verfremdung’ against ‘Entfremdung’?”; Carlo Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange”; Ficke, “Das Neue—(k)eine Denkfigur der Moderne.” 23. Shklovsky, Povesti o proze, 2: 305. Shklovsky quotes one of Novalis’s fragments: “The art of alienating [befremden] in a pleasant way, of making an object strange and yet familiar and appealing—that is romantic poetics” (Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn [Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, n.d.], 3: 348; my translation). At the same time, however, Shklovsky repeated his insistence on his concepts of “seeing” and “recognition” being independent of similar notions appearing earlier in John Dewey (the same claim was first made in Shklovsky, Khudozhestvennaia proza, 7–8). 24. Lidiia Ginzburg, O starom i novom, 381; quoted by Shklovsky in his “Vstuplenie” [1984], in Viktor Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 34. (Ginzburg’s words reflect an entry

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she made in her diary in 1927, some ten years after the term “estrangement” first appeared in Shklovsky’s “Art as Device.”) 25. See especially Caryl Emerson’s insightful “Literary Theory in the 1920s”; Sergei Zenkin’s perceptive contributions in his Raboty po teorii (2012), especially the articles in the section “Teorii i mify”; Levchenko, Drugaia Nauka; Umnova, “Delat' veshchi nuzhnye i veselye . . . ”; Tihanov, “Pamiat' teorii”; Levchenko and Pil'shchikov, eds., Epokha “ostraneniia.” With reference to film, see van den Oever, ed., Ostrannenie. 26. The theses are available in English translation in Matejka and Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics. 27. On Tynianov’s, Jakobson’s, and Lotman’s foregoing of the concept of estrangement, see most convincingly Renate Lachmann, “Die ‘Verfremdung’ und das ‘Neue Sehen’ bei Viktor Šklovskij” (1970), in Helmers, Verfremdung in der Literatur, 321–51. 28. See Jangfeldt, Jakobson-budetlianin, 29. 29. Cf. Jakobson “Vers une science,” 11. 30. Lenin received copies of Shklovsky’s books Sentimental Journey and The Knight’s Move from Berlin between January and July 1923 (cf. Golikov et al., eds., Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, 12: 572); Shklovsky claims to have known Lenin, but his statement suggests that, in all likelihood, there was no personal contact: “J’ai connu Lenin, je l’ai vu bien de fois”; “Lorsqu’il parlait, il était toujours un homme parfaitement heureux” (Shklovsky, “Me parle au galop,” 6). Only slightly later, in a conversation with Viktor Duvakin in 1968, Shklovsky recalled having witnessed Lenin speak in public on three occasions, all three in 1917 and before the October Revolution (cf. Duvakin and Radzishevskii, Besedy, 92–95). As is evident from Literature and Revolution, Trotsky was also familiar with The Knight’s Move (cf. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 173). In 1928, Walter Benjamin praised the 1926 French translation of Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey, calling for the book to be translated into German (Benjamin, “Drei Bücher,” 108–9). 31. These four texts and the 1919 article “Ulla, ulla, Martians!” are quoted, in my own translations, from Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet; page numbers are given in parentheses in the text; on the precise chronology of “Art as Device,” see Aleksandr Galushkin’s notes to the text in Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 489. 32. For a recent, perhaps not entirely successful attempt, see Berezin, Viktor Shklovskii. 33. Piast, Vstrechi, 166; Eikhenbaum quoted in Chudakova and Toddes, “Nasledie i put' Eikhenbauma,” in Eikhenbaum, O literature, 12. Shklovsky did indeed spend some time in a mental hospital in Saratov, apparently at some point in 1918, hiding there from the Bolsheviks (and following the doctor’s instructions not to try to simulate a mental disorder, since this would give him away); on this episode, see Chudakov, “Dva pervykh desiatiletiia,” in Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 3–22, here 17. 34. For an early example of this trend, see Pomorska’s Russian Formalist Theory. 35. See also the argument in Kalinin, “Vernut'.” 36. All quotes are from Simmel, “Crisis of Culture,” 266. 37. The passage lends justification to another reading as well: that art, including Futurist art, proved in the end incapable of preventing war in any of the countries listed by

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Shklovsky. On either reading, Shklovsky’s high expectations in relation to art are unmistakable. However, as will become evident shortly, he did associate Russian Futurism (its later stage) with a certain pacifist potential (and not without reason), which persuades me to read the passage in a way that highlights the difference that Futurism’s absence/ presence is said to have made in the two warring camps. 38. Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) was the central figure in the avant-garde journal Der Sturm (1916–32) and in the publishing house of the same name; he emigrated to Moscow in 1932 and died in Saratov as a victim of Stalin’s purges. 39. On Russian Expressionism and Ippolit Sokolov, see Belentschikow, Russische expressionistische Lyrik. 40. A term coined by Ernst Jünger in 1930 to describe the attitudes of the World War I generation in the postwar situation. 41. Eikhenabum, O literature, 327. 42. The article took apparently only five days to complete (Chudakov, “Sprashivaiu,” 103), but much longer to publish. Initially, Shklovsky offered it to Vestnik Evropy, where it was rejected by Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (Chudakov, “Sprashivaiu,” 94). Several different English translations are available, most recently by Alexandra Berlina (Berlina, ed., Viktor Shklovsky, 73–96) 43. As late as 1971, Shklovsky himself considered “Art as Device” his best article (Chudakov, “Sprashivaiu,” 103). 44. The passage in question can be found in Veselovskii, “Tri glavy,” 445; on borrowings from Veselovsky in Shklovskii’s earlier “The Resurrection of the Word” (1914), see Cassedy, Flight from Eden, 61–62. 45. In the same book, notwithstanding this (atypical) gesture of humility, Shklovsky made several references to Aristotle and Hegel, which Eikhenbaum advised him to drop, because Shklovsky had not studied them “with a view to understanding their words in their system and language” (Eikhenbaum to Shklovsky, 13 December 1957, in Panchenko, “Iz perepiski,” 215). 46. The early Shklovsky was indebted to Bergson for the notion of automatization (cf. Curtis, “Bergson and Russian Formalism”). Zhirmunskii noted an orientation to Bergson in Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” as early as 1921 (Levchenko, “O nekotorykh,” 186n12); see also Shklovsky’s own statement on the importance of Bergson (Chudakov, “Sprashivaiu,” 96). 47. A version of this event is narrated by Shklovsky in his Sentimental Journey, where he notes with some irony that Kornilov was disappointed by his failing to kiss the St. George Cross when it was bestowed on him (Shklovsky, Sentimental'noe, 79–80). Despite this breach of ritual norms, Shklovsky apparently wore the decoration even at informal private meetings, as a brief record of his conversation with Vladimir Shileiko in Boris Pronin’s home (1917) suggests (see Roman Timenchik’s notes in Piast, Vstrechi, 381). 48. Jünger was decorated three times during World War I; see Noack, Ernst Jünger, 40–42. 49. The strongest argument in favor of Shklovsky’s role has been Bernhard

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Reich’s testimony in his memoirs, where he asserts that a conversation in 1935 among Sergei Tretyakov, Brecht, and himself led him to assume (annehmen) that Tretyakov had already introduced Shklovsky’s concept to Brecht (Reich, Im Wettlauf, 371–72). Whether an assumption, however forcefully stated, can constitute definitive proof is far from certain, but when interviewed for Les lettres françaises, Shklovsky himself unequivocally reinforced it, telling his old acquaintance Vladimir Pozner: “désaccoutumation. . . . À travers Serguéi Trétiakov—c’était un homme bien—c’est passé chez Brecht qui l’a appelé distanciation” (Shklovsky, “Me parle au galop,” 6); cf. also the section on Shklovsky in Pozner’s memoirs (Pozner, Vladimir Pozner se souvient, 57–85). Some ten years later, however, in an interview in the GDR, Shklovsky flatly denied Reich’s conclusion: “Hier muß es sich bei Reich um einen Irrtum handeln” (Shklovsky, “Über ‘Verfremdung,’” 36). The fullest history and assessment of the case for Brecht’s knowledge of Shklovsky’s theory can be found in an article by Tamás Ungvári (Ungvári, “Origins,” esp. 217–25); Ungvári analyzes all the existing evidence, except for Shklovsky’s 1976 interview in Weimarer Beiträge, which he seems not to have known. 50. First promoted by John Willett (Willett, Theatre of Bertolt Brecht, 179–208) and restated many times since, the thesis of Shklovsky’s role—through Tretyakov’s mediation—made its way into the authoritative Brecht Chronik (Hecht, Brecht Chronik, 439– 40). The staunchest opponent has been Jan Knopf (cf. his 1974 book Bertolt Brecht: Ein kritischer Forschungsbericht, 17–20; 166–68); he repeated his opposition in 2000 (Bertolt Brecht, 80) without reference to, or any comments on, the arguments in favor of Shklovsky’s role adduced in the meantime by Ungvári (nor did Knopf draw support for his skepticism from Shklovsky’s 1976 interview in Weimarer Beiträge, which he apparently had not read). 51. Cf. also the argument in Robinson, Estrangement. 52. Todorov himself had met Shklovsky in Paris (Todorov believes the meeting may have taken place in 1966, but it probably took place late in 1964 when Shklovsky was in Paris and met Vladimir Pozner for the interview referred to above). Disappointingly for Todorov, Shklovsky was guarded by an official interpreter, apparently a KGB man, which made proper communication impossible (cf. Todorov, Devoirs et délices, 78–79). 53. Shklovsky had similarly argued in “Drama and Mass Performances,” a brief 1921 article, no doubt unknown to Marcuse, against the escapist trends dominating the performances of countless amateur drama societies in Soviet Russia (cf. Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 85–86). 54. See, e.g., Malmstad, “Khodasevich and Formalism”; Dolinin, “Tri zametki,” where Dolinin examines the parodic orientation of Nabokov’s novel The Gift toward Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not about Love; Ronen, “Puti Shklovskogo”; Slobin, “BorderCrossings.” 55. See, among others, Kudrova, “Poslednee,” 123–24; Kudrova, Gibel', 46–47, 58, 120–22, 154; Smith, D. S. Mirsky, 176–77, 251; and Kudrova, Put' komet, passim. 56. See Igor' Chubarov’s biographical note in his edited Antologiia fenomenologicheskoi filosofii v Rossii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Logos and Progress-Traditsiia, 2000), 522; the au-

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thorship of the two contributions by Litauer in this anthology is indicated as “E. Litauer/ Emmanuel Levinas.” 57. Galushkin, “V. B. Shklovskii. Pis'ma M. Gor'komu,” 36. 58. Litauer did arrive in Freiburg at some point early in 1925, apparently to study at the university (cf. Jewsei Schor to Fedor Stepun, 25 April 1925; the letter is referred to in Hufen, Fedor Stepun, 137n117). 59. See Smith, D. S. Mirsky, 251. 60. See Kudrova, Put', 593. 61. For a bibliography of Litauer’s contributions to Eurasia, see Laruelle, L’idéologie eurasiste, 372, 380–81. 62. See Kudrova, Gibel', 5. 63. See Kudrova, Put', 593, 724. 64. See Medvedev, “Formalizm i istoriia literatury”; Litauer, “Formalizm i istoriia literatury.” 65. On Karsavin’s controversial role in the Eurasian movement, see Khoruzhii, “Karsavin”; Sobolev, “Svoia”; Hauchard, “L. P. Karsavin,” esp. 360–65; Massaka, “Metafizyka”; on Karsavin in English, see Rubin, Life and Thought of Lev Karsavin. 66. See Medvedev, “Sociologism without sociology (on the methodological works of P. N. Sakulin),” first published in Russian in 1926 as “Sotsiologizm bez sotsiologii (O metodologicheskikh rabotakh P. N. Sakulina).” Here (p. 67 in the English translation) Medvedev addressed Karsavin, who had been expelled from Russia in 1922, with the ironical “Comrade” (tovarishch), a gesture that was no doubt thought distasteful by Karsavin and his friends. 67. Suvchinskii, who settled in Paris in 1925 after brief spells in Sofia and Berlin, is best known as a musicologist and music critic. At different stages of his life, he was an important figure in the careers of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, maintaining an extensive correspondence with both; on Suvchinskii’s Eurasian activities, see the copious annotations in Mirsky, Letters, ed. Smith, Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s and Petr Arapov’s letters to Suvchinskii included in Glebov, Evraziistvo, 177–556, 567–620, and also Vishnevetskii, Evraziiskoe uklonenie. 68. Suvchinskii confirmed his knowledge of Tomashevskii’s and Eikhenbaum’s works on versification and metrics in a letter to Mariia Iudina dated 17 January 1961 (cf. A. Kuznetsov, “‘Vy edinstvennaia vozdushnaia arka, kotoraia sviazyvaet menia s Rossiei’: Iz perepiski P. P. Suvchinskogo i M. V. Iudinoi,” in Bretanitskaia, ed., Petr Suvchinskii i ego vremia, 343–44). 69. Cf. V. Kozovoi, “O Petre Suvchinskom i ego vremeni,” in Bretanitskaia, ed., Petr Suvchinskii i ego vremia, 15. 70. See Mirsky, Letters, ed. Smith, 36–37. 71. See V. Kozovoi, “O Petre Suvchinskom,” 26. 72. For details, see Tihanov, “Cultural Emancipation,” 48–49. 73. Medvedev must have enjoyed the respect of the Formalists as well. Despite Medvedev’s astute criticism of Formalism in his 1928 book, Tynianov presented him with a

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copy of his Arkhaisty i novatory (1929; Archaists and Innovators);. see Iurii Medvedev, “Na puti,” 32. 74. Litauer, “Formalizm i istoriia literatury,” 120; throughout the text, citations of Litauer’s article are to the reprint in Bakhtinskii sbornik, vol. 4 (2000), in my translation; page references are given in parentheses in the text. 75. Brik, “So-Called Formal Method,” 91. 76. Ironically, Medvedev lived long enough to see himself compelled by the growing inclemency of Stalin’s regime to alter the original design of his 1928 study by omitting or revising some sections and adding a new chapter that traced the concluding stages of Formalism and subjected these to a critique that was as vehement as it was primitive. The result of these enforced changes was Medvedev’s book Formalizm i formalisty (1934; Formalism and the Formalists). 77. See Arvatov, Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo (1926; for an English translation, see Arvatov, Art and Production) and Arvatov, “O formal'no-sotsiologicheskom metode.” 78. Subsequent references are given to this edition in parentheses in the text. I have occasionally emended the English translation to bring it closer to the original. 79. Unsurprisingly, the Formalists, notably Eikhenbaum, were equally unimpressed by the mechanical, perfunctory attempts of the forsotsy to bring together Russian Formalism and the sociological study of literature. 80. Although perfectly correct, the phrase “of an amicable division” does not convey the ironic overtones of the stronger Russian poliubovnogo razdela. CHAPTER 2 1. Cf. Mikhail Polivanov, “Ocherk,” 10 2. Shchedrina, “Khronika,” 406. 3. Pavlov, “Filosofiia v Moskovskom universitete,” 102. 4. See Tihanov, “Gustav Shpet in Florovsky’s Mirror.” 5. Cf. the report in Artizov, ed., “Ochistim Rossiiu nadolgo,” 589–90. There is, however, confirmation of Shpet’s arrest, for unknown reasons, in early November 1920; he was released on 8 November (Shchedrina, “Khronika,” 426). 6. On Shpet’s membership of the jury, see Shapir’s notes in Iarkho, Metodologiia, 676–77. 7. For a wide-ranging selection of the works of GAKhN’s members and associates on aesthetics, literature, art, music, theatre, and film, see vol. 2 of Plotnikov and Podzemskaia, eds., Iskusstvo kak iazyk. For a shorter selection in English, see the special issue of Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 3 (1997), guest-edited by Nicoletta Misler. 8. Cf. Misler, “Citadel,” 30. In the winter of 1922, Harvard University Library considered purchasing Shpet’s collection of Russian philosophical works (some 1,000 volumes); see Archibald Coolidge’s letter to Shpet of 14 February 1922, in Shpet, Filosof v kul'ture, 31–32. According to Nikolai Serebrennikov, Shpet’s library, comprising more than 30,000 volumes, is today at the University of Tbilisi (Serebrennikov, ed., Shpet i Sibir', 88).

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9. For an English translation of the resolution, see Bowlt, “RAKhN on Trial,” here p. 305; for a detailed chronology of the purges at GAKhN, see Iakimenko, “Iz istorii.” 10. The year of publication is established in Petritskii, “K tvorcheskoi biografii,” 25. 11. See Iakovich, ed., Doch' filosofa Shpeta, 173. 12. Bol'shoi nemetsko-russkii slovar', vol. 1: A–K, ed. E. A. Meier [Elisabeth Meyer], et al. (Moscow: OGIZ RSFSR, 1934). Meyer and five members of her ten-strong editorial team (including Shpet) were arrested in connection with the dictionary; the second volume never appeared. 13. Mikhail Polivanov, “Ocherk,” 15. 14. Belyi, Nachalo, 175. 15. Belyi, Mezhdu, 307. 16. Belyi, Vospominaniia, 559–60. 17. Quoted in Shchedrina, “Ia pishu kak ekho drugogo,” 56. 18. See Lavrov and Malmstad, eds., Andrei Belyi i Ivanov-Razumnik, 463. 19. Cf. his two letters to Shpet of April and August 1933 in Nachala 1(1992): 64–65. 20. Baranova-Shestova, Zhizn' L'va Shestova, 130. 21. Cf. Shchedrina, ed., Gustav Shpet: Zhizn' v pis'makh, 225, 248, 258. 22. Serebrennikov et al., eds., Shpet v Sibiri, 228. 23. See the evidence in Obatnin, “Materialy,” 323–24. 24. Cf. Bird, “Viacheslav Ivanov,” 320; Kondiurina et al., eds., “Perepiska,” 238n3. 25. Kondiurina et al., eds., “Perepiska,” 373. 26. Ibid., 235, 239, 240n5. 27. Bird, “Viacheslav Ivanov,” 331n110. 28. Cf. also Nikolaev, “M. M. Bakhtin,” 265–67. 29. Shpet, “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” 357–59 (praise for Symbolism), 361–63 (critique of Futurism). 30. See Levinton and Ustinov, “Ukazatel',” 194; the two texts are reproduced in Lеv Gornung, Moi, 178–79. See Levinton, “Gustav Shpet” for more on Hermes. 31. For short biographies of the Gornung brothers, see Kliuev, “Semeinaia,” 268– 73; on Kenigsberg, see Chicherin, Sila, 239–50, and Shapir, “M. M. Kenigsberg”; on Vol'kenau, see Konstantin Polivanov, “Mashinopisnye,” 47n12. 32. Boris Gornung, “O zhurnale ‘Germes,’” 188; Lev Gornung reports that Shpet was asked to write a brief note on Tiutchev for the fourth issue of Hermes (Lev Gornung, Moi, 183–84), but he does not appear to have done so. 33. Like Shpet, Volkov was involved in translation. His partial translation (1927) of Hegel’s Aesthetics was amended, edited, and supplied with notes by Shpet, but remained unpublished (the translation is preserved in the Russian State Library in Moscow, f. 718, k. 8, ed. khr. 4 and 5). 34. Boris Gornung, “O zhurnale ‘Germes,’” 188. 35. On Berner, see Andrei Ustinov, “Dve zhizni.” Romm was the elder brother of the well-known film director Mikhail Romm; he was a philologist, poet, and translator of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (the translation remained unfinished); on this, see Toddes and Chudakova, “Pervyi.”

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36. See Levinton and Ustinov, “K istorii,” 209. Kuzmin and Sofiia Parnok were the only better-known poets to publish in Mnemosyne. 37. See Vorob'eva, “Neizvestnyi,” 178. 38. Cf. Shpet, “Literatura”; a slightly different version under the same title, closely related to the text of Shpet’s entry for the unpublished “Dictionary of Artistic Terms” (“Slovar' khudozhestvennykh terminov”) that GAKhN was preparing in 1923–29, was first published by Igor' Chubarov in Shpet, Istoriia, 1133–36. Further references in this chapter are to the publication in Shpet, Istoriia. 39. Cf. Boris Gornung, “O zhurnale ‘Germes,’” 186, and Vorob'eva, “Neizvestnyi,” 179. Unlike his brother, Lev Gornung asserts that Hermes was produced in three copies only (Lev Gornung, Moi, 175). 40. Boris Gornung, Pokhod, 349. 41. Serebrennikov et al., eds., Shpet v Sibiri, 190; Shpet, “,” 592. 61. Shpet’s use of Kuzmin’s name in 1934 and in 1935 requires some explanation of the background. Kuzmin and Shpet met for the first time on 11 May 1924 in the circle of young literati around Hermes in Moscow (Timofeev, “Esche raz,” 160). Earlier, it seems that Kuzmin had spoken skeptically and derisively about Shpet’s “Esteticheskie fragmenty” (Boris Gornung, “Iz vospominanii,” 178), but apparently this did not affect the tone of their first meeting. Kuzmin and Shpet were later involved in the Shakespeare edition, for which Kuzmin translated eight plays from 1930 to 1935, seven of which were published posthumously (his translation of The Tempest remained unpublished; Shchepkina-Kupernik’s translation was published instead in the Academia edition). Kuzmin’s translation of King Lear was corrected and edited by Shpet (Kuzmin, Dnevnik, 224n16). In 1934, Shpet was keen to have Stanislavsky stage Kuzmin’s translation of Much Ado about Nothing (Kuzmin, Dnevnik, 99). 62. Pasternak mentions Shpet in Okhrannaia gramota. In the spring semester of 1909–10, he attended Shpet’s seminar on Hume at Moscow University and wrote an essay for Shpet entitled “Hume’s Psychological Skepticism.” The next year he took Shpet’s course on the Logic of the Historical Sciences; Fleishman et al., Boris Pasternaks Lehrjahre, 1: 16, 208, 230–35. On Shpet’s significance for Pasternak’s intellectual formation, see ibid., 128–32. 63. Shpet’s experience with translating Shakespeare dated back to 1924 when he produced a stage version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (preserved in RGB, f. 718, k. 13,

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ed. khr. 5) for the Malyi theater; early in the 1920s he had begun (but never finished) an adaptation of Schiller’s Die Räuber (RGB, f. 718, k. 17, ed. khr. 7), again for the Malyi. 64. Smirnov to Shpet, 31 January 1935 (now in Shchedrina, ed., Gustav Shpet i shekspirovskii krug, 186–88). 65. For Shpet’s article-length response see ibid., 218–56 (the letter to Kamenev of 29 October 1934 is also there, 165–68). 66. Tairov, Zapiski, 68. 67. Shpet, “Teatr kak iskusstvo,” Masterstvo teatra: Vremennik Kamernogo teatra, nos. 1–2 (1922–23): 31–55; quoted here from the 2000 reprint (Shpet, “Teatr,” 111–34), where the text is dated 24 September 1922. 68. Trabskii, ed., Sovetskii teatr, 186. 69. See the minutes in Markov, V Khudozhestvennom, 562–63, 566–67. 70. See Poleva, “Osnovnye daty,” 13. 71. Stanislavskii, Sobranie, 345, 366. The notes to Stanislavsky’s letters wrongly assume that the manuscript was that of the first part of Rabota aktera nad soboi published in Russian in 1938, shortly after Stanislavsky’s death. The Russian version had been revised by Stanislavsky and differed from the American one; Shpet played no part in these revisions, since they took place while he was already in exile. 72. See Shchedrina, “Ia pishu kak ekho drugogo,” 258. The fourth printing of the first Russian version of the memoirs in January 1934 had apparently placed Stanislavsky third in popularity among readers in the Soviet Union (Pushkin was first), with the whole print run selling out in just three days (Stanislavskii, Sobranie, 381, 569). 73. Serebrennikov et al., eds., Shpet v Sibiri, 287–88. 74. Ibid., 202. 75. Ibid., 256–57. 76. Ibid., 283–84. 77. Ibid., 237. 78. Ibid., 242. 79. See Iufit, ed., Sovetskii teatr, 72. For a comparison of Shpet’s and Belyi’s views on theater, see Surina, Andrei Belyi i Gustav Shpet. 80. See Shpet, “Differentsiatsiia”; page numbers are in parentheses in the text. 81. Tynianov, Poetika, 318. For an interpretation aligning Shpet with Tynianov, see S. V. Stakhorskii’s commentaries in Stakhorskii, ed., Iz istorii, 218. On Shpet’s and GAKhN’s theatre theory, see also Schmid, “Gustav Špets Theatertheorie”; Eismann, “Theater”; and Gudkova, “Semantik.” 82. See Shpet, “Teatr,” 112; English translation: “Theatre as Art,” trans. Michel Vale, Soviet Studies in Philosophy 28, no. 3 (Winter 1989–90): 61–88. 83. See Gurevich, Tvorchestvo, 22–23. Diderot’s “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (written in the 1770s and posthumously published in 1830) appeared in Russian translation in the same year as Shpet’s article “Theatre as Art” (1922). Gurevich’s slender book was completed in April 1926 (Gurevich, Tvorchestvo, 62) and appeared at the end of that year (but with the year 1927 on the cover page) as a GAKhN imprint; until the 1980s, it remained the only published reaction to Shpet’s writings on theater.

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84. Cf. Sitkovetskaia, ed., Meierkhol'd, 2: 55. 85. See Mitiushin, “Commentary,” 89. 86. The Moscow Linguistic Circle (MLC) existed formally from March 1915 to November 1924. 87. Cf. Krusanov, Russkii avangard, 461. 88. Jakobson, “Moskovskii,” 367. 89. Jakobson, “Example,” 534. 90. Jakobson, “Retrospect,” 713. 91. Cf. Jakobson’s letters in Shchedrina, ed., Gustav Shpet: Zhizn', 502–6. 92. Nikolaev, “M. M. Bakhtin,” 228. 93. Toman, Magic, 66. 94. Shapir, Maksim, “Kommentarii,” 299–300. 95. In Russian, variously, kul'turnoe soznanie, kul'turnoe samosoznanie, and soznanie narodom svoei narodnosti (Shpet, Istoriia, 1136). 96. Cf. Toddes and Chudakova. “Pervyi,” 240–41. 97. Shpet, “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” 408. 98. Jakobson’s well-known article “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry” took its shape between 1960 and 1968; see Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar,” 37. 99. Shpet, “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” 382; my translation. 100. Vinogradov, “Iz istorii,” 265. Vinogradov appropriated Shpet’s differentiation between system and structure from the latter’s “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” but also through personal communication with him; in 1926, Vinogradov twice presented papers in GAKhN at Shpet’s invitation (Nikolaev, “M. M. Bakhtin,” 269). 101. Tynianov and Jakobson, “Problems,” 50. 102. Cf. Toddes and Chudakova, “Pervyi,” 235; more recently on this translation, see Reznik, “Long Rendezvous.” Shpet’s understanding of structure was also shaped by Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of the structured nature of the world of cultural objectifications. As Nikolai Plotnikov argues, in the course of the reception of Shpet’s thought, this hermeneutic dimension was submerged by the later (dominant and more technical) version of the concept elaborated and asserted by Structuralism (Plotnikov, “Kapitel,” 201). 103. Shpet, “Esteticheskie,” 443. 104. For more on this see Steiner, “Tropos”; he refers in this context to Derrida and Hayden White. 105. Because of that the Introduction to Ethnic Psychology earned Shpet Jakobson’s conditional praise; see Jakobson’s letter to Shpet of 24 November 1929 in Shchedrina, ed., Gustav Shpet: Zhizn', 505–506. 106. Shpet, “Esteticheskie fragmenty,” 464–71. 107. Ibid., 448; emphasis in the original. 108. Boris Gornung, Pokhod, 372–73. 109. On the formal-philosophical school, from a different perspective, see HansenLöve, “‘Synthetische Avantgarde’-Akmeismus.” 110. Vinokur, “Slovarnaia,” 106.

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111. Quoted in Chudakova and Toddes, “Nasledie i put' Eikhenbauma,” in Eikhenbaum, O literature, 17. 112. Shpet’s “Esteticheskie fragmenty” received sympathetic references in Engel'gardt’s Formal'nyi metod v istorii literatury (1925); see Engel'gardt, Izbrannye, 80–89. 113. See Tat'iana Shchedrina’s comments on “O granitsakh nauchnogo literaturovedeniia (konspekt doklada),” in Shpet, Iskusstvo, 507. 114. All subsequent references are to this edition, with page numbers in parentheses in the text, and in my translation. 115. See Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” in Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, here 268. 116. Cf. Vinogradov, “Iz istorii,” 265. 117. Yakov Nazarenko wrote on nineteenth-century Russian literature and was an inveterate supporter of the sociological school in literary studies. For the full text of the “Anthem,” see “Gimn formalistov,” ed. Kseniia Kumpan and Al'bin Konechnyi, in Baiburin and Ospovat, eds., Natales, 266–94. The authorship of the stanza quoted here has been attributed to Tynianov or Lidiia Ginzburg (cf. Novikov, “‘Luchshe Shpet,’” 422). 118. The epigram is attributed to Demian Bedny in Shevchenko, “Zhizn',” 199; I was unable to locate the text in the editions of his poetry, but the epigram may well have been attested solely in oral form. By 1930, Shpet’s alcohol intake—clearly a response to the vitriolic public campaign against him—was perceived as a problem even by helpful and benevolent friends; a worried Baltrushaitis dedicated a poem, “Netrezvomu Shpetu,” to Shpet (for the text of the poem, dated 9 April 1930, see Shchedrina, “Ia pishu kak echo drugogo,” 70). 119. See Shpet’s remark, “‘Historical poetics’ is sham history, its interest is the immutable in the mutable,” in Shpet, Iskusstvo, 47. CHAPTER 3 1. The early version of Rabelais and His World, submitted as a dissertation in 1940, and a plethora of related materials have been published, accompanied by extensive apparatus, in Bakhtin, Sobranie 4 (1). 2. On the changes introduced when “Discourse in the Novel” (conceived and written by Bakhtin as a book) was published in the 1970s, see Pan'kov, “‘Roman,'” which reveals that initially Bakhtin gave the essay currently known as “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” the same title as the 1934–36 book manuscript, “Discourse in the Novel” (90); the essay now known as “Epic and Novel” was titled “The Novel as Literary Genre” (88). For more on the genesis and the textology of the preserved fragments on the bildungsroman, see Pan'kov, “M. M. Bakhtin,” and, in the same issue of Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, his publication of parts of the 1937 book prospectus. The texts mentioned here, on occasion expanded with further material from Bakhtin’s archive and accompanied by extended commentary, are now included in Bakhtin, Sobranie 3. 3. Quoted here from the English translation; subsequent citations of this work appear in parentheses in the text. In the new Russian edition of Bakhtin’s works, the title

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of this treatise is “K voprosam metodologii estetiki slovesnogo tvorchestva. I. Problema formy, soderzhaniia i materiala v slovesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve,” which reflects the fact that the text was intended as the first part of a larger work (the other parts of which have not survived); see Bakhtin, Sobranie, 1: 264–66, 710–11. 4. On other aspects of this split, see Denischenko, “Beyond Reification.” 5. On Lukács’s texts from Literary Critic known to Bakhtin (including the materials from the discussion on the novel), see Tihanov, Master, 11–13. 6. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 335. 7. Subsequent citations of this work are in parentheses in the text, in my translation. There is so far no full English translation of the 1929 version of Bakhtin’s book. 8. Mukařovský, “Dialogue and Monologue.” 9. For an excellent study of the origins of the term “gothic realism” in Bakhtin, see Pan'kov, “Smysl,” 237–39, on Max Dvořak’s impact, and 241–48, on neoclassicist aesthetics in Literary Critic and Bakhtin’s implicit polemic with it in his work on Rabelais. 10. The first publication of a text by Bakhtin in the West (still in Russian) dates to 1962; as late as 1988, Bakhtin’s “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” was assigned a place under the rubric “Formalist, Structuralist and Poststructuralist Poetics, Linguistics, and Narratology” in David Lodge’s widely used compilation Modern Criticism and Theory. 11. On the French (mis)appropriation, see Zbinden, Bakhtin, esp. chap. 1: “The Structuralist in the Closet.” 12. Although Bakhtin did follow the work of the Moscow-Tartu School more closely than his contemporaries might have assumed (see the inventory of his personal library in Kliueva and Lisunova, M. M. Bakhtin, 49–168). 13. See Kozhinov, “Bakhtin,” 124–25; on Bakhtin and Scheler, see Wyman, The Gift of Active Empathy. 14. On Bakhtin and memory of genre, see recently Ilya Kliger, “On ‘Genre Memory’ in Bakhtin,” in Kliger and Maslov, eds., Persistent Forms, 227–51. 15. See Medvedev, Formal Method, 50–52 (quoting Eikhenbaum’s earlier endorsement of Wölfflin on p. 52). On the idea of “history without names” in the Bakhtin Circle, see also Pereda, “Mijail Bajtín.” 16. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 167. 17. Aron, Deutsche Soziologie, 154. 18. See, e.g., Orozco, Platonische Gewalt; Orozco, “Art of Allusion”; Wollin, “Untruth.” 19. See Muller, Other God, 305. 20. Habermas, “Vom öffentlichen Gebrauch.” 21. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer to Erich Rothacker, 8 April 1943, Rothacker Nachlass, University Library Bonn (my thanks to Monika Klaus for deciphering this letter). 22. Cf. Linde, “Soziologie in Leipzig,” 115 (Linde appears not to have known that Gadamer was involved in the colloquium as early as 1943). On Freyer’s Leipziger period, see Schäfer, “Wider die Inszenierung,” as well as Üner’s Soziologie and her “Kulturtheorie.” 23. Cf. Muller, Other God, 322–24.

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24. Ibid., 91n14. For an English translation of Freyer’s book, see Freyer, Theory; further references are to this edition, with page numbers in parentheses in the text. 25. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 306. Henceforth, page numbers are in parentheses in the text; I occasionally modify the English translation for the sake of accuracy. 26. Gadamer’s play on the words Bewahrung and Bewährung, which is hard to translate, goes back to Hegel. 27. Surprisingly, perhaps, Tönnies welcomed Plessner’s study; see the foreword to the sixth and seventh editions of his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1926), in Tönnies, Gemeinschaft (1991), xliii. 28. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 2: 100; 398. 29. Freyer here takes up an important distinction made by the German Romantics. For Adam Müller, too, the fundamental polar division in social life is that between space (the principle of Nebeneinander) and time (the principle of Nacheinander); when these two principles are in harmony, a healthy nation comes into being. Admittedly, Müller found an early version of this distinction in Burke. More on this see in Hans Reiss’s introduction to his edition, The Political Thought of the German Romantics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 29–30. For Freyer’s appreciation of German Romanticism’s role in the rise of modern sociology, see Freyer, “Romantiker”; for a discussion of continuities between Freyer and Fichte in particular, see Grimminger, Revolution, 195–209. 30. Further references are to this edition and in my translation, with page numbers given in parentheses in the text. 31. Freyer, “Fortschritt,” 82. 32. For other Russian approaches to hermeneutics, mainly in the work of Viacheslav Ivanov, see, e.g., Szilárd, “Problemy.” An English translation of Shpet’s Hermeneutics appeared in 2019. 33. In the formulation of Bakhtin’s criteria of “epicness,” I follow, with some modification, the helpful summary in Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, 79–80. 34. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 16; page numbers appear henceforth in parentheses in the text. 35. Henceforth, the relevant page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. I have occasionally amended the existing English translation for the sake of greater accuracy. 36. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 218; page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. 37. For a foundational overview of Bakhtin’s interest in biology, see Holquist, “Bakhtin and the Body”; on Bakhtin and Ukhtomskii, see Marcialis, “Michail Bachtin.” See also Tihanov, “Body.” 38. On Kanaev, see Ben Taylor, “Kanaev.” 39. Undoubtedly, Bakhtin is following Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy here, most likely through the mediation of the Russian symbolist poet and philosopher of culture Viacheslav Ivanov. In section 8, Nietzsche stresses the absence of differentiation between viewer and actor in Greek tragedy. 40. On Bergson and Bakhtin, see Rudova, “Bergsonism,” Fink, Bergson, and Erdinast-Vulkan, Between Philosophy and Literature (where Bergson is discussed along with the wider question of Bakhtin and phenomenology).

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41. Bergson’s essay “Laughter” is quoted in English translation from Sypher, ed., Comedy, here 74; henceforth, page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. 42. On this discussion and on the ideological baggage of the concept of the “epic novel,” see Belaia, esp. 177–85, and Tihanov, Master, 113–28. 43. For Bakhtin’s scattered references to Joyce in the 1930s and 1940s and his praise for him in a 1944–45 text titled “O Flobere” by its editors, see Bakhtin, Sobranie, 5:134 and the editors’ comments there (503). 44. Kristeva, “Word,” 86. 45. Kristeva, “Ruin,” 109. 46. Ibid., 111. 47. Al Mualla, “Beseda,” 7. 48. For a trenchant yet balanced reading of de Man on Bakhtin, see Cohen, “Ideology”; more recently, including a discussion of the biographical context, see Sempero, Influence, chap. 3. 49. Page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 50. Cf. Roberts, “Poetics,” 116. 51. See, above all, Kagan’s 1922 texts “Kak vozmozhna istoriia?” (“How Is History Possible?”) and “Dva ustremleniia v iskusstve” (“Two Aspirations in Art”), both now in Kagan, O khode, 199–237 and 451–66, respectively. 52. Cf., e.g., Humphrey, “Bakhtin.” 53. Page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 54. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 250. 55. Dimock, Through Other Continents. CHAPTER 4 1. See the relevant contributions in Kliger and Maslov, eds., Persistent Forms. 2. Cf. Tolz, Russian Academicians, 107. On Marr and his legacy, see more recently Brandist, Dimensions of Hegemony, chap. 8; on the imperial context of Marr’s work, see also Dmitriev, “Philologists-Autonomists.” 3. See Azadovskii, “Pamiati,” 13. 4. Marr, “K semanticheskoi,” 251. 5. Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, “Itogi,” 270. 6. Marr, “K semanticheskoi,” 250. 7. Marr, K bakinskoi, 44. Asked by a student why the elements were exactly four, Marr is reported to have replied with indignation: “Because they are not five!” (see D'iakonov, Kniga, 315: “Pa-ta-mu-chto ne piat'!”) It was this sense of Marr’s “new doctrine” being linguistically unfounded and yet aggressively confident that led Roman Jakobson to claim, retrospectively, that Marrism’s “pernicious pressure” was one of the factors contributing to the “self-liquidation” of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the late 1940s; see Jakobson, “Example,” 535; cf. also Laferrière, “Semiotica,” 452–53. 8. Meshchaninov, “Problemy,” 83. 9. On Marr’s knowledge of contemporary Russian literature, especially the avantgarde, see Nikol'skaia, “N. Ia. Marr” (where she maintains that Nikolai Marr, through

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his son, the poet and orientalist Iurii Marr, knew the poetry of Aleksei Kruchenykh, Ilya Zdanevich, and Igor' Terent'ev), and Vasil'kov, “Tragediia,” esp. 416 (where attention is drawn to Marr’s quotes from the poetry of Mariengof). Iurii Marr reminisced that his childhood belief in the similarity between Basque and Georgian was later taken up and developed by his father (cf. Nikol'skaia, Avangard, 84; there Nikol'skaia also highlights vestiges of Nikolai Marr’s “new doctrine” in the work of the Futurist Aleksandr Tufanov, 239–45). 10. See Marr, “Vstupitel'noe slovo,” 14. 11. The full list of participants can be found in Nina Braginskaia’s notes to Ol'ga Freidenberg, “Recollections,” here 82n23; for an unflattering account of Bogaevskii’s career, see Braginskaia, “Mezhdu,” 52–53. Some of the work of the “Homer Circle” was published as a separate volume (vol. 4) in the series Iazyk i literatura (1929); see there especially Freidenberg’s article “Siuzhetnaia semantika ‘Odissei,’” 59–74, and Ivan Meshchaninov’s “Gomer i uchenie o stadial'nosti,” 21–28. Methodologically, this volume is inferior to the introductory and concluding articles (by Ol'ga Freidenberg and Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, respectively) included in the 1932 collective volume on Tristan and Isolde; mainstream classicists abroad disapproved of the methodology of the 1929 Homer volume: “here Homer serves Japhetidology, rather than Japhetidology Homer” (Novotný, “Homer,” 114). 12. Bogaevskii, “Gomer,” 20 (emphasis in the original). 13. Marr, ed., Tristan i Isol'da. 14. See Marr, “Ishtar'.” 15. Ol'ga Freidenberg drew attention to this intentional reversal in her opening article, “Tselevaia,” 3 (Freidenberg’s text is available in English translation in Soviet Studies in Literature 27, no. 1 (1990–91): 54–66; henceforth, I quote the Russian original in my own translation). A contemporary reviewer also noted the inversion: A. Lozanova, “Rabota po fol'kloru v Institute iazyka i myshleniia (IIAM) Akademii Nauk SSSR,” Sovetskaia etnografiia 1–2 (1934): 209. 16. Cf. Schlauch, “Russian Study”; Schlauch praised Frank-Kamenetskii in particular for providing a “brilliant concluding essay” (37). 17. Boris Ilizarov, “Pochetnyi akademik I. V. Stalin protiv akademika N. Ia. Marra. K istorii diskussii po voprosam iazykoznaniia v 1950 g.,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, nos. 3–5 (2003), here no. 4: 125. Stalin also possessed a copy of Marr’s posthumously published collection of articles O iazyke i istorii abkhazov (1938); cf. Ilizarov, “Pochetnyi,” no. 4: 126. Marr’s surviving letters to Stalin appear to be marked by a somewhat didactic tone; see Ilizarov, Tainaia, 258. 18. For book-length accounts of Freidenberg’s career, see Moss, Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (this is Moss’s 1984 PhD dissertation); Perlina, Ol'ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days; Kabanov, Ol'ga Michajlovna Frejdenberg; cf. also my review of Kabanov’s and Perlina’s monographs in Slavonica 10, no. 2 (2004): 189–90. For a shorter Englishlanguage survey of Freidenberg’s career, see most recently Braginskaya, “Olga Freidenberg”; for a recent overview of Freidenberg’s genetic study of culture, see Troitskii, “Geneticheskii metod.” For accounts of Frank-Kamenetskii’s life, see the short note

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written by his nephew, V. A. Frank-Kamenetskii, “I. G. Frank-Kamenetskii,” as well as Klavdiia Starkova’s vivid memoir, Vospominaniia o prozhitom, esp. chap. 27; for analyses of his methodology, see Barsht, “Russkaia”; Debaker and Shilkov, “Iazyk”; Brandist, “Semantic.” 19. Freidenberg’s reaction is reported, based on her memoirs, in Braginskaia, “O rabote,” 274. 20. Cf. Freidenberg, Poetika, 7–8. Initially, Freidenberg had considered two other titles for her book, Semantics of Plot and Genre and Procris, the latter pointing to her principal idea that differences turn out to be embodiments of sameness (Procris’s new lover as her old husband, as in the story told in Gaius Julius Hyginus’s Fabulae); cf. also Nina Braginskaia’s note in Shumilova, ed., Vash, 27n7. 21. See Freidenberg, “O nepodvizhnykh,” 275–77; the polemic with Eikhenbaum is glossed in Braginskaia, “Siste,” 259. 22. Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, “K voprosu,” 93–94. 23. The point is made very clearly in Freidenberg’s above-mentioned article “Tselevaia,” 5. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. If an anecdote is to be trusted, Stalin associated “culture” precisely with “preclass,” “primitive” society; a history of culture, he told the high-ranking Party philosopher Pavel Iudin, would be a book about that “which was in primitive society before the emergence of classes and the state” (cf. Borev, Staliniada, 182). 26. Freidenberg, “Tselevaia,” 5. 27. Cf. I. G. Frank-Kamenetskii, “Itogi,” 266. 28. Freidenberg, Poetika siuzheta i zhanra, 12. 29. Freidenberg, Poetika, 335–61 (this appendix to the book, titled “Tri siuzheta, ili semantika odnogo,” was written in 1925; for an English translation, see Freidenberg, “Three Plots,” 30–51). 30. Freidenberg, Poetika, 11; cf. also Freidenberg’s 1925 text “Sistema,” 236–37. 31. Freidenberg, Poetika, 361. 32. Frank-Kamenetskii, “Itogi kollektivnoi raboty,” 275. 33. Ibid., 274. The assertion that the grammatically undifferentiated third person pointed to the totem was borrowed from Marr, Iazyk i myshlenie, 19–20. 34. See Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, “Pervobytnoe”; Freidenberg’s most sustained engagement with Cassirer can be found in her Poetika, 30–31. 35. Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, “K voprosu,” 141. 36. Ibid., 145. 37. See, e.g., Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii’s articles ‘K voprosu,” 142; “Razluka,” 172; and “Itogi,” 268–69. 38. Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 4 (1996): 186. This quotation comes from the third part of the article; the other two parts were published in Russkii tekst 2 (1994): 158–77 and Russkii tekst 3 (1995): 167–205. 39. Izrail' Frank-Kamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 3 (1995): 197; id., “K voprosu,” 144; this is also one of the central arguments in Freidenberg’s lectures of the late

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1930s and early 1940s, published posthumously by Nina Braginskaia as part of a onevolume selection of Freidenberg’s works, Mif i literatura drevnosti (1976; 1998 [first full edition of the text]; 2008). 40. On the “rationalization” of myth in the transition to realist plot, see Izrail' FrankKamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 2 (1994): 184, and 3 (1995): 186, 189. 41. “Therefore we shouldn’t passively await the fading of folklore; instead, we should employ all methods, fighting for its radical extermination,” Freidenberg told her colleagues at the discussion on 11 June 1931 (quoted from “Tezisy k kontr-dokladu O. M. Freidenberg,” incorporated in Freidenberg’s typewritten memoirs (Probeg zhizni, folder 5, p. 9) kept at the Pasternak Family Archive, Oxford). Freidenberg’s “counter-paper,” in which she issued this radical call for action, was in response to Viktor Zhirmunskii’s paper “What Is Folklore?” which was to appear in 1934, in a modified version, as “The Problem of Folklore.” Zhirmunskii’s paper, as we shall see later, paid unambiguous tribute to semantic paleontology. Both papers, although at the time perceived as polemically charged, agreed in essence that folklore was a relic that would fade away in a future classless society. For a firsthand report, see Astakhova, “Diskussiia”; a good overview of the discussion in English is offered in Howell, Development, 260–67 (Howell inaccurately gives the date of the discussion as May 1931). 42. In the original Russian, Ioffe’s statement is rendered through a nominative construction: “Zamykaiushchaiasia krivaia kapitalisticheskogo myshleniia.” All citations of Ioffe’s book are to this edition; page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 43. Bykovskii, N. Ia. Marr, 70–84. 44. This process is analyzed in Miller, Folklore, 3–24; see also Arkhipova and Nekliudov, “Fol'klor,” esp. 96–100. For an early critique of the encouragement of “artificial folklore” in the Soviet Union, see Leont'ev, “Volkhovanie.” 45. Ivanova, Istoriia russkoi fol'kloristiki, an otherwise well-researched history of Russian folkloristics, groups scholars as different as Freidenberg, S. Ia. Lur'e, Vladimir Propp, I. M. Kolesnitskaia, and I. I. Tolstoi together as representatives of a broadly conceived “paleontological method” (601–8). As a matter of fact, only a couple of these scholars (Freidenberg, and to some extent also Tolstoi) took Marr and semantic paleontology seriously enough, relying on the new methodology to inform their studies of folklore and demonstrating a commitment going beyond the occasional expedient quotation from Marr. 46. Freidenberg, Poetika, 32. 47. Ts. Leiteizen, “Vrednaia galimatiia,” Izvestiia, 31 September 1936 (on Poetika siuzheta i zhanra); T. N. [Tatiana Nikolaeva], “Etot slepets Gomer!” Krasnaia nov' 7 (1936): 271 (on Poetika siuzheta i zhanra); T. N., “Teofrast i drugie,” Krasnaia nov' 5 (1936): 238 (on Antichnye teorii iazyka i stilia). Nikolaeva appears to have written these short reviews at Meshchaninov’s suggestion; see Perlina, Ol'ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days, 159. 48. Beskina was arrested and shot in 1936; in the same year, Tsyrlin was the in-house editor of Freidenberg’s Poetika siuzheta i zhanra at the Leningrad “Khudozhestvennaia Literatura” publishing house (see Braginskaia, “Siste,” 268n30). As early as 1930, Tsyrlin

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had praised the “genetic study of literature,” without referring by name to Freidenberg; see Tsyrlin, “K voprosu.” 49. Beskina and Tsyrlin, “Marksistskaia,” here 3; further references are given in parentheses in the text. 50. See Tamarchenko, “Literaturovedenie.” 51. Freidenberg, “Nuzhna li iafetidologiia literaturovedeniiu?” (1931), cited with the kind permission of Nina Braginskaia; other portions of this paper have already appeared in print (cf. Braginskaia, “Siste,” 263–64). 52. Poliakova, “Oleinikov i ob Oleinikove,” 370; the quotation is from Poliakova’s article “Iz istorii geneticheskogo metoda: marrovskaia shkola,” first published in Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 7–8 (1994): 13–20. Poliakova contrasts Freidenberg and FrankKamenetskii in her article; the latter is declared a true scholar and thinker, Freidenberg is apportioned the dubious honor of a helpless, methodologically perplexed follower of Marr and Frank-Kamenetskii. This assessment is historically inaccurate and unfounded. Suffice it to point to Frank-Kamenetskii’s unequivocal praise of Freidenberg’s pioneering role in the mythological interpretation of the Greek novel, which overturned Erwin Rohde’s false assumption of the importance of invention and foreshadowed “by three years” Karl Kerényi’s 1927 study Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung (which, according to Frank-Kamenetskii, was, compared to Freidenberg’s, rather narrow in scope, limiting itself to an examination of the Egyptian myth of Osiris and its impact on the Greek novel); see Frank Kamenetskii, “K genezisu,” Russkii tekst 3 (1995): 187. 53. Cf. Lotman, Culture and Explosion, 140 (first published in Russian as Kul'tura i vzryv in 1992); see also Lotman’s article “O. M. Freidenberg” (first published in Russian in 1973 as “O. M. Freidenberg kak issledovatel' kul'tury”). At the same time, one has to keep in mind that Lotman’s understanding of “explosion” was sometimes marked by a very non-Freidenbergian Romantic belief in the genius of individual writers and artists as the agents of change (see Frank, Ruhe, and Schmitz, “Explosion und Ereignis,” 254, 259). On Toporov’s (and Viacheslav Vs. Ivanov’s) debt to Freidenberg and their continuation of her work, see Segal, Puti i vekhi, 241–43, 251, 255, 257. 54. Some of the materials, including articles critical of Freidenberg, by S. A. Takhtadzhian and A. K. Gavrilov, are republished in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 15 (1995). For a fascinating retrospective by one of the participants, see Zhmud', “Studenty”; see also the retort by one of Lotman’s defenders: Levinton, “Zametki.” 55. Zhirmunskii, “Sravnitel'noe,” here 384 (the article was first presented as a paper in December 1935). This passage is specifically quoted by Mark Azadovskii in his survey “Sovetskaia fol'kloristika” (here 46), in which Azadovskii treats Zhirmunskii’s comparatism as an unambiguous manifestation of Marr’s methodology; at the beginning of his article, Zhirmunskii explicitly mentions Marr and quotes from Marr’s “Iazyk i sovremennost'” (“Sravnitel'noe,” 383). 56. Zhirmunskii, “Problema fol'klora,” 53; first published in Sergeiu Fedorovichu Ol'denburgu: K 50-letiiu nauchno-obshchestvennoi deiatel'nosti, 1882–1932 (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1934), 195–213.

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57. Zhirmunskii, “Zhizn' i tvorchestvo Gerdera,” 241. It is not clear when exactly Zhirmunskii wrote this text. Desnitskaia dates it to the late 1930s; see Desnitskaia, “Na putiakh,” 385. But a reference to Franz Mehring’s work on Lessing and Herder, right at the start of Zhirmunskii’s text (209), suggests that it may have been written a couple of years earlier, because Mehring’s text on Herder appeared in Russian translation in 1934 as part of the first volume, Legenda o Lessinge. Literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i, of a representative two-volume selection of Mehring’s literary criticism published by Academia (cf. Zhukova, Gerder v Rossii, 45, entry no. 40). 58. See Osovskii, “Bakhtin chitaet”; in 1937–38, Bakhtin once again engaged with Freidenberg’s book, making excerpts in his notebooks (cf. Perlina, “Eshche raz,” 213, 225–26). 59. For Bakhtin’s extensive quotations from Marr and Meshchaninov in the essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (removed at the time of its first publication and thus also absent from the English translation in the Dialogical Imagination, but now available in vol. 3 of Bakhtin’s Collected Works in Russian), see Pan'kov, “‘Roman,’” 151n111. There were also references to Marr in the text currently known as “Discourse in the Novel,” similarly taken out at the time of its first publication and now restored in the Collected Works (see Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin, 123n32). For Bakhtin’s respectful mention of Marr in the 1950s, see Bakhtin, Lektsii, 89 (admittedly, on 18 October 1950, a few months after Marr’s “new doctrine of language” was crushed by Stalin, Bakhtin was forced to criticize Marrism in public at a departmental meeting in Saransk; cf. Laptun, “K biografii,” 140). For a more general account of Marr’s importance for the Bakhtin Circle, see Mihailovic, “Bakhtin’s Dialogue,” esp. 127–34. CHAPTER 5 1. Raeff, Russia Abroad, 115. 2. See Livak, How It Was Done in Paris; Rubins, Russian Montparnasse. These books, while not focusing specifically on émigré criticism, manage to break the inertia of looking at Russian exilic literary culture as self-enclosed and autistic, refusing to cultivate any productive ties with the new home cultures. See also Livak, “K izucheniiu,” where he mentions the names of Sazonova, Struve, and Veidle as regular reviewers and critics contributing to French periodicals (208); for an exhaustive bibliography, see Livak, Russian Émigrés, in which Livak extends the list to include other Russian émigré critics writing—sometimes anonymously—for the French press (4, 26). 3. Ianovskii (V. S. Yanovsky), Polia Eliseiskie, 254–55 (trans. Isabella Yanovsky and the author as Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory,1987). Nabokov’s novel, translated into French from his own English translation, was published by Gallimard in 1939 (see Davydov, “Despair,” 99n1). 4. This dialogue is partly documented in Livak and Tassis, eds., Studio. 5. On the porous boundaries between home and émigré literature at that juncture, see Slobin, “‘Homecoming.’” 6. For VTsIK’s decree, see Agurskii, Ideologiia, 163; on the Soviet interest in Volya Rossii, see Aucouturier, “Marc Slonim,” 25; and Slonim, “‘Volia Rossii,’” 299.

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7. See Blium, “Pechat'.” 8. See Maguire, Red Virgin Soil, 21. On the history of Sovremennye zapiski, see Vishniak, “Sovremennye zapiski” and the materials (including correspondence and thorough studies and bibliographies of the contemporary reception of the journal) in Korostelev and Schruba, eds., Vokrug redaktsionnogo arkhiva “Sovremennykh zapisok” (Parizh, 1920–1940), and Korostelev and Schruba, eds., “Sovremennye zapiski” (2 vols.). 9. See, e.g., Smirnov, “Na tom beregu” (I am grateful to Oleg Korestelev for drawing this article to my attention); Gorbov, “10 let.” See also Gorbov’s collection of articles, U nas. 10. See Gorbov, U nas, 32 (for the charge of bytovizm) and 76 (on the dangers of “symbolist abstraction”). 11. See Nil'sen, “P. Miliukov,” 131. 12. Cf. Boiko, “Russkoe,” 236–37. 13. All references are to Bem’s series of articles “O kritike i kritikakh” (“On Criticism and the Critics”), reprinted in A. L. Bem, Pis'ma o literature (Prague: Slovanský ústav; Euroslavica, 1996), esp. 36–37, 43. 14. In chronological order: Pil'skii, Zatumanivshiisia mir; Slonim, Portrety sovetskikh pisatelei (there is an earlier, 1931, Belgrade edition under the title Portreti savremenih ruskih pisaca); and Mandel'shtam, Iskateli. 15. See Zaitsev, ed., Shedevry; Zaitsev’s “Predislovie” (5–9) makes the points about the importance of including work by nonprofessional critics (5) and the need to limit the selection to the nineteenth century (9). 16. On the complex semantics of nostalgia and estrangement in Shklovsky’s exilic texts, see Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle” and “Poetics”; on Russian émigré literary criticism in Berlin, see Sorokina, Literaturnaia kritika. 17. Bogatyrev lived in Prague for nearly two decades and in Münster for about two years, but remained a Soviet citizen, cooperating closely with his colleagues in the Soviet Union. He returned to Moscow in December 1938. On his close contacts with Soviet folkloristics and ethnography, see Reshetov, “Pis'ma.” 18. See Jakobson, “Yuri Tynianov.” 19. Quoted here from the English translation in Russian Poetics in Translation (vol. 4: Formalist Theory), ed. L. M. O’Toole and Ann Shukman (Colchester, England: University of Essex, 1977), 49–51, here 49; written in December 1928 and first published in Russian in Novyi LEF 12 (1928)—actually in early 1929. 20. In a different context and with different tasks in mind, Stephen Greenblatt forcefully asserts that in order to write cultural history, we must “understand colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination . . . , for it is these disruptive forces that principally shape the history and diffusion of languages, and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy” (Greenblatt, “Racial Memory,” 61). 21. Said, “Travelling Theory,” 264. 22. On Bogatyrev’s functionalist Structuralism and his Prague period, see Ivanova, Istoriia, 748–72; Sorokina, “Funktsional'no-struktural'nyi metod P. G. Bogatyreva.” 23. The most important papers read at the Dostoevsky Seminar were published in

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three volumes, O Dostoevskom (Prague, 1929; 1933; 1936), while a fourth volume, conceived but left in manuscript form, appeared only in 1972. The third and fourth volumes were made up entirely of Bem’s own studies of Dostoevsky. For more on the Prague scene of Dostoevsky studies and Bem’s contributions, see Markovich, “Obshchestvo,” 166–67; Pletnev, “Vospominaniia,” esp. 14–19; Bubenikova and Goriainov, “O nevospolnimykh,” 27–29; and Bocharov and Surat, “Al'fred Liudvigovich Bem,” esp. 15–22. 24. The correspondence between Freud and Osipov is documented in Freud and Ossipow, Briefwechsel. 25. Savitsky’s admission of failure can be found in Lubenskii (Savitsky), “Evraziiskaia bibliografiia,” 288. Savitsky’s writings on literature, including a brief but very telling article on Pushkin, are listed in Beisswenger, Petr Nikloaevich Savitskii. On Chkheidze, see in English Gacheva, “Unknown Pages”; see also his 1932 paper, Chkheidze, “O sovremennoi.” On Kopetskii (1894–1976), see Lilich, “L. V. Kopetskii.” G. I. Rubanov’s brief surveys of recent Soviet literature were published in Evraziiskaia khronika 8 (1927): 52–53; Evraziiskaia khronika 9 (1927): 82–83. For an overview, see Reviakina, “Russkaia literatura.” 26. See Jakobson, K kharakteristike; the last section bears the telling subtitle “The Next Tasks of Eurasian Linguistics;” see also Savitsky and Jakobson’s joint brochure (each contributing a short article), Evraziia v svete iazykoznaniia (Prague: Izdanie Evraziitsev, 1931). Jakobson generously praised Savitsky as a “talented forebear of structuralist geography” (Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 68). Bogatyrev’s blueprint for a distinctly Eurasian Russian folkloristics was published under a pseudonym (Savel'ev, “Svoeobychnoe v russkoi fol'kloristike”). Arguably the best account of the intersections between Eurasianism and interwar Structuralism is Sériot, Structure; see also Ram, “Spatializing the Sign,” which is duly critical of Jakobson’s Eurasianism, noting that Jakobson never renounced “K kharakteristike” and defended its theses toward the end of his life (245n30). 27. Both articles are reprinted in Jakobson, Selected Writings, 5: 355–81 and 416–32, respectively. 28. See Khodasevich, “O Maiakovskom.” On Khodasevich and Formalism, see Malmstad, “Khodasevich and Formalism”; for Khodasevich’s skepticism about psychoanalytic literary studies, see his “Kur'ezy psikhoanaliza,” Vozrozhdenie (15 July 1938). 29. Adamovich’s reviews and short essays on the Formalists are collected in Adamovich, Kriticheskaia proza; see also Adamovich, “Stat'i Iu. Tynianova,” in which Adamovich, while recognizing the Formalists’ role in challenging impressionistic criticism and its fellow travelers, finds Formalism—exemplified here by Tynianov’s Arkhaisty i novatory—to be deeply flawed as a method of literary studies (the article was first published in Poslednye novosti, 3 October 1929). 30. The polemical nature of émigré literary life has been noted before; see Demidova, Metamorfozy, chap. 3. 31. Inconsequential literary polemics were often the result of hurt personal pride dressed up as disagreement on matters of principle; see, e.g., the 1927 polemic between the Warsaw-based Za svobodu! and the Paris-based Zveno, reflecting the strained re-

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lationship of Dmitrii Filosofov and Zinaida Gippius (for details, see Bogomolov, “Ob odnoi”). 32. See, e.g., Hagglund, “Adamovič-Xodasevič Polemics,” and Korostelev and Fediakin, “Polemika.” 33. For recent surveys of Russian émigré criticism and literary studies, see Barsht, “Literaturnaia,” and Stepanov, “Literaturovedenie.” 34. “My ne v izgnanii, my v poslanii.” For the attribution, see Korostelev, “Pafos svobody,” 8. 35. These earlier (1926–27), and largely isolated, interventions included essays by Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Marina Tsvetaeva (a diatribe against Adamovich), and Mikhail Tsetlin; for the relevant bibliographical details, see Hagglund, “Russian Émigré Debate,” 526n3. 36. See M. Osorgin’s column “Literaturnaia nedelia,” Dni, 29 April and 13 May 1928. 37. See Anton Krainii, “Polozhenie literaturnoi kritiki,” Vozrozhdenie, 24 May 1928. 38. G. Adamovich, “O kritike i ‘druzhbe,’” Dni, 27 May 1928. 39. M. Osorgin, “Literaturnaia nedelia,” Dni, 3 June 1928. 40. See Georgii Ivanov’s eponymous article “Bez chitatelia.” 41. Tsetlin, “Kriticheskiia zametki”; Tsetlin offered a balanced view, trying to weigh the opportunities and the risks facing the two generations; he nonetheless emphasized the danger of self-isolation to which the entire émigré literature was prone (440–41). 42. See Varshavskii, Nezamechennoe; recent research has questioned Varshavskii’s image of his own generation, deconstructing it as a strategy of self-identification and self-presentation (see Livak, How It Was Done, 10–11, and Kaspe, Iskusstvo). 43. On these two articles in Chisla, see more in Voronina, “Spor,” 153–54; see also Martynov, “Literatura.” 44. All subsequent citations of this work appear in parentheses in the text. On Novyi grad’s platform more generally, see Varshavskii, “Perechityvaia”; Safronov, “‘Novyi grad.’” 45. Varshavskii, “Neskol'ko,” 221. 46. The full list of the 1936 responses and counterresponses included pieces by Gazdanov, Adamovich, Osorgin, Bem, Aldanov, Varshavskii, and Khodasevich; the émigré periodicals Sovremennye zapiski, Poslednie novosti, Mech, and Vozrozhdenie were involved in the 1936 exchanges. 47. All subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text. 48. All subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text. 49. All subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text. 50. See Adamovich’s reviews of Sovremennye zapiski (nos. 60 and 61) in Poslednie novosti 5467 (12 March 1936): 3 and Poslednie novosti 5606 (30 July 1936): 3; see also Osorgin, “O ‘molodykh pisateliakh,’” where Osorgin speaks of Gazdanov’s “legitimate” but nonetheless unhelpful pessimism. 51. Osorgin, “O ‘dushevnoi opustoshennosti.’” 52. The article was first published in Vozrozhdenie, 22 August 1936; all subsequent references are in parentheses in the text.

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53. On the history of the term “Paris note,” see Korostelev, “Parizhskaia nota.” 54. In the course of his bibliographical research on émigré Pushkiniana, Mikhail Filin has estimated that the first-wave émigrés produced about 100 books and 1,500 articles on Pushkin (not including articles in daily newspapers); the centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937 was celebrated in 231 cities abroad, in 42 countries on all five continents. 55. Solovev, “Lermontov” (first published in 1901 in Vestnik Evropy), in Lermontov, ed. Markovich and Potapova, 335. All subsequent translations are my own; page numbers appear in parentheses in the text. For an English translation, see Soloviev, Heart of Reality, ed. and trans. Wozniuk, 179-97. 56. D. S. Merezhkovskii, “M. Iu. Lermontov: Poet sverkhchelovechestva,” 379. On Merezhkovsky’s role in the construction of the turn-of-the-century Lermontov myth, see Markovich, Pushkin i Lermontov, 157–84. 57. Merezhkovskii, “M. Iu. Lermontov: Poet sverkhchelovechestva,” 378. 58. See “Ot redaktsii,” Novyi korabl' 1 (1927): 4. 59. Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy. Kniga I, 125; first published in Zveno, 1 December 1924. 60. See Rozanov, “‘Vechno pechal'naia duel'’” in Rozanov, O Pushkine, 191, 202, 208, 209, respectively; first published in Novoe vremia, 24 March 1898. On Rozanov’s importance for Adamovich’s intellectual formation, see Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 105. 61. All quotes are from Rozanov, “Pushkin i Lermontov,” in Rozanov, O Pushkine, 117, 119 (first published in Novoe vremia, 9 October 1914). 62. V. Rozanov, “O Lermontove,” in Rozanov, O Pushkine, 249 (first published in Novoe vremia, 26 April 1916). 63. See Adamovich’s review of Petr Bitsilli’s book Etiudy o russkoi poezii (1926, actually published at the end of 1925), in Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy. Kniga I, here 384 (the review was first published in Zveno, 3 January 1926). 64. Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy. Kniga II, 198. Adamovich’s review was first published in Zveno, 3 April 1927. 65. V. Khodasevich, “Besy” (first published in Vozrozhdenie, 11 April 1927). Khodasevich wrote of Adamovich’s comments: “Here, finally, our literary (and not only literary) patriotism is offended, for Pushkin is our homeland, ‘our all’” (211); “Pushkin’s is in fact the path of greatest resistance, for in the depiction of greatest complexity he takes the way of greatest simplicity” (212). 66. Adamovich, “O Pushkine,” in Literaturnye besedy. Kniga I1, 205–11 (on the futility of the call “Back to Pushkin,” see 209); first published in Zveno, 17 April 1927. On the exchanges between Khodasevich and Adamovich over Pushkin in the context of their other aesthetic disagreements, see Bethea, Khodasevich, 322–31. 67. “Lermontov” was first published in Poslednie novosti, 1 August 1931; “Pushkin and Lermontov,” ibid., 1 October 1931. 68. In Adamovich, Literaturnye zametki. Kniga I, 571–81, here 576; all subsequent citations are in parentheses in the text. 69. Adamovich anticipated the use of the adjective “polyphonic” in describing the narrative features of the Russian novel. In a review of Leonov’s Barsuki, he mentions

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Leonov’s “‘polyphonic’ narrative, modeled on Dostoevsky or Tolstoy” (Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy, Kniga I, 296–97; the review was first published in Zveno, 7 September 1925); in the same year, Adamovich also called Belyi’s Moscow a “polyphonic narrative” (Adamovich, Literaturnye besedy, Kniga I, 249, first published in Zveno, 29 June 1925). Adamovich later, however, objected to the terminological use of “polyphonic” by Bakhtin, comparing it with “barren” Formalist (Eikhenbaum’s) statements about how a text “is made” (quoted in Adamovich, Kommentarii, 588; Adamovich’s text was written in 1971). This is no doubt an instructive example of the divergence of the discourses of theory, on the one hand, and literary criticism, on the other. 70. On Merezhkovsky’s influence, see Mokrousov, “Lermontov,” esp. 158. 71. Adamovich, “Kommentarii,” Chisla 1 (1930): 136–43, here 142. 72. Ibid., 2–3 (1930): 167–76, here 167; on the place of Chisla in the literary polemics of the Russian diaspora, see Hagglund, “Numbers.” 73. Adamovich, “Soiuz,” 240. 74. See Khodasevich’s article “O pushkinizme,” Vozrozhdenie, 29 December 1932. Eikhenbaum, Skvoz' literaturu, 157. 75. In Bem, Pis'ma o literature, 53–58, here 54 (first published in Rul', Berlin, 18 June 1931); all subsequent citations are in parentheses in the text. According to Zinaida Shakhovskaia’s memoirs, Adamovich vowed never to respond to Bem’s article (cf. Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia, 92). Privately, however, in a letter dated 23 June 1934, Adamovich went so far as to call Bem a “bastard,” “without a single thought of his own” (Korostelev, ed., “‘My s Vami ochen' raznye liudi,’” 338). 76. On the resonance of the debate on Pushkin and Lermontov and the prototypes of Khristofor Mortus, see Dolinin, “Dve zametki” and his “The Gift,” esp. 142–49, where Dolinin reveals the significance of the 1930s discussions on émigré literature as a background to Nabokov’s novel. On the prototypes behind Mortus, see Malmstad, “Iz perepiski,” 281 and 286. On Nabokov’s conflict with the younger literati around Chisla, including Adamovich, see Livak, “Kriticheskoe khoziaistvo,” here 418–21; see also Davydov, “Teksty-matreshki,” 37–51. 77. Quoted in K., “Po retsenziiam,” Chisla 4 (1930–31): 210–11, here 211. 78. See Livak, “Iurii Fel'zen,” 103. 79. In Pis'ma o literature, 242–46, here 242; the review was first published in Mech, Warsaw, 19 January 1936. This claim was not unfounded: Fel'zen does indeed paraphrase (without explicit reference, but with the help of the pointer “it has become a common place”) Adamovich’s view of Lermontov as “the start of the new” (contrasted to Pushkin’s role as finalizer of the old); see Fel'zen, Pis'ma, 84; all subsequent citations of Fel'zen’s Pis'ma are in parentheses in the text, in my translation. 80. All subsequent references are in parentheses in the text. 81. See Poplavsky’s later juxtaposition—indicatively, in a section discussing Joyce— between Pushkin, “the greatest worm,” and Lermontov, “huge and . . . endlessly gothic,” in “Po povodu,” here 171. 82. Bem, “Stolichnyi provintsializm,” in Bem, Pis'ma o literature, 246. 83. The polemic was triggered by Adamovich’s “Provintsiia i stolitsa” (“Province

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and Capital”) in Poslednie novosti, 31 December 1931, a rather condescending review of the Harbin collective volume Bagul'nik. Bem’s “Stolichnyi provintsializm” and his later “Provintsiia i stolitsa” are echoes of this discussion, which, as Oleg Korostelev notes, had reached its peak in 1934 in the pages of the Warsaw-based Mech; see Korestelev’s notes in Adamovich, Literaturnye zametki. Kniga I, 745. 84. First published in Poslednie novosti, 19 December 1939; subsequent references are cited in the text in parentheses. 85. Fedotov, “O parizhskoi poezii,” 197. 86. Ermilov, “Za rabotu,” 162. EPILOGUE 1. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 1. 2. For another inscription of Bakhtin in the context of Russian engagements with world literature during the 1930s, see Clark, Moscow. 3. Which is not to say that Bakhtin didn’t appreciate the need to undertake serious research on literatures beyond Europe and the West; cf. his praise for Nikolai Konrad’s important book West and East (Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 2). Konrad was the foremost Soviet Japanologist and Sinologist during the 1950s–1960s; he was the engine behind the multivolume Soviet History of World Literature at the early stages of working out its methodology. 4. See esp. Dwyer, “Revivifying Russia” and “Standstill as Extinction”; on nomadism in Russian culture, see most recently Hansen-Löve, “Russkie kak kochevniki.” 5. All quotations are from the English translation: Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey, with page numbers in parentheses in the text; the translation is modified on occasion for the sake of accuracy. For the first full republication of the text of the 1923 Berlin edition in Russia, see Viktor Shklovsky, “Eshche nichego ne konchilos' . . . ,” ed. A. Galushkin (Moscow: Propaganda, 2002), 15–266. 6. On Gorky’s project, see most recently Khotimsky, “World Literature, Soviet Style” and Tyulenev, “Vsemirnaia Literatura”; for a more essayistic account, see the chapter “Petrograd, 1918” in David, Spectres. 7. When later Gorky published his journal Beseda in Berlin in 1923–25, he once again sought to recruit Oldenburg and Alekseev as contributors; see Yedlin, Maxim Gorky, 158. The initiative to establish Beseda (initially under the title Putnik) was actually Shklovsky’s, according to Khodasevich (ibid., 157–58). 8. See Tihanov, “Cosmopolitanism,” 143. 9. For these two positions, see, respectively, Damrosch, What Is World Literature? and Apter, Against World Literature. 10. This argument is more fully developed in Tihanov, “Location.” 11. For an early interpretation, from a different perspective, of the split within Russian Formalism over how literariness should be understood and captured, see Dawid Hopensztand’s insightful 1938 article (Hopensztand, “Filozofia literatury”; there is a passable English translation: Hopensztand, “Formalist Literary Philosophy versus Poet-

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ics of Futurism,” trans. Bogdan Lawendowski, Literary Studies in Poland / Études littéraires en Pologne 21 [1989]: 107–19). 12. On Shklovsky’s uses of, and debt to, Sterne’s prose, see Finer, Turning into Sterne. 13. On the political and cultural baggage of English (and hence the dangers of asserting it as a seemingly transparent medium of translation), see, e.g., Mufti, Forget English. 14. For a more detailed discussion of these concerns, see Tihanov, “On the Significance,” 426–27. 15. Katalog izdatel'stva “Vsemirnaia literatura” pri narodnom komissariate po prosveshcheniiu. Vstupitel'naia stat'ia M. Gor'kogo / Catalogue des éditions de la “Littérature mondiale” paraissant sous le patronage du Commissariat de L’Instruction Publique. Préface de M. Gorky. Pétersbourg; Katalog izdatel'stva “Vsemirnaia literatura” pri narodnom komissariate po prosveshcheniiu. Literatura Vostoka / Catalogue des éditions de la “Littérature mondiale.” La littérature de l’Orient. Pétersbourg (both Petrograd: Vsemirnaia literatura, 1919). 16. Shklovsky to Gorky, April 1922, quoted in Shklovsky, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 191 (“Grzhebinskoe izdatel'stvo, i Dom uchenykh, i ‘Vsemirnaia literatura’ [nastoiashchee nazvanie: vsia vsemirnaia]—tozhe prostranstvennoe vospriiatie”; my translation—GT). Shklovsky’s irony was shared by Eikhenbaum who in his 1925 article “O. Henry and the Theory of the Novella” referred to 1919–1924 as the time when, in Russia, Russian literature “lost its seat to ‘world literature’” under the pressure of a flourishing translation industry; Eikhenbaum deliberately put the words ‘world literature’ in quotation marks to signal his sarcasm (Eikhenbaum, “O. Genri,” 166). 17. For more on this, see Tihanov, “Pamiat' teorii.” 18. Different versions of Shklovsky’s Marco Polo were published from 1931 to the late 1960s; the 1936 version in the series “Lives of Remarkable People” founded by Gorky was particularly influential. 19. Suffice it to mention the importance of Marco Polo’s narrative for Coleridge, Kafka, Borges, and Calvino, among others.

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